Politics

Beirut / AFP Aid groups were unable to deliver much-needed food packages to four besieged towns in war-torn Syria on Monday, the International Committee of the Red Cross told AFP, citing security problems. Since an unprecedented ceasefire came into force on February 27, aid deliveries have reached thousands of people in areas blockaded by regime and opposition forces. Under an ...

Brussels / AFP The European Union must stand up to Russia to defend core political and security interests even while trying to find common cause on issues such as the Syrian conflict, the bloc’s foreign ministers said on Monday. The ministers gathered in Brussels for a regular monthly meeting which for the first time in a year will review relations ...

Geneva / AFP Agreeing on political transition in Syria is the “mother of all issues,” the UN envoy for the war-ravaged country said on Monday, as a new round of peace talks was set to begin. Speaking to reporters in Geneva, Staffan de Mistura stressed the importance of getting the talks quickly focused on “the real issues,” adding: “What is ...

Beirut / AFP The United States and Russia are pulling the strings in Syria’s five-year war, experts say, pressuring opposing sides and leveraging rival regional powers to reach a settlement. As the conflict enters its sixth year, the embattled regime and fractured opposition are in Geneva for indirect peace talks hosted by United Nations peace envoy Staffan de Mistura. But ...

Bloomberg “Republicans in Ohio and Florida head to the polls this week to help decide who will become their party’s nominee, and whether the GOP will endure in any recognizable form in the months and years that follow. To hear those who have devoted their lives to building the party tell it, if front-runner Donald Trump prevails on Tuesday in ...

Baikonur / AFP Two robotic spacecraft on Monday began a seven-month journey to Mars as part of a European-Russian unmanned space mission to sniff out leads to life on the Red Planet. Russia’s Proton rocket carrying the spacecraft launched into an overcast sky at the Russian-operated Baikonur cosmodrome in the Kazakh steppe at 0931 GMT according to plan, the Russian ...

Tokyo / AFP The Japanese government will team up with experts in the United States and France to develop brand new technologies to collect melted fuel from crippled reactors at Fukushima, an official said on Monday. Removal of the melted rods at the nuclear plant, which was wrecked by a tsunami five years ago, is one of the biggest challenges ...

Bloomberg If you think Donald Trump has some outrageous ideas, wait until you meet Germany’s AfD party. The Alternative for Germany, to give the party its full name, has shaken up the country’s consensus-driven politics with headline-grabbing policies that include telling Germans to have more children to avoid the need for immigration. Frauke Petry, the AfD’s co-leader, has said that ...

Bloomberg More than one million people marched through cities across Brazil to protest political corruption, a weak economy, and to call for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, in a showing that could accelerate efforts to remove her from office. The protest in Sao Paulo was the largest ever recorded by polling firm Datafolha, surpassing even the 1984 rallies to ...

Geneva / AFP Syria’s warring sides prepared on Sunday for a new round of peace talks after locking horns over the fate of President Bashar Al Assad, with the regime insisting his ouster was a “red line” while the opposition vowed to see him go—dead or alive. The UN-brokered indirect negotiations are due to begin in Geneva on Monday, the ...