India on Wednesday hosted senior security officials from Russia, Iran and five Central Asian countries to discuss the ramifications of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in talks that were boycotted by rival Pakistan and its ally China.

A joint statement released after the meeting said the eight participating nations also discussed threats arising from terrorism, radicalization and drug trafficking as well as the need for humanitarian assistance. No details were provided.

George Kordahi was popular among TV viewers in the Middle East for his dapper charm. He schmoozed with beautiful women, dropped jokes and recited lines of Arabic poetry — all the while weighing in with his political opinions about the region's events.

Now the former host of the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" is Lebanon's information minister, and those opinions have landed Kordahi at the center of his country's worst-ever crisis with Saudi Arabia.

A Vietnamese oil tanker earlier seized by Iran was free in open water Wednesday, ending the latest maritime confrontation involving Tehran amid stalled negotiations over its tattered nuclear deal with world powers.

The Sothys left a position off Iran's Bandar Abbas port and had reached international waters in the nearby Gulf of Oman early Wednesday, data analyzed by The Associated Press from MarineTraffic.com showed. The vessel appeared anchored there, but there was no information about its crew.

Palestinian eyewitnesses said a group of Israeli settlers has vandalized dozens of cars in the occupied West Bank.

A number of witnesses told an Associated Press photographer that Israeli settlers entered the town of al-Bireh near the West Bank city of Ramallah and damaged dozens of parked vehicles.

The head of the Islamist party in Israel's governing coalition has met with Jordan's King Abdullah II in Amman, the latest sign of warming ties between the two countries.

The Jordanian Royal Palace said in a statement that Abdullah and United Arab List lawmaker Mansour Abbas discussed "the latest developments in the Palestinian territories and ways to advance the peace process." The king restated his commitment to a two-state solution to the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates met with Syria's once widely shunned president in Damascus on Tuesday, sending the clearest signal yet that the Arab world is willing to re-engage with strongman Bashar Assad.

The visit by Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan is the first by an Emirati foreign minister since Syria's civil war erupted in 2011. It comes as some Arab countries are improving ties with Syria. The U.S., a close Emirati partner, promptly criticized the visit, saying it would not support any normalization with Assad's government.

Omar El Akkad, an Egyptian-Canadian author and journalist, the author of a story of the global refugee crisis through the eyes of a child, has won Canada's richest literary award.

El Akkad won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for his book "What Strange Paradise." The former Globe and Mail journalist received the honor at a nationally televised Toronto gala Monday night.

Marvel's new film "Eternals" broke the mold in an area the studio has conspicuously avoided for years: Sex between superheroes.

It's the first time in 26 Marvel cinematic universe films that an intimate conjugal moment was visibly shown between two characters. The scene — depicted by Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao — already captured headlines before the film's theatrical release Friday.

Australia's prime minister on Tuesday announced plans to encourage people to buy electric vehicles weeks after his government was accused at a U.N. conference in Scotland of being a laggard in fighting climate change.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the price of the technology would reduce in time and offered no subsidies to buyers of electric cars.

Unlike some of her European colleagues, Leonore Gewessler arrived at the U.N. climate conference with a clean conscience.

The 27-hour journey by sleeper train from Vienna to Brussels, and then on to Glasgow, Scotland, spared Austria's climate minister the kind of criticism many VIPs faced for taking planes to a conference that's all about cutting greenhouse gas emissions.