TEHRAN Iran accused Israel and the United States of killing one of its top scientists as part of an increasingly contentious campaign against its nuclear programme as it prepared to bury him on Friday. Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a deputy director of Iran’s main uranium enrichment plant, was killed on Wednesday when two men on a [...]

MOSCOW Russian Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev warned that military escalation is likely in Iran, with “real danger” of a US strike, in an interview published on Thursday. He added that Syria, which has refused to break its ties with Tehran, could also be a target for Western intervention. “There is a likelihood of military [...]

BANGKOK The United States warned on Friday of a terrorist threat against foreign tourists in Thailand, which said it was tracking two suspects who had entered the kingdom. “Foreign terrorists may be currently looking to conduct attacks against tourist areas in Bangkok in the near future,” the US embassy in Bangkok said in an emergency [...]

BAGHDAD US forces held a formal ceremony to lower the flag in Iraq on Thursday, ahead of their withdrawal from the country nearly nine years after the controversial invasion to topple Saddam Hussein. The ceremony marking the closure of the US military’s headquarters near Baghdad comes after US President Barack Obama hailed the “extraordinary achievement” [...]

DAMASCUS Army defectors killed at least 27 soldiers and security service agents south of Damascus on Thursday in the third straight day of regime losses as the uprising in Syria entered its 10th month. The clashes in Daraa province where protests against Bashar al-Assad’s regime first erupted in mid-March came as Human Rights Watch said [...]

PARIS Governments worldwide scrambled on Thursday to get their nationals out of the chaos of Libya, as Italy warned of a “biblical” exodus of up to 300,000 migrants and anger built among trapped foreigners. Fears of a full-scale civil war in the North African country prompted countries from Canada to China to charter ferries and [...]

CHRISTCHURCH New Zealand rescuers refused to give up the hunt for quake survivors on Thursday, despite hope fading for hundreds feared trapped two days after a disaster that has killed nearly 100. Emergency officials gave the grim news that they could find no signs of life in the wreckage of office towers, churches and homes [...]

WASHINGTON President Barack Obama capped a crisis-strewn first two White House years this week flexing restored power at home and abroad after securing big wins from a supposedly “lame duck” Congress. Obama won Senate ratification of a new nuclear arms treaty with Russia, which he said sent a “powerful signal” to the world, and fulfilled [...]

SEOUL South Korea’s military held a live-fire drill involving tanks, artillery and jet fighters on Thursday, in a major show of strength staged exactly a month after North Korea’s deadly attack on a border island. Washington expressed support for the live-fire exercise by its ally, the second this week, but Pyongyang criticised the South’s “puppet [...]

STOCKHOLM Even as Sweden’s Muslim community denounces the country’s first suicide bombing, experts have cautioned the attack could be exploited by the rising far-right to polarise the nation. A man strongly believed to be Taimour Abdulwahab blew up his car and then himself in a busy shopping quarter of central Stockholm on Saturday. He killed [...]

UNITED NATIONS The UN Security Council ended this week key international sanctions imposed on Iraq in a major move toward bringing closure on the Saddam Hussein era. Three council resolutions ended sanctions over weapons of mass destruction and ended the UN oil-for-food program for Iraq. The action will allow Iraq to start civilian nuclear activities, [...]

ZURICH Hackers attacked the websites of credit card giants Mastercard and Visa this week in revenge for their decisions to cut off funding to whistleblower website WikiLeaks. The group “Anonymous” claimed credit for bringing down the websites of the two firms after they suspended payments to WikiLeaks, and for attacking the site of a Swiss [...]