A spokesman for extremist group al-Shabab said Friday its fighters killed at least 51 Kenyan soldiers in an attack on a military base in Somalia. But Kenya denied it, saying "scores" of the extremist fighters were killed instead while repelling the assault.

Al-Shabab spokesman Sheikh Abdiaziz Abu-Musab said the extremist fighters seized military vehicles during the early morning attack in Kulbiyow, a town in Lower Jubba region.

Iran's state TV reports that search teams have found two more bodies of victims from last week's deadly building collapse in Tehran.

The Wednesday report quotes Jalal Maleki, spokesman for the fire department, as saying the bodies belong to firefighters killed in the disaster.

French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron held talks with President Michel Aoun and Prime Minister Saad Hariri on Tuesday and said his country needs a more "balanced" policy toward Syria.

Urgent Matters Judge of Baabda Hassan Hamdan ordered on Tuesday an extension for the deadline to close the controversial landfill of Costa Brava until a final verdict is issued in the case on January 31, the National News Agency reported on Tuesday.

The landfill was purported to be permanently closed on Tuesday, January 24, pending a final verdict in the case, according to a judge ruling.

A state-owned newspaper in Dubai is reporting that authorities are investigating a center for the disabled after it hosted and publicized a visit by Kim Kardashian West.

A story in Tuesday's edition of Emarat Al Youm says the investigation focused on Rashid Center for the Disabled not getting prior approval for the visit by Kardashian West.

After two straight years of all-white acting nominees and an overhauling of the motion picture academy, the Oscars are poised to trend in a different direction Tuesday.

Barry Jenkin's luminous coming-of-age tale "Moonlight," the crowd-pleasing African-American mathematician drama "Hidden Figures" and Denzel Washington's fiery August Wilson adaption "Fences" are set to lead a notably more diverse group of contenders when nominations to the 89th Academy Awards are announced Tuesday morning beginning at 8:18 a.m. EST.

High school student Hamza Hamad spent 10 months in an Israeli jail for alleged links to the Islamic militant Hamas group, but was never charged with a crime.

The 16-year-old is one of the youngest among thousands of Palestinians who have been held in so-called administrative detention in half a century of Israeli military occupation.

She tried drugs. She tried arguing. She tried writing a book. After a quarter century, the daughter of the longest-held American hostage during Lebanon's civil war says she's found her father's love. And it took coming face-to-face with one of his captors to do it.

"I was searching and searching and this search, the journey, brought me closer to my father," said Sulome Anderson, a Brooklyn journalist whose father, Terry Anderson, was seized by Shiite militants in Beirut in 1985 and held until 1991. "I love my dad very much. My dad has always loved me. I just didn't know that because he wasn't able to show it to me."

The world's biggest smartphone maker Samsung blamed faulty batteries on Monday for the fires that hit its flagship Galaxy Note 7 device last year, as it sought to draw a line under the humiliating recall.

Samsung Electronics was forced to discontinue the smartphone, originally intended to compete with Apple's iPhone, after a chaotic recall that saw replacement devices also catching fire.

Serena Williams made the net seem much higher and the court much smaller for Nicole Gibbs, a first-timer on Rod Laver Arena.

It is little wonder Williams has an imposing presence — she's been playing on the Australian Open center court since 1998, and has won six of her 22 Grand Slam titles there.