Politics

  Ghazni / AFP At least 73 people were killed on Sunday when two buses and an oil tanker burst into flames in a head-on collision in eastern Afghanistan, health officials said, in one of the worst road accidents in the war-battered nation. Many of the dead, including women and children, were burned beyond recognition and dozens of others were ...

  CAIRO / AP Militants opened fire on a microbus filled with plainclothes police in a Cairo suburb early Sunday, killing eight of them, including an officer, in an attack claimed by a local IS affiliate. The attack was the deadliest in the heavily policed capital since November, when gunmen attacked a security checkpoint, killing four policemen. That attack was ...

  Madrid / AFP Three Spanish freelance journalists who were kidnapped in Syria nearly 10 months ago returned to Spain on Sunday to be reunited with their families. The trio, all experienced conflict zone reporters, arrived at the Torrejon air base near Madrid on a flight from Turkey, the government said in a statement. Antonio Pampliega, Jose Manuel Lopez and ...

  Beirut / AFP Lebanese headed to the polls for the first time in six years on Sunday for municipal elections including in Beirut, where a new grassroots campaign is taking on entrenched parties. It is the first election of any kind in Lebanon since the last municipal polls in 2010, in a country that has not had a president ...

  BEIJING / AP Rescuers on Sunday searched for 33 construction workers missing in a landslide at the site of a hydropower project following days of heavy rain in southern China. Eight other workers were pulled out alive, officials and state-run media reported. Rocks and mud with a volume of 100,000 cubic meters (3.5 million cubic feet) buried an office ...

  Shimla / AFP An overcrowded minibus fell into a deep gorge in India’s northern Himalayan region after a portion of the road caved in, killing 14 people, an official said on Sunday. Another 41 people were injured when the bus heading towards the popular tourist destination of Kinnaur rolled into the steep valley in Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh ...

  Kabul / AFP Six Afghan Taliban inmates on death row were hanged on Sunday, government sources said, in the first set of executions endorsed by President Ashraf Ghani since he came to power in 2014. Ghani last month vowed a new hardline stance against the Taliban after an insurgent attack killed 64 people in Kabul, in what appeared to ...

  Jerusalem / AFP Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday criticised the deputy head of Israel’s armed forces for remarks appearing to compare contemporary Israeli society to Nazi Germany. “The comparison drawn in the words of the deputy chief of staff regarding events which characterised Nazi Germany 80 years ago is outrageous,” said Netanyahu. “They do injustice to Israeli society ...

  Beersheba / AFP Israeli Arab Muslim leader Raed Salah started a nine-month prison sentence on Sunday for fomenting riots at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque. Salah was accompanied by about 100 well-wishers, including Israeli Arab lawmakers, as he arrived at the prison in the city of Beersheba in southern Israel’s Negev desert, an AFP journalist said. At a farewell rally earlier ...

  Jakarta / AFP A group of Indonesian “cyber warriors” sit glued to screens, as they send out messages promoting a moderate form of Islam in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country. Armed with laptops and smartphones, some 500 members of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU)— one of the world’s biggest Muslim organisations—are seeking to counter the Islamic State group’s extremist ...