Follow all of the latest developments as they happen.
Latest News for January 26
-- Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov denied reports that Moscow sent late GRU chief Igor Sergun to Damascus to ask President Assad to step down.
-- Russia has argued strongly against Turkey's demand to keep a leading Kurdish group out of Syria's peace talks, and said it expects the U.N. envoy to resist what he called "blackmail" by Turkey and others.
-- U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has dismissed reports that he threatened to stop support to the Syrian opposition if it doesn't show up for peace talks scheduled to start this week.
-- Al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, the Al-Nusra Front, is a greater threat to the United States in the long term than the IS group, making the United States' current single-minded focus on IS misguided, a new report by the Institute for the Study of War and American Enterprise Institute argues.
-- The IS group has created an industry from passports seized in Iraq, Syria and Libya, French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve has said.
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* NOTE: Live blog posts are time-stamped according to Central European Time (CET).