Ruined houses, shell craters and deserted streets – this is a typical scene in the Oktyabrsky district of Donetsk, the largest city of Ukraine’s pro-Russian rebel region that bears the same name. The self-styled Donetsk and next-door Luhansk “people’s republics” broke away from central rule in 2014 after months of violent street protests in Kiev toppled Ukraine’s Moscow-leaning president and propelled pro-Western nationalists to power.

Libya s U.N.-backed government agreed with Italy on Saturday to establish a joint operations room for tackling migrant smugglers and traffickers as part of efforts to curb migrant flows towards Europe, according to a statement. Libya is the main gateway for migrants trying to cross to Europe by sea, though numbers have dropped sharply since July as Libyan factions and authorities have begun to block departures under Italian pressure. More than 600,000 have made the journey over the past four years.

A pipe bomb strapped to a man went off in the New York City subway near Times Square on Monday, injuring the suspect and another person at the height of the morning rush hour, law enforcement officials said. The man and the other person were being treated for non-life-threatening injuries. The officials spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the incident.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday urged the European Union to follow U.S. President Donald Trump s lead and recognise Jerusalem as Israel s capital, but EU ministers shook their heads at Trump s move. Netanyahu, arriving for a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels, said Trump s move made peace in the Middle East possible "because recognising reality is the substance of peace, the foundation of peace."

President Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered the partial withdrawal of Russian troops from Syria during a surprise visit to the war-torn country. Russia first intervened in the conflict in 2015, staging air strikes in support of its ally Damascus targeting both the Islamic State group and other jihadists as well as rebels fighting government troops.

At least 31 people were wounded by Israeli occupation army gunfire and rubber bullets, medics said, in Palestinian protests in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip on Thursday after the United States recognised Jerusalem as Israel s capital. In the West Bank cities of Hebron and Al-Bireh, thousands of demonstrators rallied with chants of "Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Palestine", witnesses said. Some Palestinians threw stones at soldiers.

A senior Al-Qaeda leader on the Indian subcontinent and the head of the Taliban s "special forces" in southern Helmand have been killed in recent days in Afghanistan, Afghan and US forces said Tuesday. "Both leaders are responsible for the deaths of many innocent Afghans, and their removal will both disrupt the terrorist operations of their respective organisations and improve overall security of the country," the US command said in a statement.

Greek police fired teargas on Wednesday at youths marching in Athens to mark the ninth anniversary of the killing of a teenager by police, an incident that sparked Greece’s worst riots for decades. A few hundred students, among them dozens of black-clad youths, marched through central Athens chanting “Resist!”, waving red and black flags in a tribute to 15-year old Alexandros Grigoropoulos who was shot dead in 2008.

President Donald Trump will recognize Jerusalem as Israel s capital Wednesday, upending decades of careful US policy and ignoring dire warnings of a historic misstep that could trigger a surge of violence in the Middle East. A senior administration official said Trump would make the landmark announcement -- which flies in the face of warnings from America s allies across the region and the world -- at 1 pm (1800 GMT) from the White House.

At a time when the United States is calling for more restrictions on fuel exports to North Korea, Russia may be attempting to avoid the total collapse of the regime in Pyongyang. Julian Ryall reports from Tokyo. The price of diesel oil and gasoline in North Korea has dropped sharply in the last month, according to reports from within the isolated republic, with Russia apparently stepping up supplies in spite of international efforts to isolate the regime of Kim Jong Un and force Pyongyang to abandon its development of nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles.

Germany should be more assertive in setting foreign policy according to its own interests rather than to those of the United States, the German foreign minister said on Tuesday. Traditionally close ties between Berlin and Washington have soured since US President Donald Trump took office in January.

Officials in Ali Abdullah Saleh s General People s Congress party (GPC) confirmed to Reuters that the former Yemeni president and party leader has been killed outside Sanaa, in what sources in the Houthi group said was an RPG and gun attack. The GPC officials said Saleh was killed south of the capital Sanaa along with the assistant secretary-general of the GPC, Yasser al-Awadi. Sources in the Houthi group said fighters stopped his armoured vehicle with an RPG rocket and then shot him dead.

The United States and South Korea went ahead with large-scale joint aerial drills on Monday, a move North Korea had said would push the Korean peninsula to "the brink of nuclear war", ignoring calls from Russia and China to call them off. The drills come a week after North Korea said it had tested its most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States as part of a weapons programme that it has conducted in defiance of international sanctions and condemnation.

Qatar s ruling emir will attend a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council this week in Kuwait, his government said Monday, a summit coming amid a boycott of the energy-rich country by three of the council s members. The ongoing dispute has threatened to tear apart the six-member GCC, all U.S. allies who serve in part as a Gulf Arab counterbalance to Shiite power Iran. Already, the island nation of Bahrain has said it won t take part in any meeting that Qatar attends.

Negotiators for Syria s combatants arrived at a U.N. complex for peace talks on Thursday amid expectations the rival teams will be encouraged to hold face-to-face discussions, in what would be a small breakthrough in efforts to end the six-year-old war. One diplomat said U.N. mediator Staffan de Mistura was expected to try to bring the two sides together, but it was not clear whether he would succeed.

The European Union, United Nations and African Union have agreed to an emergency plan to dismantle people smuggling networks and repatriate stranded migrants in an effort to ease a human rights disaster in Libya, officials said. Details of the strategy were negotiated at an African Union-European Union summit that opened on Wednesday in Ivory Coast, and the plan was expected to be finalised on Thursday.

Syrian government negotiators arrived in Geneva on Wednesday to join United Nations-backed peace talks to end the civil war, adamant that they will not tolerate any discussion of President Bashar al-Assad s ouster. Damascus had initially refused to confirm it would attend the talks, which began on Tuesday, given the rebels were maintaining their hardline stance on the president s removal.

US President Donald Trump on Wednesday posted anti-Muslim videos on Twitter that had originally been posted by a leader of a far-right British party. As a candidate, Trump called for “a Muslim ban” and, as president, has issued executive orders banning entry from some citizens of multiple Muslim-majority countries, although courts have partially blocked them from taking effect.

More than 3,000 migrants and refugees have died crossing the Mediterranean in a desperate bid to reach Europe s shores since the start of the year, the International Organization for Migration said Tuesday. The figure so far represents a 40 percent drop compared to last year s record of 5,000 known or suspected drownings. "That mark (was) probably passed sometime over last weekend," when more than 30 migrants died off the coast of Libya, IOM spokesman Joel Millman told reporters in Geneva.

A two-day skirmish between Guinean and Malian villagers over control of a gold mine that straddles the countries’ joint border killed at least 17 people, a government official in Guinea said on Tuesday. Villagers in both countries lay claim to the zone’s rich underground deposits, which have lured thousands of people to work in unregulated small-scale mines along the border.

Sudan s counter-insurgency forces have arrested a powerful militia chief from Darfur accused by the United Nations of human rights abuses in the war-torn region, the official news agency said Monday. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) arrested Musa Hilal, a former aide to President Omar al-Bashir, near his hometown of Mustariaha in the state of North Darfur, SUNA reported State Minister of Defence Lieutenant General Ali Mohamed Salem as saying.