The United States will increase the financial pressure on Iran with the "strongest sanctions in history," after Washington pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday. "We will apply unprecedented financial pressure on the Iranian regime. The leaders in Tehran will have no doubt about our seriousness," Pompeo said in his first major foreign policy address since moving to the State Department from the CIA.

A political bloc led by populist Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a long-time adversary of the United States who also opposes Iranian influence in Iraq, has won the country s parliamentary election, the electoral commission said on Saturday. Sadr himself cannot become prime minister because he did not run in the election, though his bloc s victory puts him in a position to have a strong say in negotiations. His Sairoon electoral list captured 54 parliamentary seats.

Egypt has called for an international investigation into the use of live ammunition by Israeli occupation forces in Gaza, which left dozens of Palestinian protesters killed and hundreds injured last week.

Cuban authorities said the fiery crash of an aging Boeing passenger jet on Friday shortly after takeoff from Havana had killed 110 of the 113 on board, making it the Caribbean island s deadliest air disaster in nearly 30 years.

Prime Minister Theresa May said on Thursday Britain would leave the EU customs union after Brexit but a source said London was considering applying the bloc s external tariffs for a period beyond December 2020. Asked about reports that London would ask to stay in the European Union s customs area beyond the end of a post-Brexit transition period in 2020, May denied she was "climbing down" on plans to leave.

The United Nations Human Rights Council will hold a special session on Friday to discuss "the deteriorating human rights situation" in the Palestinian Territories, after Israeli occupation forces killed 61 Palestinians and injured hundreds on Monday. "The special session is being convened per an official request submitted this evening by Palestine and the United Arab Emirates," on behalf of the rights council s Arab Group and has so far received support from 26 states, a spokesman for the Geneva-based body said Tuesday.

North Korea threw next month s summit between Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump into doubt on Wednesday, threatening weeks of diplomatic progress by saying it may reconsider if Washington insists it unilaterally gives up its nuclear weapons. The North s official KCNA news agency said earlier Pyongyang had called off high-level talks with Seoul, which had been due on Wednesday, in the first sign of trouble after months of warming ties. Citing first vice minister of foreign affairs Kim Kye Gwan, KCNA later said the fate of the unprecedented US -North Korea summit, as well as bilateral relations, "would be clear" if the United States spoke of a "Libya-style" denuclearisation for the North.

The Palestinian Authority has recalled its envoys to Romania, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Austria after their ambassadors attended an Israeli reception marking the US embassy s move to Jerusalem, it said Wednesday. The statement from the PA s foreign ministry said the EU nations ambassadors had attended the reception the day before the US opened its Israel embassy in Jerusalem on Monday.

Shutting down North Korea s nuclear test site is trickier than it might seem. A botched tunnel collapse could spread radioactive debris. Nuclear material might be buried, but accessible enough to be dug up and reused in a weapon. And even if all the testing tunnels are destroyed, North Korean engineers could simply dig a new one if they want to conduct another nuclear test. Disarmament experts have raised many such scenarios after North Korea said over the weekend that it would use explosives to collapse the tunnels of its Punggye-ri nuclear test site next week.

A family of six launched suicide attacks on Christians attending Sunday services at three churches in Indonesia s second-largest city of Surabaya, killing at least 13 people and wounding 40, officials said. Indonesia, the world s largest Muslim-majority country, has seen a recent resurgence in homegrown militancy and police said the family who carried out Sunday s attacks were among 500 Islamic State group sympathizers who had returned from Syria. "The husband drove the car, an Avanza, that contained explosives and rammed it into the gate in front of that church," East Java police spokesman Frans Barung Mangera told reporters at the regional police headquarters in Surabaya.

Israeli gunfire killed at least 43 Palestinians, the highest toll in a single day since a series of protests demanding the right to return to ancestral homes in Israel began on March 30. It was the highest Palestinian single-day death toll since a series of protests dubbed the "Great March of Return" began at the border with Israel on March 30 and since a 2014 Gaza war.

Israel launched celebrations on Sunday for the U.S. Embassy s relocation to Jerusalem, a move whose break with world consensus was underscored by the absence of most envoys to the country from a reception hosted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Monday s slated opening of the new embassy follows from U.S. President Donald Trump s recognition in December of Jerusalem as Israel s capital, a decision he said fulfilled decades of policy pledges in Washington and formalised realities on the ground.

Egypt s parliament provisionally approved on Sunday a 35-article law aimed at regulating the business of medical and clinical research. Parliament speaker Ali Abdel-Aal said the final vote on the law will be postponed to a later date. "We do not have a two-thirds majority of MPs right now in order to be able to take a final vote on it," Abdel-Aal said.

Lebanon s Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri has replaced his chief of staff after his Future Party lost more than a third of its seats in parliamentary elections a week ago. The Future Party won 20 seats, down from the 33 won in the country s last elections held in 2009. In a post-election speech last week Hariri said the party had been expecting a better result and there had been "gaps" in how it conducted its campaign, for which people would be held responsible.

Israel s army said Thursday it had carried out widespread raids against Iranian targets in Syria overnight after rocket fire towards its forces which it blamed on Iran, marking a sharp escalation between the two enemies. The incident came after weeks of rising tensions and followed US President Donald Trump s decision to withdraw from a key 2015 Iran nuclear deal on Tuesday, a move Israel had long advocated.

A dam burst in Kenya after weeks of torrential rain, unleashing a torrent of water that smashed into two villages killing at least 21 people and causing “huge destruction”, rescue services and government officials said. The walls of the Patel dam, situated on top of a hill in Nakuru county, 190 km (120 miles) northwest of Nairobi, gave way late on Wednesday.

European powers scrambled Wednesday to save a landmark deal curbing Iran s nuclear programme after President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the agreement and reimposed sanctions on Tehran. Trump sparked an international outcry by ditching the accord, a move that risks overturning years of diplomacy and adding to instability in the Middle East.

President Hassan Rouhani said on Tuesday that Iran would remain committed to a multinational nuclear deal despite U.S. President Donald Trump s decision to withdraw from the 2015 agreement designed to deny Tehran the ability to build nuclear weapons. "If we achieve the deal s goals in cooperation with other members of the deal, it will remain in place... By exiting the deal, America has officially undermined its commitment to an international treaty," Rouhani said in a televised speech.

President Donald Trump determines the fate of the landmark Iran nuclear deal Tuesday, announcing his verdict on US sanctions relief underpinning the international accord, which he has repeatedly and harshly criticized. Officials and diplomats expect the pugnacious US leader to ignore last-ditch European pleas and move to withdraw the United States from a 2015 agreement, which he insists was "very badly negotiated."

A senior Iranian official on Tuesday hailed the "victory" of Hezbollah in Lebanese elections as a success in the "fight against Israel" and the United States, the state broadcaster reported. "The Lebanese people and their representatives, Hezbollah and the other resistance groups, scored this victory in the fight against Israel and its allies, including the United States," said Ali Akbar Velayati, foreign policy advisor to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

US President Donald Trump and North Korea s Kim Jong Un are likely to meet in Singapore next month, reports said Monday, as anticipation builds for unprecedented talks between the mercurial leaders. Trump said at the weekend that the two sides had settled on a date and location for the summit -- the first between a sitting US president and a North Korean leader -- without providing details.