Politics

  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 ...

  London / Bloomberg Sadiq Khan of Britain’s main opposition Labour Party took over as London’s first Muslim mayor on Saturday, facing down critics who used his religion against him by vowing to “represent every single community” in the capital. Khan’s election is a challenge to the rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric by right-wing politicians including French National Front leader Marine ...

  Srinagar / AFP Hundreds of villagers clashed with police in restive Indian-administered Kashmir on Saturday after three armed militants were killed in an early morning gunbattle with government forces, the army and witnesses said. Soldiers and special operations officers cordoned off Panzgam village, about 35 kilometres (22 miles) south of the main city of Srinagar, before dawn after receiving a ...

  BEIJING / AP China’s navy is searching for 17 sailors after their fishing boat collided with another vessel. The official China News Service said on Saturday that two other sailors have been rescued by another fishing boat following the pre-dawn crash. Three navy ships operating in the East China Sea off the coast of Zhejiang province were diverted to ...

  Beijing / AFP Sanctions that have pinched North Korea’s health care system should be eased, a group of Nobel laureates said on Saturday, after a rare visit to the nuclear armed state that coincided with its ruling party congress. Embargoes on the flow of goods into the isolated country have squeezed the quality of medical care and research, they ...

  WASHINGTON / AP Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s derision of his political opponents draws hearty boos of support at rallies. That he castigates as many Republicans as Democrats is another sign of the fractures within the GOP. Trump shrugs off the high-profile Republicans who have stated they aren’t voting for him, among them former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush ...

  PARIS / AP The most unpopular president in France’s modern history, Francois Hollande, is preparing the ground for a potential re-election bid. His leftist base is in open revolt, protesting youth are clashing with police nearly every night, and France is in a six-month state of emergency — yet he is on a new mission to convince the French ...