Politics

  Dublin / AFP French President Francois Hollande on Thursday urged Britain to begin talks to leave the EU “as soon as possible” and ruled out granting access to the EU’s single market without access by EU workers to Britain. “The sooner these negotiations begin the better, and the shorter they are the better,” Hollande said after meeting Irish PM ...

  Bloomberg In his strongest remarks to date on the future of the western military alliance, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said the U.S. would only defend NATO members attacked by Russia after reviewing whether those nations “have fulfilled their obligations to us.” In an interview with the New York Times on Wednesday, the billionaire cast doubt on whether he ...

  Istanbul / AFP Turkish security forces and Kurdish militants are locked in a grinding conflict with no end in sight even after the botched coup, following a year of renewed fighting that has sown death and devastation in Turkey’s southeast. The coup bid on Friday to unseat President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was staged by disgruntled members of the Turkish ...

  Ankara / AFP Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday chaired a crunch security meeting for the first time since the failed coup, after a widening purge that has seen around 50,000 people either detained or sacked. The Turkish air force meanwhile launched its first strikes since Friday’s putsch against targets of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in ...

  Washington / AFP US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen urged Washington to reject Turkey’s efforts to extradite him and rejected as “ridiculous” the claim he was behind the past week’s coup attempt. “Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan today once again demonstrated he will go to any length necessary to solidify his power and persecute his critics,” Gulen said in a statement. ...

  London / AFP Anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks has released nearly 300,000 emails linked to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AKP party, with Turkey immediately blocking access on Wednesday. WikiLeaks said the emails came from the party’s web domain akparti.org.tr and mainly related to world affairs and not “the most sensitive internal matters”. It said the emails, which date between ...

  Jerusalem / AFP Israel’s parliament passed a controversial law that allows the ouster of members accused of racial incitement, which critics have said is intended to target opposition Arab legislators. The bill, supported by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, allows parliament to vote to sack a member “who incites racism or supports armed struggle against the state of Israel”. The ...

  Paris / AFP Three French soldiers have been killed in Libya, the defence ministry said on Wednesday, in the first confirmation that France has troops in the country where the IS extremist group has rear bases. “Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian regrets the loss of three French officers who died while on mission in Libya,” the ministry said in ...

  Taipei / AFP Taiwanese lawmakers and fishermen headed to an island in the disputed South China Sea on Wednesday to protest at an international tribunal ruling which undermined Taipei’s claims there. Eight lawmakers from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party and the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) boarded a military plane to the Taiwan-controlled Taiping island in the Spratlys archipelago. Five fishing ...

Washington / AFP With extremist attacks proliferating around the world, the United States has reassembled its coalition partners for meetings on Wednesday and Thursday to review a two-year-old war that has so far failed to eliminate the IS extremist group. The militant group may have lost ground in Iraq and Syria, but in recent weeks it has claimed horrific attacks in ...