Turkey's foreign minister has met with a high-level delegation of Afghanistan's new Taliban rulers, officials said, the first such talks since the Taliban takeover of the country in August as U.S. forces pulled out after two decades of war.

The meeting in Ankara between Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and Amir Khan Muttaqi, the Taliban-appointed foreign minister, comes after Taliban leaders held a series of talks with the United States, 10 European nations and European Union representatives in Qatar earlier this week.

As a poorly paid public school teacher, Khaled Jaber always needed a side hustle, working as a private tutor and using his car as a taxi to help pay the bills. For unexpected needs, such as medical expenses, he has had to borrow money from relatives.

Somehow, the 44-year-old muddled through life, sustained by his love of teaching high school Arabic and the respect his job earned him in the community.

Former President Bill Clinton was admitted to a Southern California hospital Tuesday with an infection but he is "on the mend," his spokesman said.

Clinton, 75, was admitted to the University of California Irvine Medical Center on Tuesday evening for a non-COVID-related infection, Angel Ureña said Thursday in a statement.

The United States and Greece signed a deal Thursday expanding their defense cooperation agreement to grant U.S. forces broader use of Greek bases, as that nation deals with tensions between it and neighboring Turkey.

The deal, signed in Washington by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias, will allow U.S. forces to train and operate "in an expanded capacity" at four additional bases in Greece, Dendias said.

Yemen's economy is collapsing, its humanitarian crisis is worsening, and the conflict in the Arab world's poorest nation is growing more violent, the U.N.'s deputy humanitarian chief said Thursday.

The grim remarks by Assistant Secretary-General Ramesh Rajasingham came during a briefing to the U.N. Security Council. More than 20 million Yemenis — two-thirds of the population — need humanitarian assistance, but aid agencies, he said, "are, once again, starting to run out of money."

The Israeli military on Thursday said that troops shot and killed a Palestinian who was throwing firebombs at cars on a main highway in the occupied West Bank.

A military statement said that soldiers opened fire at two suspects spotted throwing firebombs near Beit Jala, a Palestinian town south of Jerusalem. It said one of the suspects was hit and died of his wounds, while the second was detained.

Schools, banks and government offices across Lebanon shut down Friday after hours of gun battles between armed groups killed seven people and terrorized the residents of Beirut and its suburbs.

The government called for a day of mourning following the armed clashes, in which gunmen used automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades on the streets of the capital's edge and suburbs, echoing the nation's darkest era of the 1975-90 civil war. The gun battles raised the specter of a return to sectarian violence in a country already struggling through one of the world's worst economic crises of the past 150 years.

Drilling by ExxonMobil set for late next month to confirm how much natural gas is contained in a sizable deposit off Cyprus' southwestern coast will map out how the fuel will reach potential markets in Europe and Asia, the island nation's energy minister said on Wednesday.

Minister Natasa Pilides says the "significant" drilling at the 'Glaucus-1' well inside block 10 of Cyprus' exclusive zone scheduled to start in 6-8 weeks will determine if the deposit is at the higher or lower end of its estimated size of 5-8 trillion cubic feet (142-227 billion cubic meters) of natural gas.

A man armed with a bow fired arrows at shoppers in a small Norwegian town Wednesday, killing five people before he was arrested, authorities said.

The police chief in the community of Kongsberg, near the capital of Oslo, said there was "a confrontation" between officers and the assailant, but he did not elaborate. Two other people were wounded and hospitalized in intensive care, including an officer who was off duty and inside the shop where the attack took place, police said.

A 4.5-magnitude earthquake shook La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands in what was the strongest recorded temblor since volcanic eruptions began 26 days ago, authorities said Thursday.

The quake was one of around 60 recorded overnight, Spain's National Geographic Institute said, as the Cumbre Vieja volcano continued to spew fiery rivers of lava that are destroying everything in their path and dumping molten rock into the Atlantic Ocean.