Politics

Donetsk / AFP A court in southern Russia on Monday found Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko guilty of murder over the killing of two Russian journalists in war-torn east Ukraine, at a trial condemned by Kiev and the West as a political sham. Savchenko “committed the premeditated murder as part of a group of people from the motives of hatred and ...

Astana / AFP Energy-rich Kazakhstan’s ruling party has secured a landslide win in parliamentary polls that never threatened to trouble autocrat President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s long reign, official results confirmed Monday. According to the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) Nazarbayev’s Nur Otan party won 82 percent of votes in Sunday’s election and will share parliament with the pro-government People’s Communist Party and ...

Brasília / AFP Brazil’s struggling leftist government is fighting on two fronts as impeachment proceedings threaten President Dilma Rousseff and legal battles harry her predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Rousseff’s presidency appears to be in peril as she fights impeachment, protests, recession and scandal, and her decision to call Lula to the rescue backfired last week when a judge ...

Tortosa / AFP Spanish investigators on Monday sought to establish the cause of a weekend coach crash that killed 13 female students from six countries, most of them Italians, as they were returning from a festival. The vehicle was carrying students from about 20 countries, many of them on the European Erasmus exchange programme in Barcelona, the seaside capital of ...

BAGHDAD / AP It was a tense confrontation between two forces supposed to be on the same side in Iraq. First, heavily armed police, led by the interior minister, waded into a Shiite militia base south of Baghdad and arrested its deputy commander, accused of organizing attacks on Sunni mosques. They loaded the man, Ali Reda, into an armored SUV. ...

Cairo / AFP The Arab League on Monday rejected Kurdish-led moves for a federal system of government in Syria, charging that they would lead to the break-up of the war-torn country. League deputy secretary general Ahmed Ben Helli said the pan-Arab bloc would not recognise last week’s unilateral proclamation by the Kurds and their Arab and Assyrian Christian allies. “The ...

ATHENS / AP Monitors from Turkey have arrived on the Greek islands of Lesbos and Chios to help supervise an agreement aimed limiting the number of refugees flowing into the European Union via smugglers’ boats. The officers arrived on Monday and were to stay for at least one week, as Greek authorities scrambled to implement the landmark deal reached last ...

Athens / WAM A total of 1,662 migrants have landed on Greek islands near Turkey since a landmark EU-Turkish deal on curbing the influx took effect on Sunday, a Greek coordination panel said Monday. Half of the migrants—830—arrived on Chios and 698 others on Lesbos, two islands in the northeast Aegean which lie close to Turkey, according to the SOMP ...

Geneva / AFP The UN expert on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories voiced scathing criticism of Israel on Monday, as he stepped down over what he said was a lack of access to areas he was meant to monitor. Makarim Wibisono, who took on the role of Special Rapporteur on the rights situation in the Palestinian territories in ...

Seoul / AFP North Korea on Monday fired five short-range missiles into the sea off its east coast—the latest in a series of launches ordered by leader Kim Jong-un amid rising military tensions. They came just days after the North test-fired two medium-range missiles in what the UN Security Council described as an “unacceptable” violation of UN resolutions. Tensions have ...