Australia may indeed be “blindly and zealously toeing the US line” with regards to North Korea – at least openly – but in truth, Canberra wants to avoid conflict with Pyongyang. There is much at stake for Australia should war resume on the Korean peninsula, after more than 63 years of tense calm. While Julie Bishop stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Mike ...

An Egyptian army vehicle is stationed outside of St. Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in central Cairo. The Pope’s visit comes nearly three weeks after the Palm Sunday bombing of two Coptic churches, brazen strikes that left at least 45 people dead. Hide Caption 5 of 9 Photos: Pope Francis visits Egypt Pope Francis greets Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam ...

US Special Forces units reached Ain al-Assad Airbase, the western Anbar province in Iraq, on Tuesday to help Iraqi forces recapture cities still held by ISIS. “A large number of US Special Forces units reached the Ain al-Assad Airbase in Anbar’s Al-Baghdadi district some 90 kilometers west of Ramadi,” the Turkish Anadolu Agency reported, quoting an Iraqi army brigadier-general. The ...

President Trump and his advisers are rightly concerned about Syria and North Korea. These rogue states, guilty of human rights atrocities, pose the risk of wider violence and destabilization. Syria’s civil war has already created millions of refugees, has rekindled diseases (e.g. polio) that were once thought to be extinct and has allowed the country to become a haven for ...

As President Trump wages a rhetorical battle with North Korea over its nuclear program, his secretary of state says the nuclear deal with Iran will now be placed under review. In a letter to Congress, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that Iran is meeting the terms of the 2015 deal worked out with the Obama administration and five other ...

Sydney – Australia will abolish a temporary work visa that has been popular with foreigners and replace it with a visa requiring better English-language and work skills, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said on Monday. Turnbull has rejected suggestions that the visa policy change was in response to the country’s far-right wing political parties, such as One Nation, demanding more nationalistic ...

CAIRO — Gunmen attacked a checkpoint near the iconic St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, one of the oldest Christian monasteries in the world, killing one police officer and wounding four others on Tuesday evening, Egypt’s Interior Ministry said. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the shooting through its Amaq news agency, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist ...

The defendants have not been named. But Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, Tehran prosecutor-general, said on Sunday that the man and woman had been sentenced because they established “a new cult.” High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our T&Cs and Copyright Policy for more ...

CAIRO (Reuters) – Saudi Arabian state oil company Aramco will resume oil product shipments to Egypt some six months after suddenly halting them, the Egyptian Petroleum Ministry said on Wednesday. The ministry said in a statement it was working out a timetable with Aramco for the resumption of shipments and that commercial reasons related to global oil prices and reduced ...

A woman flying to Melbourne from Beijing in February fell asleep while wearing noise-canceling headphones, only to awake to the sounds of a nearby explosion. The battery in her headphones had burst into flame, according to an Australian Transport Safety Bureau investigation into the incident released Tuesday.