President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron spoke on Tuesday as part of their ongoing discussions on shared security interests, including Iran, Afghanistan and Syria, the White House announced.

Turkey has asked NATO to extend for another year the deployment of surface-to-air Patriot missiles to protect its troubled border with Syria because of a continuing “serious” threat, officials said on Wednesday. “We have received a letter from the Turkish government requesting the continuation of the Patriot mission,” a NATO official said.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has said that Bulgaria and Romania will not join Europe’s passport-free Schengen area in January 2014. In a Monday interview for French TV station TF1, Barroso, as cited by the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency (BTA), claimed that the issue of Schengen