Politics

  TOKYO / AP There will be no Fourth of July fireworks for American troops in Japan this year due to restrictions imposed after a former US Marine was accused of murdering and raping a woman on Okinawa. The US Navy in Japan said Thursday that it had canceled planned annual Independence Day fireworks at its bases as part of ...

  NEW YORK / AP Facing questions about meager fundraising, slipping poll numbers and campaign instability, Donald Trump is tending to business — in Scotland. In his first international trip since becoming the presumptive Republican nominee, Trump plans to check on a pair of his championship golf resorts. Some Republicans worry that the billionaire’s attention is divided between his businesses ...

  Seoul/ AP Leader Kim Jong-Un threatened US military bases across the Pacific after North Korea’s test of a powerful new missile triggered emergency UN Security Council talks late Wednesday on curbing Pyongyang’s nuclear programme. Kim, who personally monitored Wednesday’s Musudan missile test, applauded a “great event” that significantly bolstered the North’s pre-emptive nuclear attack capability, the official KCNA news ...

  WELLINGTON / AP A New Zealand man was sentenced on Thursday to more than three years in prison for distributing militant videos in the first case of its type in the South Pacific nation. After his sentencing, 26-year-old Imran Patel had to be dragged by security guards from an Auckland courtroom , according to The New Zealand Herald newspaper. ...

  Nicosia / AFP Cyprus finally brought a massive wildfire under control on Thursday after a five-day battle that saw two firefighters killed and five foreign governments send aircraft to help, a minister said. Hundreds of firefighters remain on standby to put out any rekindling flames, Agriculture Minister Nicos Kouyialis told reporters. Firefighting aircraft deployed by Britain, France, Greece and ...

  ARSAL, Lebanon / ap In a remote corner of Lebanon near the border with Syria, Lebanese troops have been quietly making steady progress, fighting against extremists holed up in the rugged mountains. It is a fight less visible than the US-led war against the IS group in Syria, Iraq and Libya. But hardly a day passes without army artillery ...

  Beirut, Lebanon / AFP Air strikes on the IS group’s de facto Syrian capital Raqa killed 25 civilians, six of them children, a monitoring group said on Wednesday. “Dozens more were wounded, some of them critically,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, adding it was not immediately able to determine who carried out the Tuesday raids. The Syrian ...

  United Nations / AFP The UN Security Council on Tuesday urged the international community to live up to its “moral and political obligation” to aid Iraqi civilians who fled an operation against the IS group in Fallujah. Council members “welcomed the successful counteroffensive” launched by Iraqi forces and coalition partners on May 22-23 to retake Fallujah, a key extremist ...

  Seoul, South Korea / AFP Nuclear-armed North Korea conducted two back-to-back tests of a powerful new medium-range missile on Wednesday, with both achieving a significant increase in flight distance over previous failed launches, South Korea’s Defence Ministry said. Both tests were believed to be of a much-hyped, intermediate-range Musudan missile — theoretically capable of reaching US bases as far away ...

  New Delhi / AFP India successfully launched on Wednesday a rocket carrying a record 20 satellites as its famously frugal space agency looks to grab a larger slice of the lucrative commercial space market. The rocket blasted off from the southern spaceport of Sriharikota carrying satellites from the US, Germany, Canada and Indonesia, the most in a single Indian mission. ...