Politics

London / AFP Britain said on Saturday it was sending more troops to Iraq to bolster its mission training up the armed forces taking on the IS extremist group. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said a further 30 troops would be deployed to provide training in logistics and bridge-building, as well as specialist medical staff. The move would take the total ...

France / AFP French police arrested 14 people on Saturday after a far-right group took to the streets for an anti-immigrant rally in the port town of Calais, where thousands of migrants are living in improvised camps. The roughly 80 activists blocked off two bridges close to the city centre and burned tyres, waved banners and set off smoke bombs, ...

Damascus / AFP President Bashar Al Assad’s ouster remains a “red line” for the Syrian government, the war-wracked country’s foreign minister said on Saturday ahead of fragile peace talks in Geneva. Walid Muallem also told a news conference in Damascus that the government delegation to the talks due to start on Monday will wait no more than 24 hours for ...

Seoul/ AP North Korea said on Saturday its military is ready to pre-emptively attack and “liberate” the South if it sees signs that American and South Korean troops involved in annual joint military drills are attempting to invade the North. The declaration from General Staff of the North’s Korean People’s Army on state media is the latest outburst over the ...

Bloomberg The Kremlin is putting “unprecedented” pressure on opposition activists as President Vladimir Putin prepares for his toughest electoral test amid Russia’s longest recession in two decades, according to his former prime minister. “The authorities understand that 2016 will be decisive because the economic and political situation is acute,” Mikhail Kasyanov, who was premier from 2000 to 2004 and is ...

Moscow / AFP Armed men attacked the office of a prominent human rights organisation in the volatile Russian region of Ingushetia, the group said on Thursday, hours after an assault on journalists in the same area sparked international outrage. Footage of the attack posted on Twitter by Dmitry Utukin, a lawyer for the Committee to Prevent Torture, appeared to show ...

Moscow / AFP Ukrainian military pilot Nadiya Savchenko, on trial in Russia over the killing of two journalists, has started drinking water but will continue her week-long hunger strike until the verdict, her lawyer said on Thursday. “Nadezhda halted only a ‘dry’ hunger strike,” lawyer Mark Feigin said. “She will be fasting until the verdict is announced,” he said, using ...

RIKUZENTAKATA / AP The Japanese coast guard resumed underwater searches this week for some of the more than 2,500 people still missing from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated the country’s northeast coast. Six divers entered Hirota Bay in near-freezing temperatures on Thursday at the behest of surviving families in the city of Rikuzentakata. As reconstruction of the disaster-hit ...

Naypyidaw / AFP Aung San Suu Kyi was on Thursday finally ruled out of the running to become Myanmar’s next president, as her party nominated one of her most loyal aides to rule the formerly junta-run nation as her proxy. Suu Kyi has vowed to rule “above” the president, despite being barred from top office by the army-scripted constitution, as ...

Brussels / AFP A proposed EU-Turkey deal to swap Syrian refugees one-for-one will be only “temporary” and a longer-term resettlement arrangement will be necessary, the Netherlands warned on Thursday. European Union interior ministers meeting in Brussels were debating a proposal made by Ankara at a leaders’ summit on Monday for a wide-ranging deal to curb the migration crisis. Under the ...