Politics

  BAGHDAD / AP Militants on Monday unleashed a series of attacks in Shiite-majority neighborhoods in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, killing at least 15 civilians, officials said. The deadliest attack took place in the southwestern neighborhood of Al Amil when a bomber set off his explosives-laden vest in a busy outdoor market, killing seven shoppers and wounding up to 25 ...

  Idlib / AFP The frail cries of four-month-old Wahida made the rescue worker who carried her out of the rubble in Syria’s Idlib break down in sobs. The full story is one of tragedy. “I was in the shop when the airplane began carrying out air strikes,” recalls 32-year-old father Yehya Maatouq almost matter-of-factly. He was speaking to AFP on ...

  Kunduz / AFP Explosions echoed across Kunduz as Afghan commandos began to push back a Taliban assault on Monday, forcing residents to shelter in their homes one year after militants briefly seized the strategic provincial capital. Government helicopters were targeting gunmen from the air in a bid to repel the attack, a day before President Ashraf Ghani is due ...

  Moscow / AFP Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered a halt to an agreement with the United States on plutonium disposal, citing Washington’s “unfriendly actions”. The deal, signed in 2000, was meant to allow both nuclear powers to dispose of weapons-grade plutonium from their defence programmes, a move seen as a key step in the disarmament process. The two ...

  Bogota / AFP Colombian voters rejected a peace deal with communist FARC rebels, near-complete referendum results indicated, unexpectedly blasting away what the government hoped would be a historic end to the 52-year conflict. Reversing the trend of earlier opinion polls, voters appeared to have narrowly defied the government’s pleas for a new era of peace in the South American country. ...

  Stockholm / AFP Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan won the Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday for his pioneering work on autophagy — a process whereby cells “eat themselves” — which when disrupted can cause Parkinson’s and diabetes. A fundamental process in cell physiology, autophagy is essential for the orderly recycling of damaged cell parts and understanding it better has major implications ...

  Srebrenica/ AFP The Bosnian town of Srebrenica, known for the wartime massacre of 8,000 Muslims by Serb forces, looked set to get its first Serb mayor in 17 years after elections on Sunday. A Muslim war criminal was also poised to become mayor in the northwestern town of Velika Kladusa following the poll, which came at a time of renewed ...

  Aleppo / AFP Syrian regime forces advanced on Sunday in Aleppo after Russia unleashed dozens of strikes, even as condemnation kept pouring in over the bombing of the main hospital in the city’s rebel-held east. The devastating five-year war in Syria has ravaged second city Aleppo, once the country’s economic hub but now torn apart between government troops and ...

  Geneva / AFP Civilians under bombardment in Syria’s rebel-held east Aleppo are facing “a level of savagery that no human should have to endure,” the UN aid chief said on Sunday. Stephen O’Brien, who heads the United Nations humanitarian office (OCHA), issued a fresh plea to ease the suffering of some 250,000 people besieged by a Russian-backed Syrian government ...

  Istanbul / AFP Turkish police on Sunday detained a brother of the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen who is accused of masterminding the failed July coup aimed at ousting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Kutbettin Gulen was detained by police acting on a tip-off at the home of a relative in the Gaziemir district of the western Izmir province, the state-run ...