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  BEIRUT / AP Militants from the IS group seized five villages from Syrian rebels close to the Turkish border on Wednesday, further weakening the rebels’ foothold in the Aleppo area. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a network of activists monitoring the Syria conflict, said the extremist group took five villages in Azaz district, north of Aleppo, where ...

  SYDNEY/ AFP Sudanese refugee Aliir Aliir will complete an extraordinary journey when he makes his debut for the Sydney Swans against Brisbane on Sunday in Australian Rules football. The 21-year-old Aliir was born in a Kenyan refugee camp to parents who fled war-torn Sudan and arrived in Australia as a small child. He played soccer and basketball before taking ...

  Berlin / AFP Germany announced on Wednesday it is replacing the head of its foreign intelligence service, which has been rocked by revelations it helped the US National Security Agency spy on European targets. Gerhard Schindler, 63, will take early retirement from July 1, leaving the reins of the BND service to Bruno Kahl, a trained lawyer and currently high-ranking ...

  SEOUL / AP Facing mounting international pressure over its nuclear and missile ambitions, North Korea has set a date for its biggest political convention in decades next week that is expected to bolster young dictator Kim Jong un’s grip on power. The ruling Workers’ Party, led by Kim, will open its 7th congress in Pyongyang on May 6, the ...

  Tehran / AFP Nearly a quarter of Iran’s parliamentary seats are at stake on Friday in an election in which reformists want to consolidate their recent comeback and minimise the clout of hardline lawmakers. The second round run-offs were triggered because no candidate in 68 constituencies managed to win 25 percent of votes cast in the initial nationwide ballot on ...

  STEPANAKERT, Nagorno-Karabakh The military commander of this breakaway Armenian republic predicted in an interview here Monday that a fragile cease-fire could collapse within days. By that night, Azerbaijani shelling had killed two Armenian soldiers in a northern border town, amid accusations by each side that the other had violated the truce. The “frozen conflict” here, stalemated for 22 years, ...

Saudi Arabia’s ambitious strategy to restructure the Kingdom’s economy is seen as an unprecedented departure from oil dependency to diversification. In recent years, Riyadh has relied on oil revenues for about 90% of its budget. The new economic paradigm shift involves diversification, privatisation of massive state assets — including the energy giant Aramco — tax increases and subsidy cuts. Prince ...

  Tim Culpan / David Fickling Companies in both China and the U.S. want to develop driverless cars. Slick videos and flashy powerpoint slides envision a future where humans sit back and relax while their transport pods glide across highways, seamlessly merge into traffic and pull up smoothly at the kerb. Miles Google’s driverless cars have clocked 1.5 million. What ...

  On the surface, the concept of a Russian pivot to Asia made sense, particularly greater cooperation between Moscow and Beijing. But, as a pair of fellows from the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin and a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center made clear in separate articles published this month, Russia’s Asia pivot has failed so far ...

  The presidents of Ukraine and Belarus, the two countries most affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, used the meltdown’s 30-year anniversary on Tuesday to make political statements. It looks like neither of them — nor Russian President Vladimir Putin — has drawn the right conclusions from the tragedy, which probably hastened the Soviet Union’s demise. Unit 4 of the ...