COLOMBO (Al-Jazeera) - Police again fired tear gas and water cannon at students trying to storm Sri Lanka’s parliament Friday as the country was brought to a halt by a trade union strike demanding the government step down. Months of blackouts and acute shortages of food, fuel and pharmaceuticals have caused widespread suffering across the South Asian island nation of 22 million people. Public anger has sparked sustained protests demanding the government’s resignation over its mismanagement of the crisis, Sri Lanka’s worst since independence in 1948. Thousands of student protesters had been camped on the road leading to the legislature, which is on a man-made island on a lake in the capital Colombo, since Thursday.

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PARIS (AFP) - The National Council of the French Socialist Party ratified a coalition deal with three other left-wing parties early Friday to run as a united front in June’s parliamentary elections. The coalition deal, shaped under the leadership of hard-left firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon, is an attempt to deprive newly re-elected President Emmanuel Macron of a majority in parliament in the June 12-19 vote and block his pro-business agenda. Melenchon, a radical eurosceptic, has managed to unite the Greens, the Communists and the Socialists under a new banner that could raise eyebrows across the EU, as its platform aims to challenge the main tenets of the bloc’s economic policies.

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LONDON (Aljazeera) - Kyrgyzstan has reported the killing of three citizens after Uzbekistan’s troops opened fire at the disputed frontier of the two Central Asian countries. The Kyrgyz National Security Committee did not say in Friday’s announcement whether the dead were civilians or border troops. “Without regaining consciousness, they died from their gunshot wounds,” the statement said, adding that it had taken place on Thursday. Later on Friday, Uzbekistan’s border service said in a statement that its troops were “forced to use weapons in the prescribed manner” against men that it described as “violators” carrying a “large consignment of goods” into Uzbek territory.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The third long-duration astronaut team launched by SpaceX to the International Space Station (ISS) safely returned to Earth early on Friday, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida to end months of orbital research ranging from space-grown chilies to robots. The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule dubbed Endurance, carrying three U.S. NASA astronauts and a European Space Agency (ESA) crewmate from Germany, parachuted into calm seas in darkness at the conclusion of a 23-hour-plus autonomous flight home from the ISS.

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BELFAST (Reuters) - Sinn Fein, the former political wing of the IRA, sought to claim top spot in elections in British-controlled Northern Ireland for the first time on Friday, a historic power shift that could bring the once-remote prospect of a united Ireland closer. Pre-election polls indicated Sinn Fein was set to become the first Irish nationalist party to win the most seats in an election to the regional assembly since the state’s creation in 1921. Final results were not expected until late Friday or early Saturday.