President-elect Donald Trump has made a point of shaking things up. In domestic policy, this taste for disorder is risky. In foreign policy, it could be calamitous. Trump isn’t yet president, so it’s early to be drawing conclusions. But concern is warranted. Trump rejects the status quo in America’s relations with the rest of the world, and seems to …

  Thousands of dejected and distressed Syrians left the rebel enclave of Aleppo on Monday as the UN Security Council unanimously voted to deploy observers there. The council also announced the plan for a new peace talks in Geneva in February. Families in Aleppo had spent hours waiting in below-freezing temperatures, sheltering from the rain in bombed-out apartment blocks and …

  Nairobi / AFP When Rose Kariuki first felt a lump on her left breast, the spectre of cancer — a disease she had only heard of on television — was the last thing on her mind. “To me, cancer was nowhere near us. It was shocking, I feared death, I feared so many things,” the 46-year-old Kenyan school teacher said. …

  Gulu / AFP Lily Atong’s anxious eyes fix on the sky where a helicopter gunship circles over her thatched hut, so low she must shout to be heard. “When I see gunships like this it brings back the fear of being in the bush,” Atong says. Abducted as a young girl and forced to become a wife to Lord’s Resistance …

  Aleppo / AFP Buses began entering the last rebel-held parts of Aleppo on Sunday to resume the evacuation of thousands of increasingly desperate Syrian civilians and rebels trapped in the besieged enclave. As international alarm grew over the plight of the residents including women, children, the sick and wounded, the UN Security Council was to vote on whether to send …

  Moscow / AFP Russia, Iran and Turkey agreed on Tuesday to guarantee Syria peace talks and backed expanding a ceasefire in the war-torn country, laying down their claim as the main powerbrokers in the conflict. “Iran, Russia and Turkey are ready to assist in preparing the agreement in the making between the Syrian government and the opposition and to become …

  Moscow / AFP Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday there should be no “concessions to terrorists” at talks with his Turkish counterpart on Syria, a day after Moscow’s ambassador was murdered in Ankara. “This tragedy forces all of us to fight more decisively against terrorism,” Lavrov told Turkey’s Mevlut Cavusoglu as they sat down together in Moscow. “For …

  Ankara / AFP A team of Russian investigators arrived in Ankara on Tuesday to uncover how an off-duty policeman assassinated Moscow’s ambassador in an art gallery, as Turkey made its first arrests over the murder. Veteran diplomat Andrei Karlov was shot four times in the back by Turkish policeman Mevlut Mert Altintas, 22, in a brazen attack as he opened …

  Hamam al-Alil / AFP Three men set up a fence and a ribbon of yellow and black crime scene tape around a site south of Iraq’s Mosul, marking a mass grave of extremists’ victims. It is one of dozens of such sites discovered in areas around Iraq that have been recaptured from the IS group, whose rule has been defined …

  Kabul / AFP An American-Canadian couple held hostage by the Taliban have appeared in a video for the first time with their two children born in captivity, pleading with President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump to secure their release. Canadian Joshua Boyle and his American wife Caitlan Coleman had two sons after being kidnapped in Afghanistan in 2012 during …