Astana / AFP Energy-rich Kazakhstan’s ruling party has secured a landslide win in parliamentary polls that never threatened to trouble autocrat President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s long reign, official results confirmed Monday. According to the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) Nazarbayev’s Nur Otan party won 82 percent of votes in Sunday’s election and will share parliament with the pro-government People’s Communist Party and ...

Brasília / AFP Brazil’s struggling leftist government is fighting on two fronts as impeachment proceedings threaten President Dilma Rousseff and legal battles harry her predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Rousseff’s presidency appears to be in peril as she fights impeachment, protests, recession and scandal, and her decision to call Lula to the rescue backfired last week when a judge ...

Tortosa / AFP Spanish investigators on Monday sought to establish the cause of a weekend coach crash that killed 13 female students from six countries, most of them Italians, as they were returning from a festival. The vehicle was carrying students from about 20 countries, many of them on the European Erasmus exchange programme in Barcelona, the seaside capital of ...