Britain has not proposed any workable alternatives to its Brexit withdrawal agreement, the EU said yesterday after talks with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson ended without a breakthrough. It said the meeting between Johnson and EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker failed to yield any alternative…

Political outsider Kais Saied was leading Tunisia’s election with just over a quarter of votes counted, the election commission said yesterday, in the country’s second free presidential vote since the Arab Spring. Saied was on 19 percent, leading imprisoned media magnate Nabil Karoui, who…

The Ayodhya mediation committee yesterday filed a short memorandum informing the Supreme Court that parties across the Hindu-Muslim religious divide have approached it with a request to resume talks to amicably resolve the over 70-year-old Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid title dispute. The memorandum said…

Iran has seized a boat suspected of being used to smuggle fuel and arrested its 11 crew members near a vital oil shipping lane, state television reported yesterday. A naval patrol of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps intercepted the vessel carrying 250,000 litres of fuel near the Strait of Hormuz,…

North Korea yesterday demanded the United States provide security guarantees as a precondition to resuming deadlocked nuclear talks, dampening hopes for progress at a working-level dialogue expected in the coming weeks. Negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington have been gridlocked since a second…

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will host his Russian and Iranian counterparts yesterday for their latest summit on Syria, with attention focused on Damascus’s push on the last rebel-held bastion of Idlib. Presidents Vladimir Putin and Hassan Rouhani will join Erdogan in the Turkish capital…

Russia deploys S-400 missiles in Arctic AFP, Moscow Russia has placed S-400 missile defence systems at the Novaya Zemlya archipelago as Moscow seeks to increase its military presence in the Arctic, the defence ministry said yesterday. The surface to air-missile regiment of the Northern Fleet’s…