Caracas / AFP Venezuela sent an opposition leader who was under house arrest back to jail and expelled a delegation of Ecuadoran lawmakers, amid rising political tension over a campaign to recall leftist President Nicolas Maduro. Former San Cristobal mayor Daniel Ceballos was abruptly taken from his home before dawn by members of the Venezuelan intelligence services, his wife said ...

  Marawi / AFP Muslim extremists who support the IS group staged a daring jailbreak in the southern Philippines, freeing 23 detainees in the latest in a series of mass escapes, officials said on Sunday. About 50 heavily armed members of the Maute group raided the local jail in the southern city of Marawi on Mindanao island on Saturday and freed ...

  Brasília / AFP The final witnesses in the defense of suspended Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff testified late Saturday in her senate impeachment trial, days before a vote that could permanently remove her from power. Rousseff, 68, is accused of taking illegal state loans to help bridge budget shortfalls and mask the true state of the economy during her 2014 reelection ...

  Rome / AFP Shoddy, price-cutting renovations, in breach of local building regulations, could be partly to blame for the high death toll from this week’s devastating earthquake in central Italy, according to a prosecutor investigating the disaster. As questions mount over the deaths of nearly 300 people, prosecutor Giuseppe Saieva indicated that property owners who commissioned suspected sub-standard work ...

  Detroit / AFP Allegations that Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) falsified US sales data are meritless and the company’s financial reports are “totally accurate,” chief executive Sergio Marchionne told reporters. Marchionne said the FCA is cooperating with authorities from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Justice Department probing the company’s reporting after it was forced to restate unit ...

  AFP Germany’s vice chancellor and economy minister Sigmar Gabriel said on Sunday that negotiations on a massive trade between the European Union and the United States were effectively dead in the water. “The talks with the US have de facto failed because we Europeans of course must not succumb to American demands,” he told public broadcaster ZDF. “Nothing is ...

  Wilmington / AFP US rail operator Amtrak on Friday awarded a $2.0 billion (1.8 billion euros) deal to French manufacturer Alstom to supply new trains for its key Acela service between Washington, New York and Boston. The landmark deal for 28 new passenger trains will boost Amtrak’s speed and capacity along its most heavily used and profitable route, with ...

  Bloomberg Carsten Stendevad is resigning as chief executive officer of ATP, Denmark’s biggest pension fund, in order to move back to the U.S. The $120 billion fund has started a recruitment process to find a replacement, it said on Friday. The 43-year-old is leaving the fund to move back to the U.S. and be close to his wife’s family, ...

  Beirut / AFP Turkish shelling and air strikes killed at least 40 Syrians on Sunday, a monitor said, in the first significant civilian casualties in Turkey’s intensifying campaign in northern Syria. Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency said the army had killed 25 Kurdish “terrorists” in air strikes as part of its unprecedented operation inside Syria. The bombardments came after Ankara ...

  Abuja / AFP Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said on Sunday that Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau is “wounded”, in his first comments on military claims that the extremist leader was injured in an attack. Nigeria’s armed forces said on Tuesday that Shekau had been wounded in an air strike on Boko Haram’s forest stronghold, but released no further statement ...