Iraqi airstrikes killed nine suspected Islamic State fighters, including four Lebanese, in retaliation for an IS attack on Iraqi army barracks earlier this month, officials said Sunday.

IS gunmen in Iraq broke into a barracks in the mountainous al-Azim district outside the town of Baqouba on Jan. 21, killed a guard and shot dead 11 soldiers as they slept. It was one of the boldest attacks by the militants in recent weeks and came amid an uptick in violence that stoked fears the group has been re-energized.

Russia's foreign minister claims that NATO wants to pull Ukraine into the alliance, amid escalating tensions over NATO expansion and fears that Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine.

In comments on state television Sunday, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also challenged NATO's claim to be a purely defensive structure.

Israel's figurehead president arrived in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday in the first official visit by the country's head of state, the latest sign of deepening ties between the two nations as tensions rise in the region.

The UAE and Israel normalized relations in the fall of 2020, part of a series of U.S.-brokered diplomatic deals between Israel and Arab states that had long avoided formal relations with Israel over its decades-old conflict with the Palestinians.

Lebanon's foreign minister headed to Kuwait Saturday to deliver answers to a list of policy suggestions made to the country by Arab Gulf nations in an attempt to end an impasse between both sides.

Ahead of his departure, Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib made it clear that Lebanon will not disarm Hizbullah group, one of 10 confidence-building measures requested from Beirut.

High-stakes diplomacy continued on Friday in a bid to avert a war in Eastern Europe. The urgent efforts come as 100,000 Russian troops are massed near Ukraine's border and the Biden administration worries that Russian President Vladimir Putin will mount some sort of invasion within weeks.

Here are things to know about the international tensions surrounding Ukraine.

Regular citizens have taken the fight against illegal logging into their own hands in the pine-covered mountains of western Mexico, where loggers clear entire hillsides for avocado plantations that drain local water supplies and draw drug cartels hungry for extortion money.

In some places, like the Indigenous township of Cheran in Michoacan state , the fight against illegal logging and planting has been so successful it's as if a line had been drawn across the mountains: avocados and cleared land on one side, pine forest on the other. But it has required a decade-long political revolt in which Cheran's townspeople declared themselves autonomous and formed their own government.

Divers, vets and the coast guard were mounting a rescue operation Friday to help a whale calf that had become trapped in shallow water in a seaside area of the Greek capital.

The animal was an injured young Cuvier's beaked whale, or Ziphius cavirostris, according to Arion, a research organization that provides veterinary care for stranded cetaceans. The species usually inhabits deep waters, and it was unclear how it had been injured and why it became stranded in the Alimos area of southern Athens.

Top diplomats of the United States and the world's other worst climate-polluting nations talked global warming together Thursday for the first time since November's U.N. summit, with U.S. climate envoy John Kerry urging tougher commitments by the end of the year from governments falling short on emissions cuts.

The urging came after the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland ended with the world still on track to heat up well above the level that the world's nations have agreed to strive for.

Rafael Nadal is within one victory of a men's record 21st Grand Slam singles title.

The 35-year-old Spaniard advanced to the Australian Open final for the sixth time with a 6-3, 6-2, 3-6, 6-3 win over seventh-seeded Matteo Berrettini on Friday.

Coveted striker Dušan Vlahović was undergoing a medical at Juventus on Friday to complete what is expected to be one of the biggest moves of the transfer window.

Juventus tweeted a video of Vlahović signing autographs and posing for pictures with fans before he went inside Juventus' medical facility.