A top Lebanese security official said Saturday that after returning from Washington recently he visited Syria for two days where he spoke with officials about American journalist Austin Tice who has been missing in the war-torn country since 2012.

Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim did not give much details in an interview with the local Al-Jadeed television channel. His comments came two weeks after his return from Washington where is believed to have discussed Tice's case with U.S. officials.

Joe Biden faces a decision unlike any other incoming president: whether to back a short-term national lockdown to finally arrest a raging pandemic.

For now, it's a question the president-elect would prefer to avoid. In the week since he defeated President Donald Trump, Biden has devoted most of his public remarks to encouraging Americans to wear a mask and view the coronavirus as a threat that has no regard for political ideology.

An apparent steam explosion Friday in a maintenance building at a Veterans Affairs hospital in the U.S. state of Connecticut killed a VA employee and a contractor and left a third person missing, officials said.

"We received a report this morning that an explosion occurred at the West Haven campus of the VA Connecticut Healthcare System that resulted in two deaths in a non-patient care area," VA Secretary Robert Wilkie said in a statement.

In silence and mourning, France marked five years since 130 people were killed by Islamic State extremists who targeted the Bataclan concert hall, Paris cafes and the national stadium in a series of coordinated attacks.

It was France's deadliest peacetime attack, deeply shaking the nation. It led to intensified French military action against extremists abroad and a security crackdown at home.

Proceedings in a $95 million lawsuit brought by Japanese car giant Nissan against its former chairman Carlos Ghosn began Friday in a court near Tokyo.

Nissan posted a loss of 44.4 billion yen ($421 million) in the last quarter as the pandemic slammed profitability and the Japanese automaker fought to restore a brand image tarnished by a scandal centered on its former star executive Carlos Ghosn.

Nissan Motor Co. had a profit of 59 billion yen in July-September of 2019.

Turkey's interior ministry has banned smoking in public places across the country to curb the spread of COVID-19.

In a statement late Wednesday, the ministry said smoking would be banned in busy streets, bus stops and public squares when necessary. It said the nationwide mask mandate in public spaces, which has been in effect for several months, must be followed at all times and smokers were routinely violating the mask rule.

World stocks fell back on Thursday after an overnight comeback by big technology shares that have thrived during the pandemic.

On Nov. 13, 1970, a young air force officer from the coastal hills of Syria launched a bloodless coup. It was the latest in a succession of military takeovers since independence from France in 1946, and there was no reason to think it would be the last.

Yet 50 years later, Hafez Assad's family still rules Syria.

The Syrian government is working to secure the return of millions of refugees who fled war in their country, but Western sanctions are hindering the work of state institutions, complicating those plans, President Bashar Assad said Wednesday.

His comments came at the opening session of a controversial two-day international conference in Damascus on the return of refugees. The event, organized by Russia, is being boycotted by many Arab and Western countries and has been criticized by the U.N. and the U.S. Critics say the time is not ripe yet for the return of refugees, insisting the first priority should be to make it safe for people to go back to the war-torn country.