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Jakarta / AFP Indonesia’s leader on Monday held talks with Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir, who has been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, with Jakarta defending having invited him to a summit of Muslim countries. Bashir met President Joko Widodo and the Indonesian foreign minister briefly on the sidelines of an Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit ...

Bloomberg Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico started coalition talks after Saturday’s inconclusive elections, which cost him his majority in parliament, saw two nationalist groups win seats in the assembly, and raised the potential of a repeat vote. Fico’s Smer party won 28.3 percent, below the 44 percent he scored in a 2012 ballot. Voters elected seven other parties into the ...

Seoul / AFP North Korea threatened pre-emptive and “indiscriminate” nuclear strikes against South Korea and the United States on Monday, as the two allies kicked off their annual, large-scale military exercises. The drills always raise tensions on the divided Korean peninsula and the situation is particularly volatile this year, given the North’s recent nuclear test and long-range rocket launch and ...

Brussels / AFP EU leaders held a summit with Turkey’s prime minister on Monday in order to back closing the Balkans migrant route and urge Ankara to accept deportations of large numbers of economic migrants from overstretched Greece. The European Union is hardening its stance in a bid to defuse the worst refugee crisis since World War II by increasingly ...

BEIRUT / AP Syria’s opposition on Monday agreed to attend a new round of UN-sponsored peace talks set for this week in Geneva after a landmark ceasefire led to a dramatic drop in fighting. The truce between President Bashar Al Assad’s regime and non-extremist rebels, brokered by Russia and the United States, has defied expectations and led to the first ...

Calais / AfP A second week of demolition was underway on Monday in the Calais migrant camp known as the “Jungle” while France’s first international-standard refugee camp was set to open further along the coast. A group of children tried to offer white roses to the line of riot police holding back migrants and volunteers as workers resumed the dismantling ...

Zarzis / AFP Tunisian forces killed 21 extremists who attacked police and army posts near the Libyan border on Monday in a new spillover of violence that also saw four civilians killed. It was the second deadly clash in the border area in less than a week. The defence ministry said that a soldier was also killed in the fighting ...

Athens / AFP Their own wages and pensions have been slashed by the debt crisis, but thousands of Greeks are putting their own economic woes aside to help desperate refugees trapped in the country by the Balkan border blockade. People old and young, from couples with babies to pensioners and teenagers, came to Athens’ Syntagma Square on Sunday loaded with ...

Canberra / Bloomberg Already faced with higher capital requirements and a housing market past its peak, Australian banks have a new headache to contend with: corporate loans. Bad-debt provisions at the lenders are set to rise to their highest in eight years by 2018, as the chances of defaults in the mining, agricultural and dairy sectors increase, according to a ...

Bangalore / AFP A group of Indian banks has petitioned a court seeking the arrest of corporate honcho Vijay Mallya, the beleaguered businessman accused of defaulting on hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, a lawyer said. Heavily indebted Mallya has been deep in a financial fight over his now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines, which owes more than $1 billion to a ...