Lebanon's only English-language daily is protesting the country's deteriorating economic and political conditions by publishing a blank edition.

Each page of The Daily Star's Thursday edition bore a single phrase referring to one of the country's problems, including government deadlock, rising public debt, increasing sectarian rhetoric and unemployment. The back page had a photo of the cedar tree, a national symbol, with a caption reading: "Wake up before it's too late!"

Walid al-Aqqad's Gaza home would be the envy of many an antiquities collector.

Pieces of Corinthian columns greet visitors in the backyard. Inside, hundreds of ancient pots and other artifacts hang on the walls or are arranged helter-skelter on shelves.

Turkey's combative president is threatening to launch a military operation in northeastern Syria that is designed to push back U.S.-allied Syrian Kurdish forces — an invasion that carries major risks for a highly combustible region in war-devastated Syria.

An operation would mark the third Turkish incursion into Syria in the past four years — all seeking to limit the growing influence of Syrian Kurdish fighters, which Turkey views as terrorist along its border. Turkish and American military officials were meeting Monday and Tuesday in Ankara for last-ditch negotiations amid warnings from Turkish officials about a military buildup.

When Sudan's protest leaders signed a preliminary power-sharing agreement with the ruling military council in early July, they had no choice but to shake hands with the man many of them accuse of ordering a massacre just a month earlier.

Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, a paramilitary commander from Darfur who is widely known as Hemedti, has emerged as Sudan's main power broker in the months since the military overthrew President Omar al-Bashir.

The Islamic State extremist group has been left with as much as $300 million following the loss of its so-called "caliphate" in Iraq and Syria, "with none of the financial demands of controlling territory and population," Secretary-General António Guterres said in a report released Monday.

The report to the Security Council on the threat posed by IS warns that the lull in attacks directed by the militant group "may be temporary."

It took just 30 seconds in Ohio and zero bullets in Texas for officers to stop two mass shooters this weekend, but not before 29 people were killed and about 50 injured in less than 24 hours.

Officers gunned down the Ohio shooter at the doorstep of a bar-turned-hiding place in the middle of Dayton's nightclub district, and arrested the El Paso shooter as hundreds fled a crowded shopping center. Though the two attacks staggered a nation accustomed to gun violence, the bigger shock may have been that the death toll wasn't worse.

Mohammed Haji Abed drives his yellow taxi through the busy streets of the Syrian capital for about 12 hours a day, toiling in the sweltering summer heat but earning barely enough for his family of five to get by.

It was easier for him to make ends meet at the height of his country's civil war, when rebels regularly lobbed mortars into Damascus from their strongholds on the outskirts of the city.

The Islamic State remains a global threat despite losing the once vast territory it held in Syria and Iraq, U.S. officials said Thursday in warning about persistent violence from underground cells and an expansion of militants into new areas.

Ambassador James Jeffrey, the State Department envoy to the international coalition fighting the Islamic State, told reporters that thousands of the extremist organization's fighters are scattered around Syria and Iraq, where officials see a "persistent, resilient, rural terrorist level of violence" in that country.

World famous Lebanese band Mashrou’ Leila has condemned what it called "a deliberate campaign" against it, after the organizers of the Byblos International Festival called off its August 9 performance over “bloodshed” fears.

In a statement, the band said the campaign was built on false accusations and a distortion of their lyrics.

A hard-won, warts-and-all budget pact between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Donald Trump is facing a key vote in the GOP-held Senate, with many conservatives torn between supporting the president and risking their political brand with an unpopular vote to add $2 trillion or more to the government's credit card.

The Trump-supported legislation backed by the Democratic speaker would stave off a government shutdown and protect budget gains for the Pentagon and popular domestic programs. It's attached to a must-do measure to lift the so-called debt limit to permit the government to borrow freely to pay its bills.