Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit Vietnam later this week in the latest bid to build relations with a growing US partner as tensions flare with China over Taiwan, the State Department said Monday.. Vietnam has longstanding tensions with China, whose own relations with the United States have deteriorated in recent years.
At least four people were killed and 15 others injured Monday by a bomb blast in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Balochistan, officials said.. "Initial probe suggests that the explosion was caused by an IED (improvised explosive device) that had been planted on a motorcycle and was detonated using remote control," police official Azfar Mehsar told AFP. "At least four people were killed in the incident -- that includes two policemen and two civilians," he added.
Italian former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has been in hospital for leukaemia and a lung infection, is getting progressively better, doctors said Monday, expressing "cautious optimism" over his condition.. Doctors revealed Thursday that Berlusconi was being treated for a lung infection and was suffering from chronic myelomonocytic leukaemia (CMML), a rare type of blood cancer affecting mainly older adults.
At a beach on a windswept Taiwanese archipelago just a few miles from mainland China, Lin Ke-qiang offers a gloomy prediction: should war ever break out with Beijing, his island does not stand a chance.. The Taiwanese military has held regular anti-landing drills on the islands but some think the islands are so lightly defended that it is just a matter of time before China makes its move.
A fifth person has been found dead and one is still missing after an avalanche near Mont Blanc in southeastern France, the local prosecutor's office said Monday.. After the discovery of four victims on Sunday, prosecutor Karline Bouisset said the body of a 39-year-old woman had been found and "a sixth person is still missing."
Brazil's leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will meet Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing next week to discuss trade and Ukraine mediation, having overcome the pneumonia that forced him to postpone the trip.. In a joint statement with French president Emmanuel Macron, who was visiting Beijing, Xi pledged on Friday "to support any effort in favor of a return to peace in Ukraine."
Northern Ireland on Monday marks the 25th anniversary of its landmark 1998 peace accords, with the UK province mired in political dysfunction and security concerns which threaten to overshadow the historic milestone.. The following week, Northern Ireland will continue its peace accord commemorations with a three-day conference starting April 17 hosted by former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Two bodies were found in the rubble of a building that collapsed in Marseille following a major explosion, French authorities said early Monday, as rescue workers scrambled to find at least six people still unaccounted for. . Emergency workers had continued rescue operations through Sunday night into the early hours of Monday with the help of a crane and lights, but a persistent fire underneath the rubble hampered their work, making it difficult for firefighters to deploy sniffer dogs.
China was due to hold live-fire drills on Monday to round off three days of military exercises in response to Taiwan's president meeting with the US House speaker.. - Live-fire exercises - Exercises on Monday will include live-fire drills off the rocky coast of China's Fujian province, about 80 kilometres (50 miles) south of the Matsu islands and 190 kilometres from Taipei.
Twitter has backtracked after an uproar for labeling the US radio network NPR as "state- affiliated media" and now calls it "government-funded.". The change in how Twitter refers to Washington-based National Public Radio happened quietly overnight Saturday and comes after the network complained that the term "state-affiliated" was disparaging and inaccurate.
