Politics

  Fort McMurray / AFP Authorities battling a forest fire in Canada looked to Mother Nature for more help on Monday, as cooling temperatures and rain slowed the spread of the blaze that had forced the evacuation of an entire city. There was more good news too, with the amount of land charred less than originally feared and the last ...

  Sydney/ AFP Australia has intercepted three asylum-seeker boats so far this year, including one carrying women and children from Sri Lanka, the country’s immigration minister revealed on Monday. Under Canberra’s hardline measures, asylum-seekers trying to reach Australia by boat are either sent back to where they departed or to remote Pacific island camps, where living conditions have been criticised. ...

  Manila / AFP Security forces fanned out across the Philippines on Sunday on the eve of national polls, following a vicious and deadly election campaign dominated by presidential favourite Rodrigo Duterte’s threats to kill thousands of criminals. Surveys show Duterte, mayor of the southern city of Davao, has a clear lead in Monday’s presidential elections as millions of voters ...

  Kuwait City / AFP The UN special envoy to Yemen held talks on Sunday with the country’s warring parties in a bid to break an impasse, a day after the government pulled out of direct negotiations. Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed held separate morning talks in Kuwait City with delegates, and plenary or committees’ meetings were planned in the afternoon, ...

  Istanbul/ AFP Turkish forces launched a salvo of artillery strikes on northern Syria that killed 55 members of the ISgroup, Turkish news agencies reported on Sunday. Artillery units stationed near the border struck IS group targets near Aleppo on Saturday evening, destroying three missile launchers and three vehicles according to the state-run Anatolia news agency and the Dogan news ...

  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 ...