Politics

  Sydney / AFP Replicas of a large piece of debris from missing Malaysia Airlines jet MH370 will be set adrift and tracked by satellite in the hope of helping find the plane’s crash site, Australian officials said on Wednesday. Canberra is leading the search for the aircraft which vanished in March 2014 with 239 people onboard and is currently ...

  Kathmandu / AFP Nepal’s new prime minister will visit India next month on his first foreign visit, seeking to repair the strained relationship between the neighbours, an official said on Wednesday. Nepal’s relationship with India—which is often accused of acting as a “big brother” to its smaller impoverished neighbor—soured after a months-long border blockade last year by ethnic minority ...

  Kiev / AFP Ukraine marks the 25th anniversary of its freedom from Kremlin rule Wednesday with moves to sweep away its totalitarian past and embrace a European future while grappling with its tense relations with Russia. A nation that once served as a geopolitical bridge between Moscow and the West is now the source of a deep and dangerous ...

  Seoul / AFP North Korea has been laying fresh landmines on its side of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) with South Korea, the UN Command said on Tuesday, following a spate of high-profile defections. Military personnel were seen planting mines on the North’s side of a river crossing known as the Bridge of No Return—close to the border truce village of ...

  Bankok / AFP The trial of two Chinese Uighurs accused of killing 20 people when they allegedly bombed a Bangkok shrine was postponed on Tuesday because the men still do not have a translator. The delay is the latest snag in a cryptic case that has so far shed little light on the horrific attack in Thailand’s capital last year ...

  Tokyo / AFP Foreign ministers from Japan, China and South Korea kicked off a two-day meeting in Tokyo on Tuesday with their countries at odds over territorial disputes, a US missile defence system and perennial regional problem North Korea. Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida, China’s Wang Yi and South Korea’s Yun Byung-Se met for dinner at a Tokyo hotel ...

  Denpasar / AFP Indonesian police said on Tuesday that a Briton flew into a rage and repeatedly hit a Bali police officer over the head with a beer bottle after accusing him of being a “fake cop”. Traffic policeman Wayan Sudarsa was found dead last week with wounds to his head and neck on a popular beach in the south ...

  Phnom Penh / AFP Cambodia’s UN-backed court on Tuesday heard harrowing new details about the Khmer Rouge’s forced marriages, one of the brutal regime’s less reported atrocities. The Khmer Rouge oversaw the deaths of up to two million Cambodians from 1975-1979—nearly one-quarter of the population—in their quest for a Marxist agrarian utopia. But the testimony is the first time the ...

  Ankara / AFP Turkey on Tuesday pounded IS extremists in Syria with new artillery strikes as expectations grew of a major Ankara-backed offensive against the extremists after a deadly suicide bombing on its soil. With tensions flaring on the Turkey-Syria border following the bombing in the nearby city of Gaziantep that left 54 people dead, Turkish howitzers hit extremist and ...

  Lille / AFP One Sudanese migrant was killed and another injured in clashes with Afghan migrants outside the French port of Calais, authorities said on Tuesday. The two migrants were among a group of people from the “Jungle” camp who tried to access a motorway to smuggle onto trucks crossing the Channel to Britain on Monday night, local police ...