Western-backed Syrian forces should isolate Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria “by the spring” before an offensive on the city itself, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said on Saturday. The Syrian Democratic Forces, which includes the powerful Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, launched the campaign on Raqqa in November. It announced this month the start of […]
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For years, violence kept most of Pakistan’s aspiring young musicians from following their dreams, whether the threat of Taliban militant attacks or gang wars in the crowded southern port city of Karachi. Now, as law enforcement crackdowns slowly improve the security situation across the nation, some musicians are getting help from two-year old Pakistani start-up […]
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Poland has put on display over 3,000 artifacts recovered from the site of a former Nazi concentration camp. The items are mostly personal effects that belonged to prisoners in the Sobibor prison. Which killed at least 250,000 Jews during World War Two, although exact numbers are unknown. Eyeglasses, jewellery, and children’s belongings taken from them […]
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German-Israeli satirist Shahak Shapira, who set up a website shaming selfie-takers at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, says he has halted the project for now after a dozen people apologised for their disrespect. His “Yolocaust.de” website had combined selfies, often with the participants grinning or striking poses, taken at the memorial with graphic images from Nazi concentration […]
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A prominent Myanmar Muslim lawyer assassinated in Yangon was being closely watched by intelligence agents, according to friends and colleagues, and had received past threats over his sensitive work as an adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi’s ruling party. People close to advocate Ko Ni, whose killing has been described by the government as an […]
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President Donald Trump may order a review that could lead to bringing back a CIA programme for holding terrorism suspects in secret overseas “black site” prisons where interrogation techniques often condemned as torture were used, two U.S. officials said on Wednesday. The black sites were used to detain suspects captured in President George W. Bush’s […]
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U.S. President Donald Trump invited Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit the United States later this year, during a phone call on Tuesday in which the leaders discussed economic and defence cooperation. In its readout of the conversation, the White House said the two leaders also discussed security in South and Central Asia. The […]
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Russia and regional powers Turkey and Iran backed a shaky truce between Syria’s warring parties on Tuesday and agreed to monitor its compliance, but on the ground rebels faced continued fighting on two fronts which could undermine the deal. After two days of deliberations in Astana, Kazakhstan’s Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov said the powers had […]
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Nigeria is facing mounting pressure to find some 200 schoolgirls abducted 1,000 days ago in Boko Haram’s most infamous attack after the rescue of 24 girls raised hopes that they are alive. For more than two years there was no sign of the girls who were kidnapped by the Islamist fighters from a school in […]
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Kemal Pervanic grew up in a Bosnian Muslim village surrounded by Serbs. “My schoolmates were just my schoolmates and my teachers were my teachers and that’s how it was until the early 1990s,” Pervanic told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at London’s Frontline Club. But in 1992 he was in a concentration camp being interrogated and […]
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