For Republicans, it's a question with no clear answer: Who becomes House speaker after Kevin McCarthy?

It's not at all certain that any of the GOP candidates will be able to round up enough votes — 218, if all lawmakers are present and voting — to ascend to one of the most powerful positions in government, second in line to the presidency.

The Lebanese opposition has prepared a plan for resolving the Syrian refugee crisis that is based on two steps: distributing the refugees on Arab countries and halting the work of UNHCR (U.N. refugee agency) in Lebanon, media reports said.

UNHCR is “not only spending money to consolidate the presence of 850,000 refugees registered on its lists, but also on 900,000 unregistered (Syrian) migrants,” the Nidaa al-Watan newspaper reported on Thursday, quoting opposition sources.

The House of Representatives is entering uncharted territory after a far-right effort to remove fellow Republican Kevin McCarthy from the speakership succeeded thanks to support from Democrats.

A resolution — titled a motion to vacate — from Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., passed Tuesday with the support of eight Republicans and all the Democrats present and voting. The vote made McCarthy the first speaker in history to be removed from office, a bitter humiliation that came after less than nine months on the job.

Flying above enemy lines, a Ukrainian reconnaissance drone sends a clear image back to soldiers hiding in a basement a few kilometers away: A Russian armored vehicle is idling along a key logistics route, looking like easy prey in the artillery-scarred green landscape.

Then, in a flash, the image disappears, and the drone operator's screen is replaced by a jumble of black and white pixels.

Tensions between Canada and India have escalated over the assassination of a Sikh independence advocate in June.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his country was investigating credible allegations that Indian government agents were connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, but India has rejected the allegations as absurd.

Azerbaijan's launch of reportedly intense artillery firing in the Nagorno-Karabakh region on Tuesday raised fears that another full-scale conflict with Armenia could be underway, less than three years after a war that killed more than 6,000 people.

Nagorno-Karabakh, with a population of about 120,000, is an ethnic Armenian region of Azerbaijan that has been a flashpoint since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The region and sizable surrounding territories came under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by the Armenian military at the 1994 end of a separatist war. Azerbaijan regained the territories and parts of Nagorno-Karabakh itself in fighting in 2020.

Tensions between Canada and India have reached new heights with dueling diplomatic expulsions and an allegation of Indian government involvement in the killing of a Sikh activist on Canadian soil.

The row centers around the Sikh independence, or Khalistan, movement. India has repeatedly accused Canada of supporting the movement, which is banned in India but has support among the Sikh diaspora.

Iran and the United States have previously identified eight of the 10 prisoners in an exchange Monday. Here is some information about them:

SIAMAK NAMAZI

The Delegation of the European Union to Lebanon, in partnership with the Metropolis Cinema Association and in cooperation with the European Union Member States, has announced that the 28th European Film Festival in Lebanon will be held from September 25 to October 4, 2023.

The festival will open on Monday, September 25 with the Spanish film Ramona by Andrea Bagney, which won the Best Screenplay Award at the 2022 Rome Film Fest. 

American captives could be exchanged for billions of dollars of frozen Iranian assets, even as critics back in Washington warn against dealing with Tehran.

That's the way it was in 1981 and the way it likely will be in the coming days.