We are confronted by a US presidential second-term election cycle. We all must contend too with various interests. Do we have in play a version of ‘operation boot’? The 1952 US/UK regime-change operation in Iran. And do people regionally also view the late, recently murdered Major General Qasem Soleimani as an Iranian Che Quevara? Would Iran’s supreme Ayatollah be viewed as an Iranian Fidel Castro? How annoying for a rightist US administration: a Cuba in the Middle East. How much more death and devastation will flow out of our fossil-fuel dependency and the military powers of the main players, the chief one being the US?

European shares slipped from near-record highs after the US airstrike in Iraq that killed a top Iranian commander increased tensions in the Middle East

Update: Pakistan's Imran Khan offers olive branch to India PM.

"We will not send anyone to die," said immigration police chief Major General Surachate Hakparn

Moscow claimed Gavin Williamson has "lost his grasp on reason" as the UK Defence Secretary stepped up his warnings about Russian aggression.

British IS recruiter Sally-Anne Jones, dubbed the White Widow, is understood to have been killed in a US drone strike.

A suicide bomber has targeted a Shiite shrine packed with worshippers in a remote village in Pakistan, killing 20 people and leaving at least 25 wounded in an apparent sectarian attack.

Puerto Rican officials could not reach more than half their towns amid a push to evacuate tens of thousands of people over a failing dam as the disaster wrought by Hurricane Maria becomes clear.

Latest: London Police are reviewing CCTV in the hunt for those responsible for the terrorist blast on a tube train this morning.

The head of the UN has said he has confidence in the Irish general in charge of peacekeeping in Lebanon.

Pressed on the claims, Gen Jones said the report is "deeply irresponsible and frankly naive".

An Iraqi commander said his forces have taken Mosul's landmark al-Nuri Mosque compound that was destroyed by the Islamic State group last week.

The death toll from twin blasts in Parachinar has climbed to 67, bringing the overall death toll from three separate attacks in Pakistan to 85.

Thai authorities plan to revoke the passport of a fugitive heir to the Red Bull energy drink fortune who is wanted on deadly hit-and-run charges.

The United States has warned it is "prepared to do more" to stop the horrors that are taking place in Syria under Bashar Assad.

Here's your lunchtime bulletin.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has apologised to the Saudi government after an activist tried to carry out a citizen's arrest of one of the Gulf state's generals.

A Nigerian Air Force fighter jet on a mission against Boko Haram extremists has mistakenly bombed a refugee camp, killing more than 100 refugees and wounding aid workers, a state official said.

The UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution supporting efforts by Russia and Turkey to end the nearly six-year conflict in Syria and jump-start peace negotiations.

Some 50,000 civilians have fled eastern Aleppo over the past two days in a "constant stream", Russia says, as Syrian government forces close in on the last pocket of opposition control.

Plans revealing thousands of plots by the Islamic State (IS) terror group to attack Europe have been discovered by coalition forces fighting the militants in Syria and Iraq, Britain’s top commander in the region has claimed.

Russia has offered to provide samples linked to alleged chemical weapon use in the Syrian city of Aleppo to the international chemical weapons watchdog.

Iraqi forces have pushed into a town south of Mosul after Islamic State fighters fled with civilians used as human shields, officials said.

Iraqi special forces have moved more than 1,000 people from villages near the front lines of the battle to retake the city of Mosul from Islamic State.

Gunmen stormed a police training centre in Pakistan's troubled Baluchistan province and detonated explosive vests, killing at least 48 trainees.

No air defence missile systems have ever been sent from Russia to Ukraine, Moscow military officials insist.

The Israeli army’s deputy chief of staff has drawn a rebuke from Israeli ministers for comparing pre-Holocaust Germany to trends in Israel today.

The Irish Naval Service set sail yesterday to help launch one of the country’s top international regattas.

At least 30 people were killed when Boko Haram Islamic extremists struck the north-east Nigerian city of Maiduguri with rocket-propelled grenades and multiple suicide bombers, witnesses said.

US army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who walked away from his post in Afghanistan and became a prisoner of the Taliban for five years, will face court-martial on charges of desertion and endangering US troops, army officials said yesterday.

The execution of Thomas Kent on May 9, 1916, was a crude exercise in propaganda, far removed from the moral force of the scales of justice, on the part of Major General JG Maxwell, the military governor at a time when the civil governance of the country was in a state of chaotic dissolution.

Suicide bombs have killed at least 64 people in multiple blasts in north-eastern Nigeria, according to officials.

Seventeen security officials, including five generals, accused over the attempted coup of Burundi president Pierre Nkurunziza, have appeared before a prosecutor who charged them with an attempt at destabilising public institutions.

Police vanished from the streets of Burundi’s capital as thousands of people celebrated a coup attempt against president Pierre Nkurunziza, who was in a neighbouring country for a conference.

A gunman who opened fire at a veterans’ medical clinic in West Texas killing one person is also dead.

The Taliban massacre that killed 148 people, mostly children, at a military-run school in north-western Pakistan left a scene of heart-wrenching devastation, pools of blood and young lives snuffed out as the nation mourned and mass funerals for the victims got under way.

One of the founders of popular file-sharing website The Pirate Bay has been arrested under an Interpol warrant as he was crossing into Thailand from Laos.

Here's our spoiler-free guide to the best shows on TV tonight.

Nigeria’s government said Islamic extremists from Boko Haram have agreed to an immediate ceasefire.

New Florida million-dollar home has nice view, but built on wrong lot

Police on the resort island of Koh Tao in southern Thailand stepped up their hunt for the killer of two British tourists whose bodies were found on a beach.

A 24-year-old Japanese businessman who has 16 surrogate babies and an alleged desire to father hundreds more is under investigation.

Thailand’s military government gave preliminary approval for a draft law to make commercial surrogacy a criminal offence, following a spate of dramatic surrogacy scandals in the past two weeks.

If Ukrainian rebels shot down the Malaysian jetliner, killing 298 people, it may have been because they didn’t have the right systems in place to distinguish between military and civilian aircraft, experts said at the weekend.

President Barack Obama is urging Israelis and Palestinians to restrain themselves and put an end to acts of retribution in the recent round of violence.

At least 50 alleged insurgents were killed during clashes with Nigerian soldiers as security forces repelled an attack on a military base in the north-eastern state of Borno.

A militant group is recruiting in the oil exporting nation, say Glen Carey and Deema Almashabi

Scores of female students kidnapped by Islamic militants from a north-eastern Nigerian school are free, the military has reported.

Irish troops serving in Syria have come under attack from anti-government armed forces.

Within hours of President John F Kennedy’s assassination, most Americans were familiar with the name Lee Harvey Oswald. Certain images of him — posing with a rifle, recoiling from Jack Ruby’s gun — have been ingrained in memory. Yet he remains an enigma.