Dubai / AFP A court on Sunday ordered the dissolution of Bahrain’s Shiite main opposition group Al-Wefaq, a judicial source said, despite international criticism of the Sunni-ruled Gulf kingdom’s intensified crackdown on dissent. The administrative court in Manama also ordered the funds of the group, accused by authorities of “harbouring terrorism” among other charges, to be seized by the ...

  Yangon / AFP Myanmar’s de facto premier Aung San Suu Kyi held landmark talks with senior rebel leaders on Sunday, as she strives to seal a ceasefire with a patchwork of ethnic minority militias that have battled the national army for decades. Suu Kyi has made peace a flagship policy of her newly installed civilian-led government which replaced decades ...

  New Delhi / AFP Twenty-one labourers died after drinking toxic homemade liquor in northern India, police said on Sunday, in the latest incident of alcohol poisoning in the country. Police in Uttar Pradesh state’s Etah district said the victims started to vomit and fall sick, complaining of severe stomach aches and blurred vision after consuming the illicit moonshine late ...

  Nice, France / AFP French investigators arrested two more people on Sunday as they pieced together details about the motives and planning of the Tunisian who rammed a truck into a crowd in an IS-claimed attack that killed 84. Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel staked out the Nice promenade with his rented truck twice in the two days before he smashed the ...

  Paris / AFP UNESCO on Sunday listed Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s works — including the Indian city of Chandigarh which he planned in the 1950s— among its World Heritage Sites. The decision was announced as the World Heritage Committee meeting in Istanbul resumed for a day on Sunday, after being suspended a day earlier due to an abortive putsch bid ...

  Washington / AFP An overwhelming majority of Americans think the next president should place “major” focus on improving US race relations, which most see as “generally bad.” The Washington Post/ABC News poll released on Saturday was taken shortly after the mass shooting of white police officers by a black sniper that followed two high-profile shooting deaths of black men at ...

  Aleppo / AFP Opposition-controlled parts of Syria’s battered northern city Aleppo came under total siege on Sunday, after government forces severed the last route out of the east. Beleaguered rebels have failed to thwart a major Russian-backed army offensive around Aleppo city, which has been devastated by the country’s five-year conflict. On Sunday, regime fighters descended on the Castello ...

Hanoi, Vietnam / AFP Scores of activists were detained in Vietnam’s capital on Sunday as they gathered to protest against China after it rejected a recent international ruling that dismissed its claims to much of the South China Sea. Anti-Chinese sentiment runs deep in communist Vietnam but the country’s authoritarian rulers move swiftly to tamp down expressions of public anger, ...

  Multan / AFP The brother of a murdered Pakistani celebrity said Sunday he is “not embarrassed” to have killed her, as Qandeel Baloch’s death reignited polarising calls for action against the “epidemic” of honour killings. The strangling of Baloch, judged as infamous by many in deeply conservative Muslim Pakistan for selfies and videos that by Western standards would appear ...

  Bloomberg Most Gulf stock indexes rose, even after an attempted coup in Turkey that began on Friday rattled global markets. Saudi Arabia’s Almarai Co., the region’s largest publicly-traded packaged-food manufacturer, climbed as much as 5.5 percent before closing 2.3 percent higher as it posted a 19 percent increase in second-quarter profit. It was the third-biggest contributor to the Tadawul ...