Region

GEORGE TOWN: Police are looking for V. Hemasekar, suspected of involvement in kidnapping a Bangladeshi last Monday. Northeast district police chief ACP Mior Faridalatrash Wahid said 11 others have been caught, including the alleged kidnap mastermind but the 20-year-old has eluded capture. “He is known as Salsa and we are now hunting him down after […]

DUSHANBE: Two Tajiks recruited by the militant group Islamic State planned to assassinate President Imomali Rakhmon last year, a court in the capital Dushanbe said on Friday. The Dushanbe district court said it had sentenced the two, a man and a woman, last December to 10 and eight-and-a-half years in prison respectively. It said they […]

ANKARA/ISTANBUL: Ahmet Davutoglu announced on Thursday that he was stepping down as leader of Turkey’s ruling AK Party and therefore as prime minister, bowing to President Tayyip Erdogan’s drive to create a powerful executive presidency. In a speech defending his record but also vowing loyalty to Erdogan, Davutoglu said he had kept his party and […]

SARIJALY: A ceasefire between Azerbaijan and its breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region may have stopped a short conflict becoming an all-out war a month ago, but gunfire and shelling still echo nightly, residents say, and people are still being killed. The ex-Soviet state of Azerbaijan and separatists backed by Armenia fought a war over the territory in […]

PYONGYANG: The Pyongyang skyline is rising – and not just with the trophy structures that represent the North Korean state. Despite its political and economic isolation, the capital is in the midst of a building boom. In a comparison of photos taken by Reuters this week and on a visit to Pyongyang last October, several […]

KATHMANDU: Nepal’s main Maoist party that props up the fragile coalition said on Thursday it had abandoned efforts to form a new government, averting an immediate crisis that had threatened to dislodge Prime Minister KP Oli. The Maoist former rebels, the second biggest group in the coalition, triggered a crisis in the young republic on […]

CALGARY: Fire raged unchecked through the Canadian city of Fort McMurray overnight as authorities raced to complete the evacuation of its population of 80,000, fearful that hot, dry winds forecast for Wednesday would further fan the flames. About 44,000 people were estimated to have fled the city by late on Tuesday on traffic-chocked roads, and […]

SINGAPORE/DHAKA: Eight Bangladeshi men held in Singapore for allegedly plotting attacks in their homeland had formed a terrorist cell that met in parks and open fields and shared radical propaganda and videos, authorities in the city-state said on Wednesday. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) said it had issued two-year detention orders for the men, […]

MOSCOW: Russia will take retaliatory measures if NATO deploys four extra battalions in Poland and the Baltic states and it will reinforce its western and southern flanks with three new divisions by the year-end anyway, officials said. US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said on Monday that NATO was weighing up rotating four battalions of troops […]

WADI EL-QATTAFI: For a brief time, Jordan’s eastern desert blooms. The dozens of mesas commanding the bleak horizons are now skirted with vegetation. Through binoculars, these charcoal husks of dead volcanoes seem shrouded in green mist. Birds sing above yellow, red and purple wildflowers peeking up around flint shards and stone carvings. Many carvings are […]