Taking America off a permanent war footing is proving harder than President Barack Obama may have suggested.

Vice President Joe Biden and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan emerged from a nearly four-hour meeting Saturday, offering no indication that the U.S. and Turkey had bridged their differences about how to deal with Islamic State fighters or Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Kurdish forces, backed by U.S.-led airstrikes, launched a new offensive Wednesday targeting the Islamic State group in areas of Iraq that the extremists had captured this past summer.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is claiming that Muslim sailors reached the Americas more than 300 years before explorer Christopher Columbus.

Archaeology and war don’t usually mix, yet that’s been the case for years at Karkemish, an ancient city along the Turkey-Syria border where an excavation team announced its newest finds Saturday just meters (yards) from Islamic State-controlled territory.

Syria’s Western-backed opposition on Thursday called on international donors to help stave off a food crisis in the country where drought and civil war have caused a dramatic drop in wheat production this year.

Two Syrian opposition figures say the Islamic State group and al-Qaeda’s branch met last week and agreed to stop fighting each other and work together against their opponents.