BANGKOK, June 13 (Xinhua) — Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha confirmed on Tuesday he will use Article 44 next week to accelerate the Thailand-China railway project. Speaking at Government House following a weekly cabinet meeting, Prayut said he will certainly use the Article 44 absolute power to solve legal snags involving the construction of an […]

JAKARTA, June 13 (Xinhua) — Indonesian police have foiled an effort to ship hundreds of detonators in central parts of the country as the security authorities have been on alert over terrorist threat. National Police spokesman Inspector General Setyo Wasisto on Tuesday confirmed that the police have aborted an attempted shipment of 500 devices functioning […]

LONDON, June 13 (Xinhua) — Business confidence in the United Kingdom dropped dramatically days ahead of Brexit talks on concerns about political and economic uncertainties after British Prime Minister Theresa May lost parliamentary majority, a survey showed on Monday. According to the Institute of Directors (IoD), a British business organization, 92 percent of its nearly […]

PARIS, June 11 (Xinhua) — French voters went to the polls on Sunday to pick the lower house’s 577 members in the first round of parliamentary elections. The election came a month after centrist Emmanuel Macro, 39, won the presidency of the eurozone’s second largest economy. Opinion polls forecast the Republic On The Move (LREM), […]

ANKARA, June 11 (Xinhua) — Turkey has criticized a plan by Iraq‘s autonomous Kurdish region to hold a independence referendum, calling this alarming move of its ally neighbours as a “grave mistake” susceptible of creating new problems for the region. Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Iraq’s territorial integrity was a “precondition” for […]

ROME, June 11 (Xinhua) — A two-day environmental summit of the Group of Seven (G7) industrialized nations plus the European Union and four invited countries kicked off in the Italian city of Bologna on Sunday. The agenda set by host and G7 president Italy includes the fight against global warming and climate change, in spite […]

DAMASCUS, June 11 (Xinhua) — The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) captured on Sunday their third neighborhood in the Islamic State (IS) group’s de facto capital of Raqqa, less than a week since they started operation to liberate the city from IS, activists reported. The SDF captured the Romaniyeh neighborhood in northwestern Raqqa, the latest […]

ISLAMABAD, June 11 (Xinhua) — At least two policemen were killed and two others injured in a firing by unknown gunmen in Pakistan’s southwest Quetta city on Sunday, local Urdu media reported. Some unknown gunmen opened fire at a police check post in Sariab area of Quetta, the capital city of the country’s southwest Balochistan […]