Former foreign minister Nikos Christodoulides was on Sunday elected president of the Republic of Cyprus, becoming at 49 the youngest leader of the divided Mediterranean island nation.. - Hawkish on peace talks - Christodoulides served as government spokesman then foreign minister under outgoing President Nicos Anastasiades, but quit as minister last June to enter the race.
The United Nations denounced Sunday the failure to deliver desperately needed aid to war-torn regions of Syria, while warning the death toll of more than 33,000 from the earthquake that also struck Turkey is set to rise far higher.. The United Nations has warned that at least 870,000 people urgently need hot meals across Turkey and Syria.
Their mugshots are everywhere: a Turkish developer arrested while trying to flee the country and two colleagues connected to a luxurious apartment tower that crumbled in Monday's disastrous quake.. - Denials - Six months passed before Turkey arrested the first suspect in the wake of another disastrous quake in 1999.
The downing of a huge Chinese balloon off the US coast, followed by the shootdowns of two smaller objects over Alaska and Canada, has raised concerns about North American security -- and further strained relations with China.. Canada described it as cylindrical and smaller than the initial balloon.
The NATO alliance confirmed Sunday that its long-serving chief would leave office in October, launching a new round of speculation about his successor.. But, on Sunday, shortly after Stoltenberg returned from high-level meetings in Washington, his spokeswoman confirmed that he would leave office later this year.
Several thousand pro-government demonstrators marched Saturday in Nicaragua in support of the expulsion of 222 critics of President Daniel Ortega's government, which has called them "traitors to the homeland.". A Nicaraguan court official this month said the 222 prisoners were "deported" and called them "traitors to the homeland."
Polling stations opened on Sunday for regional elections in Italy's two most populous regions -- polls seen as a test of the popularity of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's three-month-old government.. Polling stations were to stay open until 11 pm local time (2200 GMT) and reopen again on Monday.
Cyprus went to the polls Sunday for a tightly fought presidential runoff between two career diplomats seeking the top post in the south of the divided Mediterranean island.. UN-backed talks on the future of the divided island, frozen for nearly six years, will also be on the new leader's agenda.
The idea is seductively simple: the West should turn over billions of dollars of frozen Russian assets to Ukraine to fund reconstruction.. After the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine last February, unprecedented economic sanctions against Moscow saw an estimated $350 billion in state assets, foreign reserves and oligarch property frozen by Western banks and officials.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats face the prospect of an embarrassing loss on Sunday during the rerun of a chaotic 2021 regional election in Berlin.. But the Social Democrat has insisted that she is campaigning for the "SPD to remain the strongest political force in this city".
