WORLD

Oil, Iran top agenda as Putin visits Saudi Arabia Moscow, Russia | AFP | Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit Saudi Arabia on Monday, where he is set to seal oil agreements as well as use his influence to defuse rising tensions in the Gulf. The meeting with King Salman …

  Beijing, China | AFP | President Xi Jinping has warned that any attempts to split China would result in “bodies smashed and bones ground to powder”, amid four months of anti-Beijing unrest in Hong Kong. Xi issued the dire message during a weekend visit to Nepal, according to a …

Paris, France | AFP |  Designers of machine translation tools still mostly rely on dictionaries to make a foreign language understandable. But now there is a new way: numbers. Facebook researchers say rendering words into figures and exploiting mathematical similarities between languages is a promising avenue — even if a universal …

Vatican City, Holy See | AFP | Pope Francis creates five new saints on Sunday, including Britain’s Cardinal John Henry Newman — one of the Catholic Church’s most renowned converts — and a nun dubbed the “Mother Teresa of Brazil”. Heads of state from across the world are expected at the …

Washington, United States | AFP |  Joe Biden faces scrutiny over Ukraine, Elizabeth Warren is surging and Bernie Sanders had a heart attack, but recent developments in the Democratic presidential battle are getting minimal attention, swamped by Washington’s impeachment obsession. Most Democratic candidates are pounding the pavement in early voting states …

San Francisco, United States | AFP |  On October 29, 1969, professor Leonard Kleinrock and a team at the University of California at Los Angeles got a computer to “talk” to a machine in what is now known as Silicon Valley. The event gave birth to a network that later became …

Washington, United States | AFP | Engulfed in an impeachment inquiry and other political turmoil, US President Donald Trump on Friday trumpeted the success of his hard-line stance with China, claiming to have scored a major win in the grinding trade war between the economic powers. But while Trump took a …

Versailles, France | AFP | The last time the strains of the aria “Oh Richard! Oh my king!” echoed around the Opera Royal at Versailles it was for Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette just before they were dragged off to Paris and their doom by their revolting subjects. The piece from “Richard …

Lake Charles, United States | AFP |  As impeachment pressure mounted on Donald Trump, the president left Washington for the second day in a row Friday to rally hardcore supporters in a bid to turn the scandal into fuel for his 2020 reelection. Framing himself as the victim of a plot …

San Francisco, United States | AFP | Facebook’s digital currency alliance lost more companies on Friday amid heavy criticism from regulators around the world on the planned Libra global cryptocurrency. Credit card giants Visa and Mastercard, online marketplace eBay and digital payments firm Stripe each announced they had changed their minds …