International

France faced potential political deadlock after elections on Sunday threw up a hung parliament, with a leftist alliance unexpectedly taking the top spot but no group winning a majority. Voters delivered a major setback for Marine Le Pen’s nationalist, Eurosceptic National Rally (RN), which opinion polls had predicted would win the second-round ballot but ended up in the third spot, ...

At least 16 people have been killed in an Israeli air strike on a school in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian officials have said. Dozens more have been injured. The building was sheltering thousands of displaced people at Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. The Israel Defence Force (IDF) said it struck several “terrorists operating ...

France votes in legislative elections Sunday that will be decisive in determining its political future and could see the far right become the largest party in parliament for the first time. Centrist President Emmanuel Macron called the snap elections three years ahead of time after his forces were trounced in June’s legislative elections, a gamble which many observers believe backfired. After ...

Iran’s reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian on Saturday won a runoff presidential election against ultraconservative Saeed Jalili, the interior ministry said. Pezeshkian got more than 16 million votes and Jalili more than 13 million out of about 30 million votes cast, electoral authority spokesman Mohsen Eslami said, adding that voter turnout stood at 49.8%. The election, called early after the death ...

US President Joe Biden vowed to stay in the 2024 presidential race during calls with campaign staff and meetings with Democratic lawmakers and governors on Wednesday, as he sought to shake off calls for him to drop out after his shaky debate performance last week. Biden dialed in to a call with worried members of his campaign team and told ...

At least 116 people, many of them women and children, were killed in a stampede at a Hindu religious gathering in north India on Tuesday, authorities said, in one of the country’s worst such tragedies in years. The stampede happened in a village in Hathras district, about 200 km (125 miles) southeast of the national capital New Delhi, where authorities ...

Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) party scored historic gains to win the first round of France’s parliamentary election on Sunday, exit polls showed, but the final result will depend on days of horsetrading before next week’s run-off. The RN was seen winning around 34% of the vote, exit polls from Ipsos, Ifop, OpinionWay and Elabe showed, in a ...

French voters cast their ballots on Sunday in the first round of a snap parliamentary election that could usher in the country’s first far-right government since World War Two, a potential sea change at the heart of the European Union. President Emmanuel Macron stunned the country when he called the vote after his centrist alliance was crushed in European elections this month ...

Former US president Donald Trump turned in a better performance than President Joe Biden during the first of presidential debates, a shift from 2020 when debate watchers saw the 81-year-old Democrat as outperforming his Republican rival. During Thursday’s feisty debate that lasted roughly 90 minutes, President Biden and 78-year-old Trump sparred over the economy, immigration, foreign policy, abortion and national ...

Torrential monsoon storms in Nepal have triggered landslides, lightning and flooding killing at least 14 people, a disaster official said Thursday. Monsoon rains from June to September bring widespread death and destruction every year across South Asia, but the numbers of fatal floods and landslides have increased in recent years, reports AFP. Experts say climate change and increased road construction ...