Politics

  BEIRUT / AP The Russian Defense Ministry says a 48-hour cessation of hostilities has been declared in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo. In past months, Aleppo has been witnessing fierce fighting and bombardment, which has claimed the lives of hundreds of people on both sides of the contested city. Russia says the truce went into effect after midnight ...

  BAGHDAD / AP An aid organization says a two-year-old boy has been killed while fleeing Fallujah with his family amid a government offensive to retake the Iraqi city from the IS group. The Norwegian Refugee Council, which works with refugees and internally displaced Iraqis, cited a relative on Thursday as saying that an IS fighter shot the boy as ...

  Lubumbashi / AFP Several people were killed in clashes between the army and former rebels at a military base in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Wednesday, officials said. Tension had been mounting for days at the military base in Kamina, in the southeast, where more than 2,000 former rebels from various groups are stationed as part of a ...

  Washington / AP CIA Director John Brennan will tell Congress that IS militants are training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks on the West and will rely more on guerrilla-style tactics to compensate for their territorial losses. In remarks prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee, Brennan says IS has been working to build an apparatus to direct and ...

  Tehran / AFP Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards killed 12 Kurdish rebels near the Iraqi border in clashes in which three guards were also killed, an Iranian news agency reported on Thursday. Wednesday evening’s fighting took place in Oshnavieh in the northwest, the Tasnim news agency said, citing a statement from the Guards. Two separate groups of rebels had slipped ...

  Kenya / AFP Eritrea claimed on Thursday to have killed “more than 200” Ethiopians in a battle last week, one of the fiercest border clashes since a 1998-2000 war, while giving no mention of its own casualties. Each side blames the other for starting the two-day battle which broke out on Sunday, saying also that their rival suffered the most ...

  Taiwan / AFP An American man fatally stabbed himself with a pair of scissors in a Taiwan courtroom on Thursday during his sentencing on drug possession charges, raising questions over security failings. The man, named as 41-year-old Tyrel Martin Marhanka, is thought to have hidden the dismantled scissors inside a magazine to get past a metal detecting door, Changhua district ...

  ST. PETERSBURG / AP EU Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker warned Russia on Thursday that the 28-nation bloc will only lift its sanctions if the Kremlin fully implements a Ukraine peace deal. “The next step is clear, full implementation of the agreement—no more, no less,” Juncker told Russia’s main economic forum in Saint Petersburg ahead of a meeting with President ...

  Seoul / AFP South Korea said on Thursday it would resume salvage operations on the Sewol ferry next week, but underlined the enormous challenges posed by raising the vessel that sank in 2014 with massive loss of life. The Sewol was carrying 476 people when it went down off the southwestern island of Jindo, leaving 304—mostly school children—dead in ...

  Seoul / AFP South Korea on Thursday kicked off a live-fire naval exercise near its disputed sea border with North Korea — a move likely to fan already elevated military tensions with Pyongyang. The three-day exercise in the Yellow Sea is aimed at practising responses to simulated incursions by North Korean vessels and aircraft, the South’s navy said in ...