Politics

  Nairobi / AFP Eritrea on Monday accused arch-rival Ethiopia of attacking its heavily militarised border, but officials in Addis Ababa said they had no knowledge of the reported fighting. Ethiopia on Sunday “unleashed an attack against Eritrea on the Tsorona Central Front,” Eritrea’s ministry of information said in a statement. Ethiopian government spokesman Getachew Redda said there were “no ...

  Tehran / AFP Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards have killed five Kurdish rebels near the country’s northwestern border with Iraq, an official statement said on Monday. “A team of five from the PJAK terrorist splinter group… has been identified and destroyed in the Sardasht region” on the Iraqi border, a Guards statement said on its official website. It said the ...

  Pretoria / AFP Oscar Pistorius is suffering from depression, a South African court heard on Monday, as the Paralympic athlete faced a return to jail for murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp three years ago. The double-amputee killed Steenkamp, a model and law graduate, in the early hours of Valentine’s Day in 2013, saying he mistook her for an intruder ...

  Jerusalem / AFP Israel has reopened Palestinian crossing points from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip following a three-day closure put in place after last week’s deadly Tel Aviv shooting, the army said on Monday. Crossings were reopened overnight as planned, an army spokeswoman said, though “security checks are ongoing” in Yatta, the West Bank village where the ...

  Manila / AFP Filipino protesters said on Monday that Chinese coastguard ships blocked and sprayed them with water as they sailed to a disputed South China Sea shoal to plant a Philippine flag for independence day. China claims most of the strategic and resources-rich sea and has controlled Scarborough Shoal, just 230 kilometres (145 miles) off the main Philippine ...

  Bloomberg The FBI let the Orlando mass-shooting suspect slip through its grasp despite interviewing him twice since 2013 due to a lack of evidence to hold him, a troubling fact that will pressure officials struggling to detect lone terrorists without eroding basic civil liberties. The FBI is investigating Sunday’s killing spree at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, as an ...

  Washington / AFP The head of a prominent US Muslim advocacy group strongly condemned the nightclub massacre in Florida, calling members of the IS group an “aberration” amid allegations the gunman was inspired by the extremists. Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, also called for unity and urged politicians not to “exploit” the slaughter in ...

  Bloomberg White House hopeful Donald Trump appeared bent on exploiting massacre in Orlando to boost the argument that he can be trusted to tackle terrorism over rival Hillary Clinton. With many victims of the carnage yet to be identified, and police still probing the suspected extremist’s ties of the slain gunman, Trump wasted no time in harnessing the assault ...

  Bloomberg Prime Minister David Cameron turned to his traditional rivals in the opposition Labour Party to win over undecided voters with just 10 days to stop Britain from voting to leave the European Union. Gordon Brown, who was ousted by Cameron in 2010, was to make the case to stay in the 28-nation bloc, and other media interventions have ...

  Puebla / AFP Two people were killed and at least six others seriously wounded in Mexico when armed men opened fire on players and spectators at an amateur baseball game, authorities said. The attorney general’s office in the state of Puebla said the attack occurred on Sunday in the town of Acatzingo, 170 kilometers (105 miles) from Mexico City. ...