Güncel

The Catholic priest stood at the altar of the hilltop church for the mass baptism, dipping dozens of heads into water and tracing a cross with his finger on each forehead.Then he rejoiced in Christianity's recovery of souls in a land where the vast majority of people are Muslim – as had been the men, women and children who stood before him.The ceremony was one of many held in recent months in Kosovo, a former Serbian territory inhabited largely by ethnic Albanians that declared itself an independent state in 2008. In a census last spring, 93% of the population said they were Muslim and only 1.75% Roman Catholic. .A small number of ethnic Albanian Christian activists, all converts from Islam, are urging their ethnic relatives to see the Church as an expression of their identity. They call i...

The Treasury Department imposed sanctions on a Beijing-based cybersecurity firm on Friday, accusing it of helping Chinese hackers infiltrate U.S. communications systems and conduct surveillance on four continents.In an announcement, the department said the company, Integrity Technology Group, had supported a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group known as Flax Typhoon in a campaign to break into foreign networks between the summer of 2022 and 2023, saying it having discovered that the group had "information sent to and received regularly by Integrity Tech infrastructure".The action came after the Treasury Department revealed in a letter to lawmakers this week that a Chinese intelligence agency had breached its systems in what appeared to be a spy operation, gaining access to government empl...

Syria's new leaders met with French and German foreign ministers in the capital Damascus on Friday, in one of the highest-level Western diplomatic visits since the fall of President Bashar al-Assad last month.German Annalena Baerbock and her French counterpart, Jean-Noël Barrot, arrived in Damascus on the first such trip in years on behalf of the European Union, as world powers began building ties with Hayat Tahrir al- Sham, the Islamic group that leads the new Syrian government.Ms Baerbock and Mr Barrot met Ahmad al-Shara, the group's leader, after visiting the infamous Sednaya prison, where the al-Assad regime had tortured and killed thousands of inmates.“We travel to Damascus today to offer our support, but also with clear expectations of the new rulers,” Ms. Baerbock said in a statemen...