Secretary of State Antony Blinken was due in China on Sunday for the highest-level trip by a US official in nearly five years as the rival powers look to lower the temperature after soaring tensions.. Blinken was speaking alongside Singaporean Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, who said that the region wanted the United States both to stay as a power and to find ways to coexist with a rising China.
South Africa's president, in Russia as part of a delegation pushing for peace between Kyiv and Moscow, on Saturday told his Russian counterpart the fighting had to stop.. Efforts to secure peace appear increasingly perilous, analysts told AFP, with both Kyiv and Moscow convinced they can win on the battlefield.
Tens of thousands of people protested on Saturday against the government in the Serbian capital, in the latest rally since 18 people were killed in mass shootings.. They were triggered by two mass shootings in May that claimed 18 lives and left several people wounded.
Militants linked to the Islamic State group massacred at least 41 people, mostly students, in western Uganda, the country's deadliest such attack in over a decade, officials said Saturday.. Police and army officials blamed the ADF, one of the deadliest militias over the border in DR Congo's strife-torn east, which the Islamic State group has called its local offshoot.
The United States won't make special arrangements for Ukraine to join the NATO military alliance, President Joe Biden said Saturday, despite Russia's invasion. . NATO nations in eastern Europe have pushed for a better roadmap for Ukraine to obtain membership, but key allies like the United States and Germany have been reluctant to go much beyond a vague 2014 pledge that Kyiv will join one day.
Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan said Friday that conditions were not yet right for ASEAN to open high-level talks with Myanmar on the country's political situation.. "We believe it would be premature to re-engage with the junta at a summit level or even at a foreign minister level," Balakrishnan said when asked about a news report that Thailand had proposed talks.
In war-torn Syria, parents of teenagers missing in a shipwreck off the Greek coast are clinging onto hope their children might be alive, days after the tragedy.. "If he is found alive, we'll bring him back to Syria.
Medics on Saturday said they are overwhelmed by the hundreds of wounded fleeing Sudan's Darfur region, which has become an increasing focus of global concern more than two months into the country's war.. Residents of the capital Khartoum, hundreds of kilometres (miles) east of Darfur, on Saturday also reported fresh air strikes, gunfire and explosions there in battles between the army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Every day at dawn, 14-year-old Salim Mohammad leaves home to fetch water, trekking through his city in southwestern Yemen to join the queues at the nearest public dispenser.. "Sometimes we get it, sometimes we don't... it's a competition," the 35-year-old said, as her children filled containers at the public tank, one of several around the city.
Japan's Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako arrived in the Indonesian capital Jakarta on Saturday for their first state visit since ascending the Chrysanthemum Throne in 2019.. They will also pay a visit to a new mass rapid transit (MRT) train depot constructed in the capital with Japan's help and a Tokyo-funded pump station that prevents flooding.
