Syria says it caught the Damascus bombers as a US team arrives in Lebanon

Syria's interior minister Anas Khattab and a regional security commander said forces had captured an Islamic State-linked cell behind two bombings in Damascus that killed one person and injured 36. The arrests were announced after the blasts near a hotel used by president Emmanuel Macron, who was not there at the time. The casualty figures remained one dead and 36 injured.

The Financial Times reported that a United States Central Command delegation had arrived in Lebanon to carry out an agreement to end the fighting among Israel, Lebanon, and Hezbollah. Israel said it had killed an alleged Hezbollah militant who came out of a tunnel in Ali al-Taher. The delegation report and the tunnel killing were both dated to the same stretch of days.

Secretary of state Marco Rubio notified Congress that the United States would remove Syria from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation in place since 1979. The notice was a policy step toward Damascus. It was separate from the bomb-cell arrests but pointed the same direction, toward a changed official relationship.

The United States said it would resume regular consular services in Karachi and Lahore after suspending them during protests in Pakistan, including an attack on the Karachi consulate. The European Parliament passed a resolution regretting Ukraine's decision to name a unit for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, citing the Volhynia and Eastern Galicia massacres. Those were diplomatic texts, not battlefield results.

Indonesian police raided 12 places tied to three cases and found 74 kilograms of gold and cash in rupiah, Singapore dollars, and United States dollars totaling more than 3.7 million dollars. An Argentine court convicted former navy commander Claudio Villamide over the 2017 implosion of the submarine ARA San Juan, which killed all 44 people aboard. Seven people were killed and five injured in two shootings on the Cape Flats in Cape Town.

The Damascus toll to remember is one dead and 36 injured, with a cell now reported in custody. Syria's removal from the terrorism-sponsor list was a notification to Congress, not the same act as the arrests. Lebanon's reported Centcom team was about the Israel ceasefire track, not the cafe bombs.