ISTANBUL (AP) — Turkey will no longer hold high-level talks with neighboring Greece, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday amid rising tensions between the traditional rivals. Ankara resumed negotiations with Athens last year following a five-year break to address differences over a range of issues such as mineral exploration in the eastern Mediterranean and rival claims in the Aegean Sea. “We broke off our high-level strategy council meetings with Greece,” Erdogan told a meeting of his party’s lawmakers in Ankara, adding: “Don’t you learn any lessons from history? Don’t try to dance with Turkey.”

 

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DAKAR (Reuters) - Over 500 civilians died in attacks carried out by armed forces and takfiri groups in Mali from January to March this year, the United Nations said in a report that detailed a rapid unravelling of an already desperate security situation. The killings represented a 324% rise over the previous quarter and highlighted the failure of Mali’s military junta to limit human rights abuses or stop groups linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State from carrying out campaigns of violence. They come just as Mali cuts ties with former colonial power France and as Wagner Group, a Russian private military contractor, steps in to help defeat militants who have carried out attacks in the centre and north for nearly a decade.

 

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SAN ISIDRO DEL PALMAR, Mexico (AP) — Hurricane Agatha caused flooding and mudslides that killed at least 11 people and left 20 missing, the governor of the southern state of Oaxaca said. Gov. Alejando Murat said rivers overflowed their banks and swept away people in homes, while other victims were buried under mud and rocks. “There were fundamentally two reasons” for the deaths, Murat told local media. “There were rivers that overflowed, and on the other hand, and the most serious part, were landslides.”

 

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KIGALI (Reuters) - Rwanda will retaliate if it suffers further attacks from neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, its foreign minister said, after accusing Congo of firing shells across the border earlier this month. Congo summoned Rwanda’s ambassador and suspended RwandAir flights to Congo over the weekend in response to what it said was Kigali’s support for M23 rebels carrying out a military offensive in its eastern borderlands. Rwanda denies the claims and has in turn accused Congo’s army of fighting alongside the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, an armed group founded by ethnic Hutus who fled Rwanda after participating in the 1994 genocide.

 

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LONDON (Reuters) - Britain aims to send a first group of asylum seekers to Rwanda in two weeks’ time as part of a policy which the government says is designed to break people-smuggling networks and stem the flow of migrants across the Channel. In April, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government announced plans to send some of the people who seek asylum in Britain to Rwanda in a plan that drew criticism from both within and outside Johnson’s Conservative Party as well as from many charities. The Home Office said that an initial group of migrants have started to receive formal letters telling them they are being sent to Rwanda to “rebuild their lives in safety”.