Bloomberg Volkswagen AG’s former chief executive officer, Martin Winterkorn, approved a plan to disclose only partial information on the carmaker’s software rigging to U.S. authorities seven weeks before the scandal broke last year, Bild newspaper reported, citing newly uncovered documents. On July 28, 2015, Winterkorn signed off on talking points prepared ahead of an informal meeting with regulators in ...

  San Sebastian / AFP Spain’s Basque country and Galicia went to the polls on Sunday in regional elections that may help unblock the long-lasting national political paralysis. The country is stuck in limbo, run by a government without full powers following two inconclusive elections which the conservative Popular Party (PP) won without an absolute majority, and which have seen ...

  Peshawar / AFP Afghan security forces have killed one of the top Pakistani Taliban commanders along with at least 10 other militants in a border area operation, sources said on Sunday. Raeas Khan, also known as Azam Khan Tariq, had a 20 million rupee ($190,740) bounty on his head and was the fourth-highest ranking commander in the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). ...

  Los Angeles / AFP Authorities have arrested a Turkish-born man suspected of shooting five people dead, including a teenaged cancer survivor, at a shopping mall in the US state of Washington. Police named the suspect as Arcan Cetin, a 20-year-old resident of the nearby town of Oak Harbor, saying he was arrested late Saturday about 24 hours after the killings. ...

  Goma / AFP Thirteen people died when a panic-stricken crowd stampeded in a troubled town in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on Saturday, local officials said. “The incident happened when a drunken soldier in civilian clothes fired four shots from his gun, causing panic,” the mayor of Beni, Jean Edmond Nyonyi, said. “Eight people drowned when they threw themselves in ...

  Nairobi / AFP South Sudan’s rebel leader issued a call for renewed war with the government this weekend, declaring the collapse of an internationally-backed peace deal. Former vice president Riek Machar is in exile in Khartoum where he fled following fighting in the South Sudanese capital Juba in July. In a statement received by AFP on Sunday, Machar said he ...

  Nicosia / AFP Cypriot leaders meeting UN chief Ban Ki-moon in New York on Sunday hope to gain a “road map” leading to an agreement by the end of 2016 for reunifying the island, Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci said. “We expect tomorrow’s meeting to draw up a road map pointing us to the way to the long-expected final resolution” ...

  Donald Trump has few supporters in liberal Silicon Valley — even Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and Facebook board member, who spoke for the Republican nominee at the Republican National Convention, hasn’t given a cent to the campaign. Yet the tech world doesn’t unanimously favour Democrats. Consider, for example, the financial support that Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has given ...

  It’s hard to be a Bush these days. Liberals still condemn the most recent President Bush for “lying us into war” in Iraq. Even if you credit George W. Bush with benign intentions, his record is undeniably grim. In foreign policy, fiscal policy and much else — including its catastrophic inattention to the aims and capabilities of Osama bin ...

  The federal government will shut down at the end of the month unless Congress can pass a continuing resolution to keep the doors open. And Congress just left for the weekend with things looking bleak indeed. Unresolved is funding for efforts to fight the Zika virus, to help Flint, Michigan, deal with its drinking-water crisis, and to aid in ...