Middle East News

A U.S. District Court Judge has ordered the seizure of a vessel carrying about 1 million barrels of Kurdish crude oil about 60 miles off the Galveston coast.

On Monday, Secretary of State Kerry took to the podium at the State Department to say that he was working with Israel and Hamas to negotiate an extension of their temporary ceasefire.

"The Honorable Woman" is a meditative thriller that investigates a woman's inner life and a global hot spot.

A senior PLO official proposed a 24-hour humanitarian cease-fire Tuesday in the Gaza war, saying he spoke in the name of Hamas, but was contradicted a short while later by a spokesman of the Islamic militant group.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is returning an award given to him by a Jewish American group in 2004, after the group asked for it back because of comments he made regarding the conflict in Gaza.

United States officials are "gravely concerned" about a Palestinian-American teen who has been in Israeli custody for three weeks, the State Department said Monday.

Premier Christy Clark has aligned herself and British Columbia with Israel in a letter to a Jewish-Canadian advocacy group in which she says the province can be "counted as a friend."

Ever since U.S. forces invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, the U.S. government has worried that Iraq would splinter into three states - each representing the feuding religious and ethnic factions the dictator held together through his iron rule.

SEPTEMBER 21: A statue is adorned with flowers for the visit of a casket containing relics of Saint Therese of Lisieux at The Sacred Heart and Saint Theresa Church on September 21, 2009 in Coleshill, England.

House Speaker John Boehner said Monday that support for Israel must be the United States' main focus and not peace mediation in a subtle jab at the Obama administration.

After more than six weeks of sometimes testy talks, House and Senate negotiators have agreed on a compromise plan to fix a veterans health program scandalized by long patient wait times and falsified records... A bipartisan deal to improve veterans health care would authorize at least $15 billion in emergency spending to fix a veterans health ... (more)

This image obtained by the Associated Press, defendants' Trial Exhibit DX2414, shows eight spent shell casings from the scene of the shootings of 14 Iraqis in Nisoor Square in Baghdad in 2007.

Khaled Meshaal said in an interview broadcast Monday that he believes the world hasn't taken an even-handed view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

There is no electricity 21 hours a day because power lines have been hit. Water taps have run dry because there's no power to their fuel pumps and tens of thousands of displaced sleep on the floors of schools and hospitals.

Syrian President Bashar Assad prayed at a Damascus mosque at the start of a major Muslim holiday on Monday amid reports of an unprecedented high death toll among his troops battling Islamic extremists.

The attorneys say the suppressed evidence consists of photographs of eight spent shell casings that would fit an AK-47 - the weapon of choice used by insurgents and Iraqi authorities.

The woes of a second term are nothing new, but for President Obama they seem to have started sooner and struck harder than for his predecessors.

Discarded belongings are left behind at a U.N. school in Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday, July 24. Discarded belongings are left behind at a U.N. school in Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday, July 24. Israel acknowledged Sunday that troops fired a mortar shell that hit the courtyard of a U.N. school in Gaza last ... (more)

The White House says Obama and Netanyahu spoke Sunday about the ongoing violence in the region and the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza.

They spoke anonymously to The Associated Press for fear of reprisal. The Islamic State group launched an aggressive offensive through western and northern Iraq beginning late last year and took over Mosul in June.