World News

Ukraine said Wednesday a major attack on government positions by pro-Russian separatists has begun, with 15 people killed so far.

Russia’s state atomic energy company on Monday announced it would begin construction of a second nuclear power plant in Iran’s Bushehr region later this year.

Fierce battles between Islamic State and other fighters raged in the northern Syrian province of Aleppo on Monday, a day after the extremist group seized villages near the Turkish border and came within miles of the main highway connecting Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, to Turkey.

Thick black smoke rising from the Baiji oil refinery could be seen as a dirty smudge on the horizon as far away as Baghdad after fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) set fire to the enormous processing plant just over 100 miles north of the capital last week.

The world is sinking under too much debt and an aging global population means countries’ debt piles are in danger of growing out of control, the European chief executive of Goldman Sachs Asset Management has warned.

Nearly 75 percent of U.S. bombing runs targeting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria returned to base without firing any weapons in the first four months of 2015, holding their fire mainly because of a lack of ground intelligence and raising questions about President Obama’s key tactic in pushing back an enemy that continues to expand its territory in the war zone.

Iran has dispatched additional paramilitary forces to Yemen to aid pro-Tehran rebels seeking to take control of the strategic southern Arabian state, the Washington Free Beacon reported citing U.S. intelligence reports.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the third major Russian military exercise over the past three months in response to six-member states of NATO beginning military exercises this week over the Arctic.

Russia’s army is massing troops and hundreds of pieces of weaponry including mobile rocket launchers, tanks and artillery at a makeshift base near the border with Ukraine, a Reuters reporter saw this week.

China’s armed forces are to extend their operations and its air force will become an offensive as well as defensive force for the first time, in a major shift in policy that will strengthen fears of accidental conflict.

Moscow and Tehran have concluded negotiations on the delivery of the Russia’s long-range S-300 surface-to-air missile system to Iran, which should take place “within a short period,” said Iranian Deputy Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian, on a visit in Moscow on Monday.

Ireland’s referendum saw 62.1 percent of Irish voters say “yes” to changing the nation’s constitution to define marriage as a union between two people regardless of their sex. With the move, Ireland became the first country in the world to approve gay marriage in a popular national vote. Nineteen other countries, including most U.S. states, have legalized the practice through their legislatures and courts.

Russia has deployed equipment during the conflict in eastern Ukraine that can be used for nuclear weapons, NATO’s top military commander said.

U.S. military forces are “closely monitoring” an Iranian ship bound for Yemen that is said to contain aid for the warring factions in that country, according to multiple Pentagon officials.

After seizing Palmyra on May 20, the Islamic State (ISIS) now controls 50 percent of Syria, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Between 16,000 and 17,000, according to one independent Western estimate, men and a small number of women from 90 countries or more who have streamed to Syria and Iraq to wage Muslim holy war for the Islamic State.

Iran’s supreme leader vowed Wednesday he will not allow international inspection of Iran’s military sites or access to Iranian scientists under any nuclear agreement with world powers.

Saudi Arabia has reached out to its ally Pakistan to acquire “off-the-shelf” atomic weapons as a nuclear arms race begins to shape up with Shiite rival Iran.

Seventeen months before President Obama dismissed the Islamic State as a “JV team,” a Defense Intelligence Agency report predicted the rise of the terror group and likely establishment of a caliphate if its momentum was not reversed.

Islamic State militants have taken the capital of Iraq’s largest province, the city of Ramadi, as Iraqi elite special forces soldiers flee.