Paris / AFP France will accept 400 refugees per month from Greece as part of the EU relocation deal it signed last year, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Thursday. “This week, as part of the relocation, 97 additional refugees have arrived in France coming from Greece and Italy,” Cazeneuve said in a statement, adding that another 253 were ...

  Washington / AP The US-led coalition fighting the IS group in Syria is trying to strangle it by cutting off a key supply route from Turkey. The Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led alliance, has just launched an offensive to capture the strategic northern town of Manbij with the help of coalition air strikes, 18 of them in the past ...

  Ahmedabad / AFP An Indian court convicted two dozen Hindus on Thursday over a massacre during religious riots 14 years ago when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was chief minister of Gujarat state. Sixty-nine Muslims were hacked and burnt to death as they sheltered at a residential complex in the city of Ahmedabad, in one of the single worst massacres ...

  Mogadishu / AFP An attack on a Mogadishu hotel by extremist gunmen has ended with at least 10 dead, Somalia’s security minister said on Thursday. Somali security forces had been battling the Shabaab fighters holed up inside the building since Wednesday evening when the assault began with a car bomb that tore the front off the six-storey Ambassador Hotel. ...

  Kuala Lumpur / AFP Families of six Malaysia Airlines crew members who were killed when flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine nearly two years ago filed a lawsuit on Thursday blaming the carrier for the tragedy. The suit accuses the airline of negligence and breach of contract and is believed to be the first filed against the company ...

I don’t know whether a President Donald Trump would be able to destroy U.S. democracy by crushing the institutions that share power with the executive. I tend to agree with Brian Beutler that the institutions Trump might go after would fight back effectively — though I’m not eager to test that proposition. Nonetheless, I think Trump is dangerous to democracy ...

  Adam Minter Indonesia is drowning in plastic trash. Bottles pollute its beaches, bags congest its waterways and instant-noodle cups overflow its garbage bins. It’s only getting worse: By 2019, Indonesia will generate about 5 percent more trash than it did in 2014, and about 15 percent of that will be plastic. Fixing this problem has become a priority for ...

  The differences between China and the U.S. over the South China Sea issue have become a matter of concern and even anxiety. But some of the perceptions in the U.S. and elsewhere about China’s policy and intentions in the area are misplaced. A pressing task is to understand the facts and China’s intentions correctly so as to avoid real ...

  BLOOMBERG Global stocks slid to a six-week low and commodities fell as markets braced for the possibility that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates as soon as next month. A gauge of the dollar’s strength stood at a seven-week high. Oil fell as OPEC members agreed to stick to the policy of unfettered production, while European stocks and ...

  Bloomberg The Chinese smelters that churn out more than 40 percent of the world’s zinc may cut production for the first time in four years because they can’t get enough raw material, further lifting prices of one of this year’s strongest-performing commodities. Zinc, used for rustproofing steel in everything from auto bodies to suspension bridges, has surged as much ...