The United States and Russia have announced that they’ll resume their talks in an effort to halt the bloodshed in Syria. Washington broke off all negotiations with Moscow nine days ago amid extreme tension over the failure to secure a ceasefire. The Russian’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, and his U.S. counterpart, John Kerry, will now meet in Switzerland on Saturday. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran are also expected to attend.
Rescue workers in the rebel-held east of Aleppo say that at last twenty-five people have been killed in a second day of heavy airstrikes. The most deadly was on a busy market in the Fadul district.
It’s emerged that Islamic State militants have carried out a deadly attack in northern Iraq using a drone aircraft that was carrying an explosive device. Kurdish officials say two of their soldiers were killed, when they were handling the booby-trapped device after it’d crashed.
The leader of the Colombian FARC rebels, Temechenko, has indicated that he’d been reluctant to renegotiate one of the most contentious clauses of a peace accord which he signed with the government last month. He said reopening negotiations on the clause that dealt with justice would be a rebuff. The peace accord was rejected by a slim margin in a national referendum. Critics had argued that it didn’t allow for sufficient punishment for the leaders of the FARC.
American officials say a cruise missile has been fired at a U.S. Navy destroyer from territory controlled by Houthis rebels in Yemen, but that it’d missed its target. It’s the second such attack in four days. On Tuesday, the Pentagon indicated it could take retaliatory action.
The company responsible for producing the most recent installment in the Star Wars franchise has been fined nearly two million dollars. It follows an accident two years ago, in which the star, Harrison Ford, was pinned to the floor by a hydrolic door.
