Vientiane / AFP With months left in office, US President Barack Obama said on Thursday he was not ready to give up on an eight-year-old promise to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Obama urgently wants to shutter the facility before he leaves the White House at the start of next year but his efforts have been continually thwarted by …

  Paris / AFP Salah Abdeslam, thought to be the sole surviving member of the extremist team that attacked Paris in November 2015, on Thursday refused to answer questions from French anti-terror judges for a third time. “He exercised his right to silence,” Frank Berton told reporters after his 26-year-old client appeared at Paris’s main courthouse. The lawyer said he was …

  Berlin / AFP Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Bavarian allies have called for tougher immigration rules in Germany that favour migrants from Europe’s “Christian-occidental cultural sphere”, according to a party paper seen by AFP on Thursday. The CSU party also has demanded a ban on the Muslim full-face and partial-face veils, an end to dual citizenship, iron-clad rules that newcomers socially …