Caracas / AFP Facing mounting pressure from food shortages, looting and increasingly violent protests, Venezuelan authorities announced the next stage of a recall referendum against embattled President Nicolas Maduro. But Maduro’s camp said it would go to the Supreme Court to contest the process, accusing the opposition of fraud while gathering the signatures needed to call a referendum. The wranglings ...

  Manila / AFP Philippine president-elect Rodrigo Duterte does not endorse extrajudicial killings, his spokesman said on Saturday after scathing criticism from the UN chief over his plans for thousands of people to die in an unprecedented war on crime. Duterte won last month’s elections by a landslide largely due to an explosive law-and-order platform in which he pledged to ...

  Beirut/ AFP Western powers lashed out at Syria’s government, accusing regime forces of dropping barrel bombs on the town of Daraya hours after it received its first food aid in almost four years. The strikes, using crude unguided explosive devices, came as Arab-Kurdish fighters said they had encircled a stronghold of IS fighters in northern Syria, cutting off a ...

  Los Angeles / AFP A California man was sentenced to 32 months in prison for conspiring to skirt US sanctions against Syria by sending tactical military equipment to extremists in the war-torn country. Amin Al Baroudi, 50, a Syrian-born naturalized US citizen, pleaded guilty in January to purchasing tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of tactical equipment, including night ...

Mogadishu / AFP Shabaab extremists in Somalia have publicly executed four men they accused of spying, including one they claimed helped kill their supreme leader in a US drone strike, the Al-Qaeda-linked group and local sources said on Saturday. The executions took place on Friday evening in a village in the Bay region in the centre of the country, the ...

  Tripoli / AFP Forces allied with Libya’s unity government said on Saturday they had recaptured the port in the extremist stronghold of Sirte from IS group fighters who are now surrounded inside the city. The fall of Sirte, the hometown of ousted dictator Moamer Kadhafi, would be a major setback to the extremists who have also lost territory in ...

  Johannesburg/ AFP Disgraced South African Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius will appear in court on Monday for a sentencing hearing set to send him back to jail for murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp three years ago. The double-amputee killed Steenkamp, a model and law graduate, in the early hours of Valentine’s Day 2013, saying he mistook her for an intruder ...

  DHAKA/ AP Authorities have rounded up about 1,600 criminal suspects, including a few dozen believed to be radicals, in a nationwide crackdown aimed at halting a wave of brutal attacks on minorities and activists in Bangladesh, police said on Saturday. The attacks — including two Hindus in the last week — have alarmed the international community and raised questions ...

  Americans find it hard to imagine that the two-party system could ever break down. “Democracy works, this country works when you have two parties that are serious and trying to solve problems,” President Barack Obama said recently. Yet U.S. democracy and the country itself would be better served if politicians started acting as if there were more parties — ...

  With the U.K. set to vote on European Union membership in less than a month, economists, politicians and pundits are endlessly debating how an EU exit would affect the country’s economy. However, for many families, the types of figures being thrown about — which can run to the billions of pounds — may seem abstract and remote from their ...