GAZA (Sputnik) - Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has met with US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief William Burns in the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the central West Bank, the Palestinian WAFA news agency reports.

CAIRO (Sputnik) - The preliminary turnout in the second round of the Tunisian legislative elections was 11.3%, the Tunis Afrique Presse (TAP) news agency reports citing President of the Independent High Authority for Elections (ISIE), Farouk Bouaskar.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Russian aircraft will make up 70% of the fleet of Aeroflot (Russian Airlines) by 2030, the CEO of the Russian flag carrier, Sergey Aleksandrovsky, told reporters.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to the Near East to meet with Egyptian, Israeli and Palestinian Authority officials amid violence flaring in the West Bank and in Jerusalem.

BAKU (Sputnik) - The Azerbaijani Embassy in Iran has evacuated its staff after a fatal shooting, which took place earlier this week, and suspended the diplomatic mission in Tehran, Azerbaijani Deputy Foreign Minister Khalaf Khalafov said on Sunday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told the CBS News broadcaster on Sunday that he was planning to hold a meeting with President Joe Biden on February 1 to discuss a "responsible" debt ceiling and take control of "runaway" spending.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has urged his Israeli and Palestinian counterparts to show "maximum" responsibility and avoid the actions, which may further escalate the situation, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Sunday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - A helicopter of Russia's UTair airline participating in the UN humanitarian mission has been shelled at a Mogadishu airport, nobody was injured, the Russian Embassy in Djibouti, which also operates in Somalia, said on Sunday.

Britain plans to deliver 14 Challenger 2 main battle tanks (MBTs) to Kiev, along with ammunition, training and logistical support. The United Kingdom became the first country to promise Kiev Western MBTs. Germany and the United States followed suit this week by committing Leopard 2 and Abrams tanks.

Ankara has held up Finland and Sweden's accession into the Western military alliance for months, calling on the Nordic nations to drop any association with Kurdish militants it classifies as 'terrorists', and make other concessions. This week, controversy generated by the burning of Quarans in Stockholm further strained Turkish-Swedish ties.

The German government folded to months of pressure from Washington and Kiev this week and agreed to send its Leopard 2 main battle tanks east, marking a major escalation in the NATO-Russia proxy conflict in Ukraine. Not skipping a beat, Kiev immediately began calling on the West to deliver even more advanced hardware, including fighter jets.

An ammunition factory in the city of Isfahan, central Iran was struck by drones at about 11:30 pm on Saturday night. Malicious media reporting and social media posts sought to spin the story into evidence of a broad, coordinated attack against the Islamic Republic. Here’s what we really know so far about the incident.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - A total of 973 people were injured as a result of a powerful earthquake that rocked Iran's northwestern city of Khoy and its surroundings, an Iranian news agency reported on Sunday, citing an emergency official.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spent almost seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. During that time, many celebrities visited him to show their support. Among them was also TV star Pamela Anderson - a firm Assange supporter, who recently decided to reveal details of their rendezvous.

The negative reaction some western countries have had to the increased cooperation between Russia and Mali is a fresh indication of their neo-colonial mentality, according to the Russian Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Ukrainian tank crews arrived in the United Kingdom for training to operate Challenger 2 tanks, which London plans to send to Kiev this spring, the UK Defense Ministry said on Sunday.

Earlier this week, the Franco-Dutch airline Air France–KLM issued an warning of flights disruptions because of possible “civil unrest” in Kenya and neighboring Tanzania between Friday 27 January and Monday 30 January. The carrier later amended its alert to cite an unspecified "local threat in Tanzania".

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The amount of gas reserves in Europe’s underground storage facilities (UGS) has dropped below 75%, according to Gas Infrastructure Europe (GIE) data.

The US and its allies set the stage for the Ukraine crisis by sponsoring the Maidan coup in 2014, which sparked a conflict in Donbass and escalated into a full-blown confrontation involving Moscow last February. One heavily underreported facet of the West’s Ukraine policy revolves around Kiev’s immense mineral wealth.

PARIS (Sputnik) - More than 200 strikes against the pension reform project will be held at the call of leading trade unions across France on January 31, marking the second nationwide demonstration against raising the retirement age, media reported Sunday.