Politics

  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 ...

  BEIRUT / AP A wave of late night airstrikes pummeled the northwestern Syrian city of Idlib, killing at least 23 people, wounding dozens and trapping several under the rubble of their homes, opposition activists said on Tuesday. At least seven children were among those killed in the strikes, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group ...

  Kiev / AFP Ukraine’s defiant pilot Nadiya Savchenko sang the national anthem on Tuesday in a strident first appearance in parliament since her release in a prisoner swap with Russia last week. The 35-year-old member of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s populist party strode to the podium draped in the flag of Ukraine and holding one of Crimea at ...

  LUXEMBOURG / AP A senior adviser to the European Court of Justice says European Union economic sanctions imposed on Russian companies are valid in the main under the EU’s common security and defense policy. Advocate General Melchior Wathelet issued the opinion on Tuesday in response to a challenge the Russian oil and gas producer Rosneft filed before a British ...

  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 ...