In a classroom in northern Iraq, Zhiwei Hu presides over his students as a conductor would an orchestra. He cues with a question, and the response from his students resounds in perfect, fluent Chinese.

The 52-year-old has been teaching the cohort of 14 Iraqi Kurdish students at the behest of the Chinese consulate in the northern city of Irbil.

At least three rockets struck near Baghdad's international airport and an adjacent military base that hosts U.S. and other coalition advisors on Friday, damaging an abandoned commercial plane but causing no casualties, Iraqi officials said.

The rockets struck in the early morning hours, and landed between the civilian and military areas of the airport, two security officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the press.

Iran became the first team from Asia to qualify for this year's World Cup in Qatar with a 1-0 win over Iraq in Tehran on Thursday.

Medhi Taremi's goal early in the second half at the Azadi Stadium secured a third straight World Cup appearance for Iran with three Group A games still remaining.

The Saud Arabia-led coalition at war in Yemen has announced it is investigating an airstrike on a detention facility there that killed dozens of people.

The strike last week on the prison in the north of the country was one of the deadliest single attacks in the yearslong war between the coalition and the Houthi rebels. It came as hostilities have increased in recent weeks.

Holding his skis beside a bunny slope, Li Wei enthuses over his winter job as a farmer-turned-ski coach on the northwestern outskirts of Beijing.

The tall, tanned 36-year-old works December to March at a resort in the Yanqing district, which will host skiing, luge and other sliding events at the Winter Olympics, which open next week.

An autopsy has found that a 78-year-old Palestinian man who was pronounced dead shortly after being detained by Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank died of a heart attack caused by "external violence."

The autopsy, undertaken by three Palestinian doctors, confirmed that Omar Asaad, who has U.S. citizenship, suffered from underlying health conditions. But it also found bruises on his head, redness on his wrists from being bound, and bleeding in his eyelids from being tightly blindfolded.

When the coronavirus began spreading around the world, the remote Pacific archipelago of Kiribati closed its borders, ensuring the disease didn't reach its shores for nearly two full years.

Kiribati finally began reopening this month, allowing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to charter a plane to bring home 54 of the island nation's citizens. Many of those aboard were missionaries who had left Kiribati before the border closure to spread the faith abroad for what is commonly known as the Mormon church.

In a break from the past, the U.S. and its allies are increasingly revealing their intelligence findings as they confront Russian preparations for invading Ukraine, looking to undercut Russian President Vladimir Putin's plans by exposing them and deflecting his efforts to shape world opinion.

The White House in recent weeks publicized what it said was a developing Russian "false-flag" operation to create pretext for an invasion. Britain named specific Ukrainians it accused of having ties to Russian intelligence officers plotting to overthrow President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The U.S. also released a map of Russian military positions and detailed how officials believe Russia will try to attack Ukraine with as many as 175,000 troops.

Multiple channels of Iran's state television have broadcast images showing the leaders of an exiled dissident group and a graphic calling for the death of the country's supreme leader, an incident that authorities later described as a hack.

For several seconds, graphics flashed on screen, interrupting the broadcast to depict the leaders of the opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq. The name of a social media account, which claimed to be a group of hackers who broadcast the message honoring the dissidents, also appeared. Two state radio stations were also interrupted.

Construction workers with heavy machinery have started work on Poland's border with Belarus on a $394 million wall to stop migrants pushed across by Belarus in what the European Union calls a "hybrid attack."

Reporters were allowed to see the work in the village of Tolcza, near the closed border crossing of Kuznica in eastern Poland.