Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is sending the director of the Mossad foreign intelligence agency to ceasefire negotiations in Qatar, his office said Saturday, in a sign of progress in talks on the war in Gaza.

Intelligence officials in Syria's new de facto government thwarted a plan by the Islamic State group to set off a bomb at a Shiite shrine in the Damascus suburb of Sayyida Zeinab, state media reported Saturday.

State news agency SANA reported, citing an unnamed official in the General Intelligence Service, that members of the IS cell planning the attack were arrested. It quoted the official as saying that the intelligence service is "putting all its capabilities to stand in the face of all attempts to target the Syrian people in all their spectrums."

Lebanon's new president and former army commander Joseph Aoun has maintained a low profile. Those who know him say he is no-nonsense, kind and averse to affiliating himself with any party or even expressing a political opinion — a rarity for someone in Lebanon's fractured, transactional political system.

Bilal Saab, a former Pentagon official who is now senior managing director of the TRENDS US consulting firm, often met Aoun while overseeing Washington's security cooperation in the Middle East. He called Aoun a "very sweet man, very compassionate, very warm" who avoided political discussions "like the plague."

Cristiano Ronaldo scored his 11th goal of the season to help Al-Nassr defeat Al-Okhdood 3-1 on Thursday as the Saudi Pro League restarted after a month's break.

After Saviour Godwin gave Okhdood an early lead, former Liverpool star Sadio Mane leveled after 29 minutes.

Goalkeeper Manuel Neuer is set to return for Bayern Munich for the first time in more than a month in Saturday's Bundesliga game against Borussia Moenchengladbach but Jamal Musiala will miss out.

The 38-year-old Neuer missed Bayern's last four games of 2024 with a broken rib and wasn't in the squad for a friendly against Salzburg on Monday, but now looks fully fit again, coach Vincent Kompany said Friday.

Jude Bellingham scored again to lead Real Madrid into the Spanish Super Cup final with a 3-0 win over Mallorca in Saudi Arabia on Thursday.

The England midfielder, who led Madrid in scoring last season, started this campaign slowly but has netted seven goals in his last eight Spanish league games.

Turkey “does not have any secret agenda” in Syria and wants to construct a “new culture of cooperation,” Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said Friday.

One of Turkey’s priorities in the upcoming year is to clear the region of terrorism, Fidan said, referring to Kurdish militants based in northeast Syria. “The extensions of the separatist group in Syria are now facing destruction and the old order is no longer going to continue,” he told a news conference in Istanbul.

An oil tanker that burned for weeks in the Red Sea after being attacked by Yemen's Houthi rebels and threatening a massive oil spill has been salvaged, a security firm said Friday.

The Sounion had been a disaster-in-waiting in the waterway, with 1 million barrels of crude oil aboard that had been struck and later sabotaged with explosives by the Iranian-backed Houthis as part of their campaign over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. It took months for salvagers to tow the vessel away, extinguish the fires and offload the remaining crude oil.

In a singular moment in U.S. history, President-elect Donald Trump faces sentencing Friday for his New York hush money conviction after the nation's highest court refused to intervene.

Like so much else in the criminal case and the current American political landscape, the scenario set to unfold in an austere Manhattan courtroom was unimaginable only a few years ago. A state judge is to say what consequences, if any, the country's former and soon-to-be leader will face for felonies that a jury found he committed.

Earth recorded its hottest year ever in 2024, with such a big jump that the planet temporarily passed a major climate threshold, several weather monitoring agencies announced Friday.

Last year's global average temperature easily passed 2023's record heat and kept pushing even higher. It surpassed the long-term warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit ) since the late 1800s that was called for by the 2015 Paris climate pact, according to the European Commission's Copernicus Climate Service, the United Kingdom's Meteorology Office and Japan's weather agency.