Politics

Near Fallujah / AFP Iraqi forces struggled on Wednesday to break into Fallujah city centre where hundreds of fighters from the IS group and some 50,000 increasingly desperate civilians were holed up. Fighting also raged hundreds of kilometres further up the Euphrates Valley in Syria, as US-backed Kurdish and Arab fighters opened a new front against the extremists in the ...

  BEIRUT / AP Kurdish-led Syrian fighters have launched a new advance on the northern town of Manbij, a key IS stronghold, with the aid of US-led airstrikes, a spokesman for the fighters and a monitoring group said on Wednesday. The United Nations meanwhile said it was looking into “every possible means” to deliver life-saving aid to besieged Syrians now ...

  Kampala / AFP Ugandan opposition leader Kizza Besigye’s treason trial began on Wednesday with the prosecutor saying he could not be brought to court for security reasons. Besigye, who claimed fraud after coming second in February’s presidential election, was arrested last month for holding a mock swearing-in ceremony and charged with treason. He is being held at the maximum ...

London / AFP A coroner on Wednesday ordered a re-examination of the deaths of 21 people in the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings, one of Britain’s worst ever terror attacks, after claims that police failed to act on two warnings. Coroner Louise Hunt ordered new inquests for the victims killed in the twin attacks, which were widely blamed on the Provisional ...

  Berlin / AFP Germany’s parliament votes Thursday on a resolution that qualifies the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces as “genocide”, despite a strong warning from Turkey. Drawn up by the ruling left-right coalition and the opposition Greens, the resolution entitled “Remembrance and commemoration of the genocide of Armenians and other Christian minorities in 1915 and 1916” also carries ...

  Kuala Lumpur / AFP Half a century after they died, the bodies of 32 Australian soldiers and their dependents, many of whom were killed in the Vietnam War, were returned home from Malaysia on Tuesday. In a sombre ceremony, their flag-draped coffins were loaded onto Australian airforce planes by a military guard of honour as a bugle sounded the ...

  Dhaka / AFP A Bangladesh court on Tuesday sentenced to death six suspected militants for a deadly bank robbery last year, as authorities crack down on local hardliners following a wave of killings. Dhaka judge SM Quddus Zaman convicted and sentenced the men over the robbery, which raised fears at the time of local groups raising funds to finance ...

  CAMP TARIQ / AFP Iraqi forces battling their way into Fallujah repelled a four-hour attack by the IS group in the city’s south on Tuesday, a day after first moving into the southern edges of the militant-held city with the help of US-led coalition airstrikes. Also Tuesday, a leading aid group raised alarm over the unfolding “human catastrophe” in ...

  Kunduz / AP The Taliban killed at least 16 people on Tuesday and kidnapped dozens of others after pulling them off buses in northern Afghanistan, officials said, the latest assault since the insurgents named a new leader last week. The Taliban have so far not commented on the incident in Aliabad district in the volatile province of Kunduz, where ...

  Geneva / AFP More than 2,500 people have died trying to make the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to Europe so far in 2016, the UN said Tuesday, a sharp jump from the same period last year. At the same time some 204,000 migrants and refugees have crossed the Mediterranean to the continent since January, a figure that has ...