Politics

  Moscow / AFP Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency is reporting that the armed forces chief of staff has criticized Donald Trump for his past harsh words about confronting Iranian boats in the Persian Gulf. The Thursday report quotes Gen. Mohammad Hossein Bagheri as saying, “The person who has recently achieved power, has talked off the top of his head! ...

  Moscow / AFP Russia’s defence ministry on Thursday dismissed as “counterproductive” a request from the United Nations to extend future pauses in fighting to allow aid into rebel-held eastern Aleppo as winter comes. The ministry said it received a request from the head of a UN-backed humanitarian taskforce for Syria, Jan Egeland, to make future breaks in fighting longer to ...

  Istanbul / AFP President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday hailed the founder of modern Turkey Mustafa Kemal Ataturk on the 78th anniversary of his death but added the country’s influence should go well beyond the borders of the state he created. Ataturk, who died on November 10, 1938, founded Turkey as a secular republic in 1923 out of the ...

  BEIJING /AFP A top Chinese police official was elected president of Interpol on Thursday, setting off alarm bells among rights advocates over abuses and a lack of transparency within China’s legal system, as well as the potential misuse of the police organization to attack Beijing’s political opponents. Vice Public Security Minister Meng Hongwei was named as the first Chinese ...

  Moscow/ AFP Russia’s security service said on Thursday it had detained several people in Crimea, accusing them of being saboteurs sent by Kiev to the Moscow-annexed peninsula to attack infrastructure targets. Russia’s FSB security service on Wednesday “detained members of a sabotage-terrorist group from the main intelligence directorate of the Ukrainian defence ministry,” it said in a statement. The ...

  Washington /AFP Protesters burned a giant orange-haired head of Donald Trump in effigy, lit fires in the streets and blocked traffic as rage over the billionaire’s election victory spilled onto the streets of major US cities. From New York to Los Angeles, thousands of people in around 10 cities rallied late Wednesday against the president-elect a day after his ...

  Moscow /AFP Russia on Thursday dismissed reports the Kremlin was “euphoric” about Donald Trump’s election win, saying it was not certain the US president-elect would be any friendlier to Moscow than his predecessor. Deputy Foreign Sergei Ryabkov also confirmed that members of Trump’s inner circle had “kept in contact” with Russian officials during the election campaign, in apparent contradiction ...

  Tokyo / AFP Japan’s lower house of parliament on Thursday passed the contentious Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade deal, a move largely viewed as an empty gesture due to opposition by US president-elect Donald Trump. President Barack Obama championed the 12-nation deal saying it would enable the United States to set the global trade agenda in the face of China’s ...

  Brussels / AFP Donald Trump’s “America first” approach has Europe worried he may cut US commitments to NATO just as it mounts its biggest military build-up since the end of the Cold War to counter a more assertive Russia. Trump caused uproar during the campaign when he suggested Washington would think twice about coming to the aid of an ...

    Vienna /AFP Donald Trump’s stunning victory is a “wake-up call” against the rise of populism ahead of Austria’s presidential election, candidate Alexander Van der Bellen said on Thursday, three weeks before the poll. The independent ecologist is running against Norbert Hofer who is striving to become the EU’s first far-right elected head of state on December 4. Opinion ...