Politics

  MOSCOW / AP Ukraine on Wednesday announced a transport blockade of rebel-held areas that is likely to cause serious economic disruption and could threaten a precarious cease-fire in the east of the country. “It will be in place until the occupiers return stolen Ukrainian industry to Ukrainian jurisdiction,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko told the country’s national security council in ...

  MANILA / AP The Philippine vice president is raising alarms about the president’s bloody crackdown on illegal drug use, which she says can’t be solved “with bullets alone,” adding that Filipinos should “defy brazen incursions on their rights.” Vice President Leni Robredo’s videotaped comments, which were issued to the media on Wednesday, are some of her sharpest critiques so ...

  ANKARA/ AP Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday directed fresh verbal attacks at the Netherlands amid their growing diplomatic spat, holding the country responsible for Europe’s worst mass killing since World War II. In a televised speech, Erdogan referred to the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, eastern Bosnia, in 1995, and blamed a ...

  BRUSSELS / AP European Union lawmakers have voted to toughen the bloc’s gun laws and close loopholes exploited by attackers in France. The lawmakers passed the rules on Tuesday in a 491-178 vote, with 28 abstentions. It will force EU countries to beef up laws on certain arms that fire blanks so they can’t be easily converted to use ...

  NEW DELHI / AP Police say assailants have shot and hacked to death a Sufi spiritual leader and his adopted daughter in northern Bangladesh. Local police chief Hamidul Alam said on Tuesday the bodies of Farhad Hossain Chowdhury and his daughter, Rupali Begum, were recovered late Monday from a shrine Chowdhury ran in Dinajpur district. Alam said police are ...

  JERUSALEM / AP Israeli police have raided the east Jerusalem office of a prominent Palestinian cartographer, accusing him of working illegally on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. Khalil Tufagji told The Associated Press that police had entered his office and were confiscating computers and files before the line went dead. His daughter Roleen later said her father had been ...

  UNITED NATIONS / AP The Syrian government committed “slow-motion slaughter” of unknown numbers of Syrians trapped in besieged and hard-to-reach areas by willfully denying them food and health care, according to a new report on Tuesday from a civil rights group. Physicians for Human Rights says in the report that the Syrian government consistently exploited a new UN aid ...

  MANILA / AP Libya’s eastern-based military commander Khalifa Haftar launched an assault by land, air and sea on Tuesday to retake two of the country’s key oil terminals, as fighting threatens to escalate in the holder of Africa’s largest crude reserves. Fighters were deployed near Ras Lanuf and Es Sider, according to three military sources who asked not to ...

  MOGADISHU V/ AP Pirates have hijacked an oil tanker off the coast of Somalia, local officials and an expert said on Tuesday, the first such seizure of a large commercial vessel on the crucial global trade route since 2012. The reported seizure on Monday of the Aris 13 came as a surprise to the global shipping industry as patrols ...

  Bloomberg The Dutch election was upended by a diplomatic standoff with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as a spiral of increasingly hostile rhetoric threatened to overshadow the final stretch of campaigning and influence voting. With less than 48 hours to polling day in the first of Europe’s big elections this year, political analysts said the international incident centered on ...