Significant dates in Vladimir Putin's 24 years in power in Russia:

Dec. 31, 1999 — In a surprise address to the nation, President Boris Yeltsin announces his resignation and makes Putin, the prime minister he appointed four months earlier, the acting president.

Fatah, the largest Palestinian party, has seen its popularity plunge during the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, from where the Islamists violently ousted rivals Fatah in 2007.

Fatah's chosen path of negotiations has not brought about the Palestinian state promised by the Oslo Accords of 1993, and Hamas -- after choosing violence instead -- has seen its popularity soar.

When Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen launched missiles and hit three commercial ships in the southern Red Sea last weekend, it triggered an immediate question: Will the U.S. military strike back?

The Houthis have sharply escalated their attacks against ships as they sail toward the narrow Bab el-Mandeb Strait. And U.S. Navy ships have shot down an array of drones headed their way and believed to have been launched by the militant group from territory it controls in Yemen.

For all Palestinian parents, Marwan Tamimi said, there comes a moment they realize they're powerless to protect their children.

For the 48-year-old father of three, it came in June, when Israeli forces fired a large rubber bullet that struck the head of his eldest son, Wisam. A week later, Marwan said, soldiers came for the 17-year-old, dragging him out of bed with a fractured skull.

All these years later, the scene still is almost too bizarre to imagine: a tearful president and his perplexed aide, neither very religious, kneeling in prayer on the floor of a White House bedroom in the waning hours of a shattered presidency.

Until the embittered end, Henry Kissinger was one of the trusted few of a distrusting Richard Nixon. That trust, combined with Kissinger's intellectual heft and deft manipulation of power, made him a pivotal player in a tense period in American history, a giant of U.S. foreign policy and a fixture in international relations for decades to come.

Already weeks into their deployment, Israeli soldiers in Israel's north are settling in for a long, tense standoff with Hezbollah across the border in Lebanon.

Until a truce with Hamas went into effect in the Gaza Strip to the south on Friday, the Israel-Lebanon border saw near-daily exchanges of fire with the Iranian-backed group.

The deal seemed on the verge of unraveling. Hamas had accused Israel of failing to keep its side of the bargain and Israel was threatening to resume its lethal onslaught on the Gaza Strip.

That was the point at which a Qatari jet landed at Israel's Ben-Gurion International Airport on Saturday. Negotiators aboard set to work, seeking to save the cease-fire deal between Israel and Gaza's Hamas rulers before it fell apart and scuttled weeks of high-stakes diplomatic wrangling.

Israel's military offensive has turned much of northern Gaza into an uninhabitable moonscape. Whole neighborhoods have been erased. Homes, schools and hospitals have been blasted by airstrikes and scorched by tank fire. Some buildings are still standing, but most are battered shells.

Nearly 1 million Palestinians have fled the north, including its urban center, Gaza City, as ground combat intensified. When the war ends, any relief will quickly be overshadowed by dread as displaced families come to terms with the scale of the calamity and what it means for their future.

Israel and Hamas have agreed to a four-day halt in their devastating war in exchange for the release of dozens of hostages taken captive by militants on Oct. 7, when Israeli communities were overrun and some 240 people abducted.

The agreement will bring the first respite to war-weary Palestinians in Gaza, where more than 11,000 people, many women and children, have been killed. It could also offer a glimmer of hope to the families of those abducted weeks ago.

The helicopter-borne Houthi attack on an Israel-linked ship in the Red Sea highlights the danger now lurking in one of the world's key shipping routes as the Israel-Hamas war rages, as well as the rebels' tactics mirroring those of its chief sponsor, Iran.

While Tehran has denied aiding the Yemen rebel group in launching their attack Sunday, the targeted ship before the assault passed by an American-sanctioned Iranian cargo vessel suspected as serving as a forward spying base in the Red Sea. The rebels, dressed commando-style in bulletproof vests carrying assault rifles, covered each other and moved in military formation before quickly seizing control of the bridge of the Galaxy Leader.