In a sermon focused on the virtue of hope, which is also the theme of the Holy Year, the pontiff said hope "is a summons not to tarry, to be kept back by our old habits, or to wallow in mediocrity or laziness".

The Ramallah-based ministry said seven were killed in the Tulkarem refugee camp and one in the nearby Nur Shams camp after the military launched a sweeping raid early on Tuesday. 

The tradition started in 1955 when an advertisement in a Colorado Springs newspaper invited children to call in to speak to Santa, but it inadvertently gave the phone number for the Continental Air Defense Command, NORAD's predecessor.

"He's not gonna be president, that I can tell you," Trump told a Republican conference in Phoenix, Arizona. 

Trump's comments before a crowd of conservative supporters in Phoenix, Arizona, were one of the strongest signals yet that he opposes a potential exit of TikTok from the US market.

Despite still occupying the world's most powerful pulpit, Biden has remained virtually absent from the public debate about his noisy successor whom he often used to brand as a threat to democracy.

Funding earmarked for Gaza will total 800 million kronor (US$72 million) in 2025, but aid to UNRWA, which totaled 451 million kronor in 2024, will be stopped, said the government.

New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh, who has been helping keep Trudeau in office, said he would present a formal motion of no-confidence after the House of Commons elected chamber returns from a winter break on Jan. 27.

The Indonesian Navy warship KRI Sultan Iskandar Muda departs from Jakarta on Thursday, carrying 120 servicemen for their duties in Beirut, Lebanon, serving under the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).

Strong economic cooperation and growth among Muslim countries can help bolster cooperation between them and better support the Palestinian cause amid the war in Gaza, President Prabowo Subianto said at the D8 Summit in Cairo.

The Boeing 777 carrying 239 people disappeared from radar screens on March 8, 2014 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and despite the largest search in aviation history, the plane has never been found.

It is the first formal US diplomatic mission to Damascus since the early days of the brutal civil war that broke out in 2011 and culminated in a surprise lightning offensive that toppled longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad this month.

The veteran Israeli leader is set to cement his strategic goals: tightening his military control over Gaza, thwarting Iran's nuclear ambitions and capitalising on the dismantling of Tehran's allies -- Palestinian Hamas, Lebanon's Hezbollah and the removal of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

"We're going to see more chaos in Trump's second term than his first," said Todd Belt, political science professor at George Washington University. "I think what has happened this week is a good indication of what is to come."

Washington has for years said it has some 900 military personnel in Syria as part of international efforts against the jihadist group, which seized swathes of territory there and in neighboring Iraq before being defeated by local forces backed by a US-led air campaign.

The US Department of Defense on Wednesday announced the repatriation of Mohammed Farik bin Amin and Mohammed Nazir bin Lep to Malaysia. 

President Prabowo Subianto on Wednesday reiterated Indonesia’s ironclad support for a Palestinian state alongside his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, insisting on the two-state solution as the only possible resolution of the prolonged Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The talks among ASEAN members in Thailand may expedite the work for peace in war-torn Myanmar, analysts have said amid calls from human rights groups for the bloc to stand firm against the junta.

President Prabowo Subianto is in Egypt for a summit of eight Muslim-majority developing countries grouped under the D8 Organization for Economic Cooperation scheduled for Thursday, an event he dubbed important for Jakarta despite skepticism from analysts who question the group’s strategic bearing.

"I can tell you that the United States was not aware of it in advance and was not involved," State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said of the killing of Igor Kirillov, the head of the Russian army's chemical weapons division.

Mother of two Mary Jane Veloso landed at daybreak, then was immediately transferred to prison following a repatriation deal between the two countries over a decade in the making.

Netanyahu, Defence Minister Israel Katz and the heads of the armed forces and the domestic security agency visited "outposts at the summit of Mount Hermon for the first time since they were seized by the military", Katz's office said. 

President Prabowo Subianto left Jakarta on Tuesday to attend the Developing 8 Organization for Economic Cooperation (D8) Summit in Cairo and hold bilateral meetings with several heads of state. 

Leaders from five pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) will apply at their schools lessons learned from participating in a cultural exchange program in Japan .  

The 7.3-magnitude quake struck at a depth of 57 kilometres (35 miles), some 30 kilometres off the coast of Efate, Vanuatu's main island, at 12:47 pm (0147 GMT), according to the US Geological Survey.

The US ambassador has said that Washington and American businesses are looking to expanding cooperation in various sectors with Indonesia, including human resource development, even as the world braces for a second Trump administration.

The story, headlined "Singapore Mansion Deals Are Increasingly Shrouded in Secrecy" looked at top-range houses called Good Class Bungalows and claimed many purchases did not have legal filings, adding that said such deals were harder to track.