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  Taipei / AFP Taiwan’s defence minister warned on Tuesday that enemy threats were growing daily after China’s aircraft carrier and a flotilla of other warships passed south of the island in an exercise as tensions rise. After sailing south of Taiwan itself, the Liaoning and five other warships on Monday passed the Taiwan-administered Dongsha Islands in the South China ...

  Seoul / AFP South Korea’s ruling conservative party officially split Tuesday over the impeachment of scandal-hit President Park Geun-Hye, threatening to complicate presidential elections that could be held as soon as March. A group of 29 lawmakers left the ruling Saenuri Party, arguing that its leadership refuses to embrace reforms despite the political crisis fuelled by the corruption scandal that ...

  Seoul / AFP North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un is planning a “prime time” nuclear weapons push in 2017 to take advantage of leadership transitions in South Korea and the United States, a high-ranking defector said on Tuesday. In his first press conference since fleeing his post as North Korea’s deputy ambassador to Britain in August, Thae Yong-Ho said Kim ...

  Montevideo / AFP A cheap flight from Paris to Madrid will set you back about $100. But it costs six times that to cover the same distance in Latin America, where low-cost airlines are only just taking off. Latin America has long lured travellers with its history, music and natural beauty spanning from Mexico’s deserts to the Amazon rainforest ...

  BEIJING / AP China vowed on Tuesday to speed up the development of its space industry as it set out its plans to become the first country to soft land a probe on the far side of the moon, by around 2018, and launch its first Mars probe by 2020. “To explore the vast cosmos, develop the space industry ...

  Paris / AP After finding possible survivors and victim remains, the first priority of air crash investigators is to locate the black boxes, a duo of data recorders that can hold vital clues on why an aircraft went down. Despite their name, the boxes that hold a plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recordings are actually bright orange with ...

  MEXICO CITY / AP The Mexican airline Interjet says it’s had to cancel some flights due to a mandatory safety inspection of its Russian-made Superjet 100 aircraft. Russian authorities issued the directive on Dec. 23 after cracks were found in a part on one of the Sukhoi planes. Interjet is among the largest customers for the relatively new Superjet, ...

  Bloomberg The European Central Bank sees Italian lender Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA needing about 8.8 billion euros ($9.2 billion) of capital to bolster its balance sheet after liquidity deteriorated this month. The calculation is based on the results of a 2016 stress test, the Italian bank said in a statement, citing two letters from the ECB ...

  Bloomberg Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann said the bar should be high for government funds being used in a rescue of Italian lender Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA. Government funds are intended as a “last resort,” Weidmann said in an interview with German newspaper Bild, with the banker adding that planned measures by the Italian government should only ...

  Reuters European shares were steady with the focus on lenders after Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse settled mortgage securities fraud suits in the United States, and Italy’s Monte dei Paschi agreed to a bailout. The STOXX Europe 600 was flat at its close and unchanged for the week, but the index still on track for its best month since ...