A U.S. Air Force drone the size of a small airliner crashed in a remote section of California near Mt. Whitney.

Edwards Air Force Base said in a statement that the RQ-4 Global Hawk, an unmanned surveillance aircraft, was making a routine trip Wednesday afternoon from Edwards to its usual home at Beale Air Force Base when it crashed for unknown reasons.

There was a time when the mention of the Persian Gulf brought to mind images of pampered societies ruled by aging monarchs content to preside quietly over their oil money and fantastical skyscrapers while the U.S. kept the peace.

Not anymore.

Saudi Arabia's King Salman on Wednesday appointed his 31-year-old son Mohammed bin Salman as crown prince, placing him firmly as first-in-line to the throne and removing the country's counterterrorism czar and a figure well-known to Washington from the royal line of succession.

In a series of royal decrees carried on the state-run Saudi Press Agency, the monarch stripped Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, who had been positioned to inherit the throne, from his title as crown prince and from his powerful position as the country's interior minister overseeing security.

France's new president Emmanuel Macron has vowed to quickly implement security, anti-corruption and labor measures he considers as priorities. They are expected to easily pass parliament during a special session in July, now that the government has a wide majority at the National Assembly.

SECURITY

The Islamic State group is in retreat across Syria and Iraq, and the contours of a new conflict among the array of parties battling it are already starting to appear.

The U.S. military shot down a Syrian government warplane on Sunday, saying it had targeted an American-allied Kurdish force that is battling the extremists in their de facto capital, Raqqa. That led Russia, a close ally of Syrian President Bashar Assad, to warn that it would target U.S.-led coalition planes flying west of the Euphrates River.

The Iraqi military says it has captured a border crossing with Syria from the Islamic State group.

Tribal forces and border police, supported by Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition aircraft, took part in the operation to take the al-Waleed crossing, the Iraqi Joint Operations Command said in a statement Saturday.

Saudi Arabia's King Salman has issued a royal decree that restructures the country's system for prosecutions, essentially stripping the crown prince of longstanding powers overseeing criminal investigations.

The king's decree issued Saturday renames the Bureau of Investigation and Prosecution as the office of Public Prosecution and orders that a newly appointed public prosecutor report directly to the monarch.

President Donald Trump acknowledged for the first time Friday that he is under federal investigation as part of the expanding probe into Russia's election meddling. He lashed out at a top Justice Department official overseeing the inquiry, reflecting his mounting frustration with the unrelenting controversy that has consumed his early presidency.

"I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt," the president wrote on Twitter.

Some 15,000 residents in the northern German city of Hannover had to evacuate their homes after a 250 kilogram (550 pound) World War II-era bomb was found during construction work.

The dpa news agency says the bomb was found during digging Thursday afternoon but disposal experts couldn't begin work until the early morning hours Friday as some recalcitrant residents refused to evacuate their homes.

Putting aside a rift over a U.S. anti-missile system, top officials from China and South Korea are attending a meeting of a China-backed Asian lending bank on the South Korean island of Jeju.

Chinese finance minister Xiao Jie and his Indian counterpart Arun Jaitley are among those attending the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank's annual meeting, which started Friday in Jeju.