Politics

  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 ...

  BEIRUT / AP Syrian opposition fighters will be allowed to leave the last rebel-held neighborhood in the city of Homs under a Russia-backed deal signed on Monday, a Syrian official and an activist said. According to Talal Barrazi, the governor of Homs province where the city of Homs is the capital, the deal is to be carried out within ...

  JERUSALEM / AP Israel’s ministry of strategic affairs said on Monday it denied a prominent British boycott activist’s entry into the country. Revital Yakin-Karkovsky, a senior ministry official, said Hugh Lanning of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign was prohibited on Sunday from entering Israel because his organization had close ties to the Hamas militant group and was one of the ...

  MOGADISHU / AP A suicide car bomber detonated near a hotel in Somalia’s capital Monday morning, killing at least six people and injuring four others, police said. The bomber detonated near the Weheliye hotel on the busy Maka Almukarramah road, Capt. Mohamed Hussein said. Ambulances rushed to the scene. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast. ...

  WASHINGTON / AP Top Senate Democrats are warning Republicans controlling Congress against adding billions of dollars for President Donald Trump’s US-Mexico border wall to an upcoming $1 trillion-plus catchall spending package. The warning from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and others came in a Monday letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The letter also warns against adding ...

  WASHINGTON / AP Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway says she doesn’t have any evidence to support President Donald Trump’s claim that Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower phone lines during the election. Instead, Conway is pointing to recent revelations about other government surveillance to suggest it was possible Obama used a different technique. Her response was unlikely to tamp ...

  LONDON / AP Scotland’s leader will seek authority to hold a new independence referendum in the next two years because Britain is dragging Scotland out of the European Union against its will, she said on Monday. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said that she would move quickly to give voters a new chance to leave the United Kingdom because Scotland ...

  WASHINGTON / AP Less than twenty-four hours after Donald Trump had won the White House, House Speaker Paul Ryan triumphantly proclaimed the start of a new era of Republican leadership that would “hit the ground running.” Six weeks into Trump’s administration, Republicans are running — just in different directions. As congressional leaders move forward with efforts to undo former ...

  AMMAN / AP A Jordanian soldier who killed seven Israeli schoolgirls in a 1997 shooting rampage was released on Sunday, after serving 20 years in prison. Ahmed Daqamseh opened fire on the eighth graders while they were on a class trip to the scenic “Island of Peace” border post, killing seven girls and wounding seven others. A Jordanian court ...