WORLD

The front-runner in the French presidential election has told the BBC that the EU must reform or face the prospect of “Frexit”. Pro-EU centrist Emmanuel Macron made the comments as he and his far-right rival Marine Le Pen held rallies in the last week of campaigning. French voters go to the polls on Sunday to decide between the two. At ...

Paris – French soldiers killed or captured about 20 jihadists in Mali’s restive north where a French soldier was killed on April 5, the French chief of staff said on Sunday. Troops from Operation Barkhane, a French counterterror operation whose mission is to target jihadist groups operating in the Sahel region south of the Sahara Desert, launched the operation on ...

US President Donald Trump has launched a scathing attack on the media during a rally marking 100 days in office. He told supporters in Pennsylvania that he was keeping “one promise after another”, dismissing criticism as “fake news” by “out of touch” journalists. Mr Trump decided to skip the White House Correspondents’ Dinner – the first US leader to miss ...

South Korea and the United States wrapped up their annual large-scale military drills on Sunday but continued a separate joint naval exercise that has triggered the threat of nuclear war from North Korea. The USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier group arrived in waters near the Korean peninsula and began exercises with the South Korean navy late on Saturday. The South ...

The US is open to negotiations with North Korea aimed at removing nuclear weapons from the region, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said. But he said the US would use military force if necessary. The foreign minister of China, North Korea’s greatest ally, said a peaceful settlement was the “only right choice”. Mr Tillerson told a UN Security Council ...

Dakar – A desert warfare specialist, Chad’s Hissene Habre seized power in 1982 and quickly embraced the role of ruthless dictator, with brutal atrocities the hallmark of his eight-year reign of terror. Often dressed in combat fatigues that complemented his “desert fighter” nickname, Habre fled to Senegal after he was ousted by current Chadian President Idriss Deby in 1990. Habre ...

Nairobi- Kenya’s opposition lined up Thursday behind a single candidate, veteran political leader Raila Odinga, strengthening their challenge to the government in August’s polls. Former prime minister Odinga, 72, was named presidential candidate by senior leaders of the National Super Alliance (NASA) at a large rally in the capital Nairobi. Odinga will, for the second consecutive time, challenge President Uhuru ...

Vatican City – Pope Francis is brushing off security concerns to forge ahead on Friday with a two-day trip to Egypt aimed at presenting a united Christian-Muslim front that repudiates violence committed in God’s name. Three weeks after Islamic militants staged twin Palm Sunday church attacks, Francis is expected to land in Cairo in the early afternoon for a series ...

Dakar – Souleymane Guengueng was barely able to walk or see when the prison doors swung open and he and hundreds of others were released in Chad in 1990 after dictator Hissene Habre fled. He then began collecting accounts of torture. A quarter-century later, those accounts helped convict and uphold a life sentence for Habre in a landmark trial that ...

New York – The UN Security Council on Thursday postponed voting on a draft resolution on the Western Sahara conflict amid signs the Polisario Front independence movement was preparing a pullback from a tense zone of the contested territory, a council diplomat has said. The US-drafted text included a strong appeal to the Polisario Front to immediately withdraw from the ...