The new year will usher in the bitcoin-friendly administration of President-elect Donald Trump and an expanding lobbying effort in statehouses that, together, could push states to become more open to crypto and for public pension funds and treasuries to buy into it.

Proponents of the uniquely volatile commodity argue it is a valuable hedge against inflation, similar to gold.

After weeks of fear and bewilderment about the drones buzzing over parts of New York and New Jersey, elected officials are urging action to identify and stop the mysterious flights.

"There's a lot of us who are pretty frustrated right now," Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on "Fox News Sunday."

The world's nations keep faltering in their efforts to join together to save the planet from several environmental crises.

In the past few months United Nations-sponsored negotiations to tackle climate change, plastic pollution, loss of global species and a growing number of deserts have either outright failed or come out with limited outcomes that didn't address the scale of the problems. It's been three years since activist Greta Thunberg dismissed global talks as "blah-blah-blah," which became a rallying cry for young environmentalists.

Israel said it will close its embassy in Ireland as relations deteriorated over the war in Gaza, where Palestinian medical officials said new Israeli airstrikes killed over 46 people including several children.

The decision to close the embassy came in response to what Israel’s foreign minister has described as Ireland’s “extreme anti-Israel policies.” In May, Israel recalled its ambassador to Dublin after Ireland announced, along with Norway, Spain and Slovenia, it would recognize a Palestinian state.

In churches across long-stifled Syria, Christians marked the first Sunday services since the collapse of Bashar Assad 's government in an air of transformation. Some were in tears. Others clasped their hands in prayer.

"They are promising us that government will be formed soon and, God willing, things will become better because we got rid of the tyrant," said one worshiper, Jihad Raffoul, as the small Christian population hoped that new messages of inclusion would ring true.

A rebel force deployed to a village in southeastern Damascus to stop looters who swarmed a residential complex and set some apartments on fire.

The raid by the rebel force comes a week after the fighters marched on the Syrian capital in their lightening offensive that forced Syrian President Bashar Assad to flee, ending five decades of his family rule.

The Israeli government has approved a plan to increase the population of the annexed Golan Heights, while insisting it had no intention of confronting Syria after seizing a U.N.-monitored buffer zone.

As Islamist-led rebel forces swept Syrian president Bashar al-Assad out of power last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered troops to seize the demilitarized zone between the two countries' forces on the Golan Heights.

Personal photos of ousted Syrian President Bashar Assad have surfaced from his abandoned residences, sparking ridicule among Syrians who until days ago were persecuted for criticizing his carefully crafted public image.

The intimate and candid photos, reportedly discovered in albums from Assad's mansions in the hills of Damascus and Aleppo, offer a stark contrast to the polished, glamorous image that Assad and his father projected as they led Syria for half a century.

In central Gaza's Nuseirat urban refugee camp, mourners gathered Monday for the funeral of a Palestinian journalist working for Al-Jazeera who was killed the day before in a strike on a point for Gaza’s civil defense agency. They carried him through the street from the hospital, his blue bulletproof vest resting atop his body.

Al-Jazeera said Ahmad Baker al-Louh, 39, had been covering rescue operations of a family wounded in an earlier bombing when he was killed.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war monitor, reported early Monday that Israeli airstrikes pounded missile warehouses and other former Syrian army sites along Syria’s coast in the “most violent strikes in the Syrian coast region since the beginning of the (Israeli) strikes in 2012.”

The Israeli military declined to comment on the strikes.