Politics

Washington / AFP President Barack Obama on Saturday urged Americans not to stigmatize Muslims following this week’s deadly attacks in Brussels, saying that doing so is “counterproductive” in the fight against radical Islam. In his weekly media address, Obama said Muslim-Americans are “our most important partners in the nation’s fight against those who would wage violent holy war.” “That’s why ...

Bloomberg The US and Russia set an August deadline for a deal to end Syria’s five-year war as they agreed to try to push forward negotiations between the government and opposition that remain deadlocked over the fate of Russian ally President Bashar Al Assad. “We will accelerate the effort to try and move the political process forward,” US Secretary of ...

Baghdad / AFP United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon arrived in Baghdad on Saturday for talks with senior officials on ways of assisting war-ravaged Iraq, the world body said. Ban, who had last visited the Iraqi capital in March 2015, was travelling with World Bank chief Jim Yong Kim and Islamic Development Bank head Ahmad Al Madani. They went straight ...

Iskandariyah / AFP The village of Al Asriya, south of Baghdad, prepared on Saturday to bury its sons, killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up after a football tournament. The attacker, who himself looks like a teenager on a photo distributed by the IS group that claimed the attack, cut through the crowd when trophies were being presented. “There ...

Palmyra / AFP Syrian troops backed by Russian ground and air forces on Saturday pushed deeper into the IS group stronghold of Palmyra, as Washington considered boosting its anti-extremist fight in neighbouring Iraq. IS, behind a string of attacks in the West including this week’s Brussels bombings, is under growing pressure from Syrian and Iraqi military offensives to retake two ...

Athens / afp Greece has begun evacuating migrants from the main Idomeni camp on the Macedonia border, while the flow of refugees arriving on Aegean islands has slowed to a trickle, officials said on Saturday. Eight buses transported around 400 refugees from Idomeni to nearby refugee camps Friday, local police sources said. A dozen more buses were waiting for migrants ...

Seoul / AFP North Korea released a new propaganda video on Saturday menacingly titled “Last Chance”, showing a submarine-launched nuclear missile laying waste to Washington and concluding with the US flag in flames. The four-minute video romps through the history of US-Korean relations and ends with a digitally manipulated sequence showing a missile surging through clouds, swerving back to the ...

Bloomberg Two days after IS attacks on Brussels, European Union ministers are trying to overcome their divisions and convince citizens that they can stop the wave of terrorism as police hunt for a new suspect possibly involved in the bombings. As Belgian police continue their search for the surviving perpetrators, EU interior ministers meet in Brussels on Thursday afternoon to ...

Bloomberg With a combination of defiance, sadness and anger, people in Brussels tried to return to normality a day after the terrorist massacre that many feared was coming. Machine-gun wielding soldiers guarded subway entrances and searched commuters’ bags and coats before they were allowed to travel as suspects in Tuesday’s bombings remained at large. Many people followed advice to work ...

London / AFP A British man who sparked outrage on Twitter with a message about confronting a Muslim woman over the Brussels attacks has been arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred, London police said on Thursday. “I confronted a Muslim woman yesterday in Croydon. I asked her to explain Brussels. She said ‘Nothing to do with me’. A mealy ...