Politics

  Pukhrāyān / AFP Emergency workers raced on Sunday to find any more survivors in the mangled wreckage of an Indian express train that derailed overnight, killing over 100 people, in the worst disaster to hit the country’s ageing rail network in years. Many were sleeping when 14 carriages leapt from the tracks in a remote area of Uttar Pradesh ...

  Mont Pelerin / AFP Rival Cypriot leaders on Sunday resumed UN-backed talks on ending the island’s 42-year-old division, with hopes of breakthrough high but a key territory dispute unsettled. Greek Cypriot leader Nicos Anastasiades and his Turkish Cypriot counterpart Mustafa Akinci were meeting at a luxury hotel in Mont Pelerin, a town on the shores of Lake Geneva, for ...

  Yangon / AFP Eight civilians were killed on Sunday when fighting broke out in a northern Myanmar town on the border with China, a region long plagued by ethnic rebel insurgencies. The latest clashes are another blow to civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s hopes of forging a nationwide peace agreement after years of war in Myanmar’s many ethnic ...

Aleppo / AFP Intense government air strikes and artillery fire on Saturday shook the rebel-held side of Aleppo city, where multiple hospitals have been hit and schools forced to close. The ferocious bombardment saw rockets, mortar shells and barrel bombs pound residential neighbourhoods, shaking buildings and terrifying residents, an AFP correspondent in east Aleppo said. “People went to sleep to the ...

  Sanaa / AFP A 48-hour ceasefire announced by a Saudi-led coalition fighting Iran-backed rebels in Yemen began on Saturday, after the beleaguered government finally agreed to a US peace push. The government, which has deep reservations about a UN peace blueprint it believes undermines its authority, had previously rejected a ceasefire plan announced by US Secretary of State John Kerry ...

  Seoul / AFP Tens of thousands of protestors rallied in Seoul on Saturday, for the fourth in a weekly series of mass protests urging President Park Geun-hye to resign over a corruption scandal. The demonstrations—among the largest seen in South Korea since the pro-democracy protests of the 1980s—have provided a stark challenge to Park’s authority, but the president has defied ...

  Kuala Lumpur / AFP Former Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad called for a sustained push to topple scandal-plagued Prime Minister Najib Razak as thousands rallied on Saturday to demand the premier’s resignation over the 1MDB corruption saga. Malaysians clad in the yellow of the reformist Bersih campaign flooded Kuala Lumpur for the second time in 15 months to vent anger over ...

  Vienna / AFP Several top Austrian conservatives on Saturday urged voters to shun far-right candidate Norbert Hoffer in next month’s presidential election, highlighting fears he could take the country out of the EU. In a manifesto published on Saturday, senior conservatives including former EU agriculture commissioner Franz Fischler and ex-vice chancellor Wilhelm Molterer, both from the People’s Party (OeVP), ...

  Marrakesh / AFP From across the Atlantic, Donald Trump eclipsed a UN conference which fought valiantly in Marrakesh to preserve momentum on curtailing climate change amid fears the mogul will fragment the global effort and starve it of cash. World leaders, CEOs, negotiators and activists at the two-week meeting, which closed on Friday, were clearly unsettled by the pending ...

  London / AFP Three prominent members of British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party on Saturday urged her to drop the government’s appeal against a court ruling that parliament must approve the process to trigger Brexit. Oliver Letwin, former head of the government’s Brexit preparations, former law officer Edward Garnier and former attorney general Dominic Grieve all warned that ...