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A huge blaze broke out at an Iranian oil refinery south of Tehran on Wednesday, a spokesman for Iran's emergency department said, according to state media. At least 11 people have been injured.

The head of Tehran's Provincial Crisis Management Office, Mansour Darajati, said that "a leak at a liquid gas pipeline at the facility sparked the fire," Reuters reported.

Shaker Khafaei, the head of public relations of Tehran Oil Refining Co., which runs the refinery, told state news agency IRINN that he did not believe sabotage to be the cause of the fire.

Germany-bound flight from Oman lands in Kuwait over bomb threat

A Germany-bound Eurowings passenger flight from Oman landed in Kuwait on Sunday over a bomb threat but no explosives were found on board, authorities said.

In a statement, Eurowings said there were 286 passengers on board the flight, which was being flown by SunExpress on its behalf. The discrepancy in passenger numbers could not be immediately resolved, though the KUNA figure may have included flight personnel.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The International Space Station accepted its first U.S. shipment in more than half a year early Wednesday, receiving Christmas presents and much-needed groceries for the resident astronauts.

"There's much rejoicing on the ground," Mission Control radioed.

NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren (CHELL LEND-grin) used the space station's big robot arm to grab the capsule and its 3 ½ tons of cargo. The operation went smoothly, thanks to all the practice Lindgren put in. He operated the crane via joy sticks, joking earlier this week, "I knew those hours playing video games would come in handy!"

If oil stays around $50 a barrel, most countries in the region will run out of cash in five years or less, warned a dire report from the International Monetary Fund this week. That includes OPEC leader Saudi Arabia as well as Oman and Bahrain.

Low oil prices will wipe out an estimated $360 billion from the region this year alone, the IMF said.

audi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, needs to sell oil at around $106 to balance its budget, according to IMF estimates. The kingdom barely has enough fiscal buffers to survive five years of $50 oil, the IMF said.

he Syrian government declared Saturday it is ready to attend peace talks scheduled in Geneva later this month

“terrorist groups” will be participating in the meetings, according to the Syrian news agency SANA.

The Geneva negotiations are the first step in a road map laid out last year by the international community to end the Syrian civil war. The

The acting director of the agency responsible for deporting immigrants plans to retire.Thomas Homan, whose retirement plans were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, has served as the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement since the beginning of the Trump administration.

oman told Fox News in February that politicians who govern so-called sanctuary cities, where local police limit their cooperation with federal immigration agents, should be charged with crimes. Under his tenure as the top official at ICE, the agency has increased arrests of noncriminal migrants and raids on workplaces

"Because of their tremendous dedication and hard work, we have made significant progress this past year in enforcing our nation’s immigration and customs laws, and in protecting public safety and national security. I will continue to be a strong advocate for the workforce and for the ICE mission," Homan said.Breaking News EmailsGet breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.SUBSCRIBE

One of humanity’s greatest achievements has been mastering routes across the world’s oceans.

Customs have been decisively altered by the movement of ships across the oceans. No one drank tea in medieval Europe, but once contact had been made with the tea-drinking Chinese, tea became the obsession of millions of people from Sweden to the United States

We tend to think that the opening of the oceans was the work of the great explorers, especially the 15th century pioneers who edged their way through uncharted waters to southern Africa, the Indian Ocean and the spice lands of the Indies. These were sailors such as Christopher Columbus, who chanced upon unsuspected lands that blocked the expected sea route from Europe to China and Japan. But while these men did give the Age of Discovery its name, they didn’t start the exploration of the world’s oceans

The US and Iran charged each other with ratcheting up tensions in the Persian Gulf as concerns about potential conflict build days before Iran marks one year since the US assassinated its most powerful military figure and less than three weeks before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.

ran appealed to the UN Security Council on Thursday to stop the US from conducting what it called heightened "military adventurism" in the Gulf and the Oman Sea, including dispatching nuclear-capable bombers to the region, declaring that it did not want conflict but would defend itself if necessary.

Earlier this week, defense officials told CNN new intelligence showed Iran has been moving short range ballistic missiles into Iraq.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will designate the Houthi rebels in Yemen as a foreign terrorist organization

It is not clear how the terrorist designation will inhibit the Houthi rebels, who have been at war with the Saudi-backed government in Yemen for nearly six years but, some analysts say, pose no direct threat to the United States.

Mr. Pompeo will announce the designation in his last full week as secretary of state, and more than a month after meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who began a military intervention with Arab allies against the Houthis in 2015.

Already, the American death toll is of a different order of magnitude than in most other countries. With only 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States has accounted for 22 percent of coronavirus deaths. Canada, a rich country that neighbors the United States, has a per capita death rate about half as large

Together, the national skepticism toward collective action and the Trump administration’s scattered response to the virus have contributed to several specific failures and missed opportunities, Times reporting shows:a lack of effective travel restrictions;repeated breakdowns in testing;confusing advice about masks;a misunderstanding of the relationship between the virus and the economy;and inconsistent messages from public officials.

Some Republican governors have followed his lead and also played down the virus, while others have largely followed the science. Democratic governors have more reliably heeded scientific advice, but their performance in containing the virus has been uneven.

Over the past month, about 1.9 million Americans have tested positive for the virus.

That’s more than five times as many as in all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia, combined.

... the outbreaks still pale in comparison to those in the United States. Florida, with a population less than half of Spain, has reported nearly 300,000 cases in the same period.

For the last few years, though, I’ve felt the opposite — that so much of my work was decrying bad choices made by big players

Vladimir Putin’s tightening dictatorship and aggression, culminating in his brutal invasion of Ukraine; Xi Jinping’s reversal of China’s opening; Israel’s election of the most right-wing government in its history; the cascading effects of climate change; the loss of control over America’s southern border; and, maybe most ominously, an authoritarian drift, not only in European countries like Turkey, Poland and Hungary but in America’s own Republican Party as well.

If I think about the three pillars that have stabilized the world since I became a journalist in 1978 — a strong America committed to protecting a liberal global order with the help of healthy multilateral institutions like NATO, a steadily growing China always there to buoy the world economy, and mostly stable borders in Europe and the developing world — all three are being shaken by big choices by big players over the last decade