President Donald Trump will be the patient, not the commander in chief offering comfort, when he visits the Walter Reed military hospital on Friday.

Trump is headed to the medical facility in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington, for his first medical check-up as president. But what has been a fairly routine exam for previous officeholders has taken on outsized importance in the age of Trump, given the tone of some of his tweets, comments attributed to some of his close advisers and Trump's recent slurring of words on national TV.

The U.S. Justice Department is forming a team of prosecutors to investigate alleged drug trafficking and money laundering linked to Hizbullah, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday. The move follows reports that Obama administration officials thwarted drug prosecutions related to Hizbullah for fear of jeopardizing a nuclear deal with Iran.

President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have been relentless in pressuring Sessions to take a fresh look at Obama-era dealings, in an effort that Democrats contend is aimed at steering attention away from investigations into Trump campaign ties to Russian election meddling.

A series of eight earthquakes hit the Iran-Iraq border area and rattled Baghdad on Thursday, apparent aftershocks of a temblor that struck the mountainous region in November and killed over 530 people. Four people suffered minor injuries in Iran, state television reported.

The U.S. Geological Survey said seven of the quakes struck near the Iraqi city of Mandali, 120 kilometers (75 miles) northeast of the Iraqi capital. Mandali is right on the border between the two nations. The eighth hit near Mehran in western Iran, about 90 kilometers (55 miles) southeast of Mandali along the sparsely populated Zagros Mountains that divide Iran and Iraq.

Hundreds of searchers continued the grueling work Thursday of hunting for survivors and digging up bodies in the sea of mud and wreckage left by flash flooding in this wealthy coastal enclave.

Muck-spattered searchers from around the state slogged through knee-deep ooze, poking long poles into the mud to probe for victims. Search dogs clambered on shattered heaps of wood that used to be homes.

U.S. President Donald Trump is expected this week to extend relief from economic sanctions to Iran as part of the nuclear deal, citing progress in amending U.S. legislation that governs Washington's participation in the landmark accord, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the administration's deliberations.

But Trump is likely to pair his decision to renew the concessions to Tehran with new, targeted sanctions on Iranian businesses and people, the six people briefed on the matter said. The restrictions could hit some firms and individuals whose sanctions were scrapped under the 2015 nuclear agreement, a decision that could test Tehran's willingness to abide by its side of the bargain.

A Lebanese prosecutor has begun questioning an Uber driver suspected in the murder of a British woman who worked at the UK Embassy in Beirut.

Rebecca Dykes was found dead on Dec. 16 on the side of a road, strangled and reportedly showing signs of sexual assault. The suspect, Tarek Houshi, was arrested days later.

North Korea agreed Tuesday to send a delegation to next month's Winter Olympics in South Korea, Seoul officials said, as the bitter rivals sat for rare talks at the border to discuss how to cooperate in the Olympics and improve their long-strained ties.

The Koreas' first talks in two years were arranged after North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un recently made an abrupt push for improved ties with South Korea after a year of elevated tensions with the outside world over his expanding nuclear and missile programs. Critics say Kim may be trying to divide Seoul and Washington in a bid to weaken international pressure and sanctions on the North.

The two Koreas' rare high-profile talks Tuesday took place at the jointly controlled area inside the world's most heavily fortified border — the same place where North Korean soldiers recently sprayed bullets at a comrade who was making a daring dash for freedom.

The defecting soldier was hit five times, but he survived and is now recovering in South Korea. The dramatic video of his defection, released by the American-led U.N. command, showed again why the area, called Panmunjom, is known as one of the scariest places on Earth.

With three strong hurricanes, wildfires, hail, flooding, tornadoes and drought, the United States tallied a record high bill last year for weather disasters: $306 billion.

The U.S. had 16 disasters last year with damage exceeding a billion dollars, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Monday. That ties 2011 for the number of billion-dollar disasters, but the total cost blew past the previous record of $215 billion in 2005.

Oprah Winfrey's impassioned call for "a brighter morning even in our darkest nights" at the Golden Globes has Democratic Party activists buzzing about the media superstar and the 2020 presidential race — even if it's only a fantasy.

Even so, for Democrats in early voting states, and perhaps for a public that largely disapproves of President Donald Trump's job performance, the notion of a popular media figure as a presidential candidate is not as strange as it once seemed, given the New York real estate mogul and reality TV star now in the White House.