Politics

  Mumbai / AFP A massive fire that erupted at one of India’s largest military ammunition depots Tuesday killed at least 16 soldiers and firefighters, reigniting safety concerns about military equipment and installations. The blaze broke out in the early hours at the high-security facility which stores bombs, grenades and other ordnance outside the central city of Pulgaon. Flames lit ...

  Brasília / AFP The government of Brazil’s acting president Michel Temer took a fresh hit as the anti-corruption minister resigned after a recording revealed him criticizing a probe into graft at state oil giant Petrobras, officials said. Fabiano Silveira was the second minister to exit in the span of a week from Temer’s government, which has only been in ...

  Sydney / AFP More than 45 million men, women and children globally are trapped in modern slavery, far more than previously thought, with two-thirds in the Asia-Pacific, a study showed on Tuesday. The details were revealed in the 2016 Global Slavery Index, a research report by the Walk Free Foundation, an initiative set up by Australian billionaire mining magnate and ...

  Seoul / AFP North Korea apparently failed with an attempted missile launch on Tuesday, the latest in a series of setbacks for a ballistic weapons programme that aspires to threaten the US mainland. South Korea’s defence ministry detected the dawn launch effort, which Japan condemned as an unacceptable and “provocative” act. The ministry declined to speculate on the missile ...

  Beirut/ AFP Syria’s opposition chief negotiator in UN-brokered peace talks has announced his resignation in what analysts said amounted to a warning the Geneva-based process was on its “last legs”. Mohammed Alloush, a member of the Saudi-backed rebel group Jaish al-Islam (Army of Islam), said on Twitter late Sunday he was resigning over the talks’ failure to produce any ...

  Sydney / AFP An Australian man has been killed in Syria fighting IS extremists, the country’s third national thought to have died alongside Kurdish forces, reports said on Monday. Former Australian soldier Jamie Bright, in his 40s, was named on social media as having been “martyred” in recent days. The Kurdish People’s Protection Unit said on its Facebook page ...

Antalya / AFP Turkey is offering to “join forces” with Washington for a special operation inside Syria on condition it doesn’t include a Syrian Kurdish militia blacklisted by Ankara but seen as an ally by the US, the foreign minister said. Washington’s support of Kurdish fighters in Syria in the fight against IS extremists has angered Ankara, especially after AFP ...

  Baghdad / AP Iraqi forces thrust into the city of Fallujah from three directions on Monday marking a new and perilous urban phase in the week-old operation to retake the extremist bastion. Led by the elite counter-terrorism service (CTS), Iraq’s best trained and most seasoned fighting unit, the forces pushed in before dawn, commanders said. “Iraqi forces entered Fallujah ...

  BAGHDAD / AP A wave of bombings claimed by the IS group targeted commercial areas in and around Baghdad on Monday, killing at least 24 people. The bombings by IS, which has been behind several recent deadly attacks in Baghdad and beyond, are seen as an attempt by the militants to distract the security forces’ attention away from the ...

  Antalya / AFP Ankara will abandon a deal with the European Union to reduce migrant flows if its citizens are not granted visa-free travel to most of the bloc, Turkey’s foreign minister has warned. With the two sides locked in an increasingly-bitter standoff, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said it was “impossible” for Ankara to change anti-terror laws that ...