Politics

STOCKHOLM / AP A 20-year-old Swedish national has been charged with preparing to a make a suicide bomb, a prosecutor said on Thursday. Prosecutor EwamariHaggkvist says the suspect, who denies the charges, “could have seriously hurt Sweden.” “He told relatives he had sympathies for (the Islamic State group) and would blow himself up for them in Sweden,” Haggkvist told The ...

BAGHDAD / AP Iraq’s elite counterterrorism forces say they have entered the center of a strategically important western Islamic State-held town. Government forces reached the center of Hit on Wednesday. The operation to retake the small Euphrates river town — initially launched last month — was stalled by politics, heavy IS resistance and tens of thousands of trapped civilians. Iraqi ...

Brussels / AFP Gone are the usual snap-happy crowds on Brussels’ famed Grand Place, visits to the Atomium monument have plummeted and hotel rooms are empty. Two weeks after the Belgian capital was hit by terror attacks, the country’s tourist industry is in despair. As Belgium struggles to move on from the March 22 IS suicide bombings that struck Brussels ...

Hanoi / AFP Vietnam’s parliament approved Nguyen XuanPhuc as the communist country’s new prime minister on Thursday, handing him a five-year term and a range of tough challenges from domestic economic reforms to a simmering maritime dispute with China. Phuc, a former deputy prime minister, was the only candidate nominated for the position by party officials earlier this year and ...

Bethpage / AFP Donald Trump attacked his insurgent Republican rival Ted Cruz and ignored his crushing defeat in Wisconsin, electrifying thousands of passionate supporters at a home state rally in New York. “It’s great to be home,” the 67-year-old Manhattan tycoon told a fist-pumping, cheering crowd at Grumman Studios in the Long Island town of Bethpage, where Apollo Lunar Module ...

Washington / AFP NATO’s secretary general, responding to Donald Trump’s criticism of the alliance, recalled how it stood behind America after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. The first and only time NATO invoked “collective defense goals” was after the suicide plane bombings against New York and Washington, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said in a speech in Washington. “Europeans stepped ...

Brussels / AFP Extraditing Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam from Belgium to France is likely to take several weeks, as investigators question him about a shootout with police in Brussels last month, his lawyer said on Thursday. “He will be handed over to France in several weeks. He must first be heard in another case,” lawyer Sven Mary told reporters, ...

Copenhagen / AFP Copenhagen police said on Thursday they had detained four people on suspicion of joining the IS group in Syria and seized weapons and ammunition in a search linked to the arrests. All four were suspected of breaking Denmark’s terrorism law while in Syria, and were arrested in the Copenhagen area, police said in a statement without giving ...

Dublin / AFP Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny held talks on Thursday with opposition leader Micheal Martin to end the impasse over a new government following inconclusive elections in February. After an initial meeting on Wednesday, Kenny’s Fine Gael party said in a statement it had offered a “full and equal partnership” in a future administration to Martin’s Fianna Fail—its ...

Skopje / AFP Macedonia’s main opposition party said it will boycott a “sham” election in June, as parliament dissolved ahead of the vote which is supposed to end a political crisis. The June 5 election is part of a European Union-backed deal reached last year between the government and the opposition to end months of turmoil. But Zoran Zaev, leader ...