Overshadowed this week by President Barack Obama's historic visit with Cuban leaders in Havana, another top American government official made some history of his own.
On Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry met in Havana with Latin America's oldest communist guerrilla rebel group, the Revolutionary of Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) which has waged war on the Colombian government for half a century and which the U.S. government has designated as a foreign terrorist organization and drug cartel.
DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Syrian government forces recaptured the ancient city of Palmyra on Sunday, scoring an important victory over Islamic State fighters who waged a 10-month reign of terror there and dealing the group its first major defeat since an international agreement to battle terrorism in the fractured nation took effect last year.
The city known to Syrians as the "Bride of the Desert" is famous for its 2,000-year-old ruins that once drew tens of thousands of visitors each year before IS destroyed many of the monuments. The extent of the destruction remained unclear. Initial footage on Syrian TV showed widespread rubble and shattered statues. But Palmyra's grand colonnades appeared to be in relatively good condition.
