Politics

  Baghdad / AFP The IS group “executed” five Iraqis, including members of the security forces, during ongoing fighting in the western town of Rutba, army officers said on Monday. Extremist fighters launched an attack on Rutba, a remote but strategic town near the Jordanian border in Anbar province, early on Sunday. They briefly seized the mayor’s office before being ...

  Baghdad / AFP Iraq’s joint operations command on Monday denied Turkey was participating in military operations to retake the northern city of Mosul from the IS group. “The spokesman of the Joint Operations Command denies Turkish participation of any kind in operations for the liberation of Nineveh,” a statement said, referring to the Iraqi province of which Mosul is ...

  Jérémie / AFP Rickety structures made of sheet metal and scrap wood are clustered along the road to the Haitian city of Jeremie, which still hasn’t seen any aid nearly three weeks after Hurricane Matthew. In a scene that is eerily similar to the devastation in Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake, when hundreds of thousands of survivors had to ...

  Moscow / AFP Russia, blaming failures by the US-led coalition and meagre hopes for diplomacy, on Monday ruled out early moves to renew its ceasefire in Aleppo after a brief truce ended at the weekend. “The question of renewing the humanitarian pause is not relevant now,” deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov told Interfax news agency, in Moscow’s first official ...

  Aleppo / AFP Migrants lugging meagre belongings boarded buses on Monday taking them away from Calais’ “Jungle” under a French plan to raze the notorious camp and symbol of Europe’s refugee crisis. “Bye bye, Jungle!” a group of migrants shouted as they hauled luggage through the muddy lanes of the shantytown where thousands from Africa and the Middle East had ...

  Ankara / AFP A group of former US diplomats held closed door talks at the weekend with senior Pyongyang officials, even as international efforts gather pace to further isolate North Korea, diplomatically and economically. The two-day meeting in Kuala Lumpur, which was confirmed by the South Korean and US governments, was the latest in a series of unofficial talks commonly ...

  Valletta / AFP A small passenger aircraft crashed on takeoff at Malta’s international airport on Monday, killing all five people onboard, officials said. In a statement, the airport said the aircraft, a Fairchild Metroliner turboprop, was involved in an accident “upon takeoff.” “We can confirm that the five crew on board are deceased,” it said, adding that the airport ...

  Manila / AFP Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s fiery rhetoric and deadly crime war are becoming a growing concern around the world, the top US envoy for Asia warned on Monday in Manila. US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Russel met with the Philippines’ defence and foreign ministers on Monday, after Duterte last week ...

  Islamabad / AFP Two children and another civilian were killed along with a soldier in firing across the border between India and Pakistan, officials from both sides said on Monday, as tensions soar between the nuclear-armed rivals. Pakistan’s military said an 18-month-old girl and another civilian were killed on its side of the border in “unprovoked firing” by the ...

  New Delhi / AFP Indian police on Monday killed at least 21 rebels in a shoot-out in eastern India, a local officer said, one of the deadliest incidents this year in a long-running Maoist insurgency. Police said they ambushed a meeting of 30 to 40 Maoists in a forest near the border of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh states, triggering a ...