Politics

  Tokyo/ AFP A deal to return American military land on Okinawa to the Japanese government was hailed on Wednesday as the biggest such land transfer in more than four decades. But the move is unlikely to reduce frustration on the strategic island that remains crowded with American bases—a legacy of World War II. The agreement covers about 4,000 hectares ...

  Aleppo / AFP Buses began entering the last rebel-held parts of Aleppo on Sunday to resume the evacuation of thousands of increasingly desperate Syrian civilians and rebels trapped in the besieged enclave. As international alarm grew over the plight of the residents including women, children, the sick and wounded, the UN Security Council was to vote on whether to send ...

  Moscow / AFP Russia, Iran and Turkey agreed on Tuesday to guarantee Syria peace talks and backed expanding a ceasefire in the war-torn country, laying down their claim as the main powerbrokers in the conflict. “Iran, Russia and Turkey are ready to assist in preparing the agreement in the making between the Syrian government and the opposition and to become ...

  Moscow / AFP Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday there should be no “concessions to terrorists” at talks with his Turkish counterpart on Syria, a day after Moscow’s ambassador was murdered in Ankara. “This tragedy forces all of us to fight more decisively against terrorism,” Lavrov told Turkey’s Mevlut Cavusoglu as they sat down together in Moscow. “For ...

  Ankara / AFP A team of Russian investigators arrived in Ankara on Tuesday to uncover how an off-duty policeman assassinated Moscow’s ambassador in an art gallery, as Turkey made its first arrests over the murder. Veteran diplomat Andrei Karlov was shot four times in the back by Turkish policeman Mevlut Mert Altintas, 22, in a brazen attack as he opened ...

  Hamam al-Alil / AFP Three men set up a fence and a ribbon of yellow and black crime scene tape around a site south of Iraq’s Mosul, marking a mass grave of extremists’ victims. It is one of dozens of such sites discovered in areas around Iraq that have been recaptured from the IS group, whose rule has been defined ...

  Kabul / AFP An American-Canadian couple held hostage by the Taliban have appeared in a video for the first time with their two children born in captivity, pleading with President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump to secure their release. Canadian Joshua Boyle and his American wife Caitlan Coleman had two sons after being kidnapped in Afghanistan in 2012 during ...

  Berlin / AFP Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday that German authorities believe a deadly rampage by a lorry driver at a Berlin Christmas market was a “terrorist” attack likely committed by an asylum seeker. Police were questioning a suspect, described by media as a 23-year-old man from Pakistan or Afghanistan who had arrived via the so-called Balkan route ...

  Berlin / AFP The bloody carnage at a Berlin Christmas market, with a Pakistani or Afghan asylum-seeker as the chief suspect, immediately emboldened right-wing populist critics of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal refugee policy. Merkel has been under fire over her decision in September last year to let in tens of thousands fleeing war and poverty from mostly war-torn countries ...

  Washington / AFP China has returned a US underwater probe it seized in the South China Sea, the Pentagon confirmed after Beijing’s capture of the craft sparked a dispute between the two powers. The Chinese navy handed over the drone near where it was seized, the Pentagon said, repeating US condemnation of Beijing’s actions in what it says are ...