Iran said Saturday it plans to enrich uranium up to 20% at its underground Fordo nuclear facility "as soon as possible," pushing its program a technical step away from weapons-grade levels as it increases pressure on the West over the tattered atomic deal.

The move comes amid heightened tensions between Iran and the U.S. in the waning days of the administration of President Donald Trump, who unilaterally withdrew America from Tehran's nuclear deal in 2018.

The top commander of Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard said Friday that his country was fully prepared to respond to any U.S. military pressure as tensions between Tehran and Washington remain high in the waning days of President Donald Trump's administration.

Gen. Hossein Salami spoke at a ceremony at Tehran University commemorating the upcoming one-year anniversary of the U.S. drone strike in Baghdad that killed Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who headed the expeditionary Quds force, on Jan. 3, 2020.

Investigating Judge Fadi Sawwan handed the Court of Cassation, headed by Judge Jamal Hajjar, the entire file of his investigation into the port blast, to decide on a memorandum submitted by two ex-ministers who challenged Sawwan’s authority, calling that he be recused from the investigation, Asharq el-Awsat daily reported Thursday.

Britain on Wednesday became the first country to authorize an easy-to-handle COVID-19 vaccine whose developers hope it will become the "vaccine for the world." The approval and a shift in policy that will speed up rollout of the vaccine in the U.K. comes as a surge in infections threatens to swamp British hospitals.

In the days before he detonated a bomb in downtown Nashville on Christmas, Anthony Quinn Warner changed his life in ways that suggest he never intended to survive the blast that killed him and wounded three other people.

Warner, 63, gave away his car, telling the recipient that he had cancer. A month before the bombing, he signed a document that transferred his longtime home in a Nashville suburb to a California woman for nothing in return. The computer consultant told an employer that he was retiring.

So far, the large majority of British and EU citizens have not felt the realities of Brexit. Though the U.K. left the European Union on Jan. 31, it follows the bloc's rules until the end of this year as part of a transition period to the new economic relationship.

President Michel Aoun met Monday in Baabda with caretaker Health Minister Hamad Hassan, who thanked the president for “authorizing him to negotiate with the Pfizer company on providing its anti-coronavirus vaccine,” the National News Agency said.

Aoun gave Hassan the necessary instructions for “finalizing the agreement with the aforementioned company to achieve this purpose,” NNA added.

Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said overnight that his group now has twice as many precision-guided missiles as it had a year ago, noting that Israel's efforts to prevent it from acquiring them have failed.

Nasrallah, in an end-of-year interview with the Beirut-based Al-Mayadeen TV, said his group has the capability to strike anywhere in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

The Lebanese army said Sunday it had conducted raids and arrested two Lebanese men and six Syrians as part of an investigation into the torching of a Syrian refugee camp in the norther region of Minieh.

The statement said the Lebanese men had fired weapons into the air and torched the tents.

More than 300 Syrian refugees were forced to flee an informal camp in northern Lebanon as a blaze raged through and burnt tents to the ground, U.N. and Lebanese officials said Sunday.

The fire late Saturday raged for four hours as firefighters tried to put it out, the Lebanese civil defense said.