INTERNATIONAL

The police HQ in the strategic Afghan town of Sangin remains under siege after a Taliban attack, officials say. But there are conflicting reports as to who controls the remote district in Helmand province. The Helmand governor and police dismissed Taliban reports that it now controlled Sangin as “totally false”. Sangin has fallen under Taliban control several times, and fighting ...

Hundreds of rescue workers are looking for survivors after a landslide hit 33 buildings in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. Seven people were pulled from the rubble with minor injuries but 85 are still missing. About 900 were evacuated as the landslide struck on Sunday. Authorities said a huge man-made mound of earth and construction debris lost stability and ...

A suicide vehicle bomb attack on a patrol near a base at Bagram in eastern Afghanistan has killed six foreign soldiers and injured six other people. Nato, which leads the international force in Afghanistan, did not give the nationalities of the victims. In a separate incident, the US embassy said a US citizen had been killed in the capital Kabul. ...

Spain faces political uncertainty after two new movements won nearly a third of the seats in the country’s election. Anti-austerity party Podemos and liberal Ciudadanos made big gains as the conservative Popular Party (PP) lost its majority. “Spain is not going to be the same anymore and we are very happy,” said Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias. The PP and the ...

An Air France passenger jet was forced to make an emergency landing in Kenya after a fake bomb was found in a toilet, the airline says. The Boeing 777, on its way from Mauritius to Paris, was evacuated at Mombasa airport and the suspicious device taken away for examination. Air France chief Frederic Gagey later said it was made of ...

The youngest convict in the notorious 2012 Delhi gang rape case has been released from a correctional centre, his lawyer has told the BBC. Legal challenges and protests from the victim’s parents failed to prevent the release. The rapist, who cannot be named as he was a minor at the time of the crime, was sentenced to three years in ...

China has accused the US of “serious provocation” after it flew B-52 bombers near one of the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Chinese military personnel were put on “high alert” during the incident on 10 December, and issued warnings to leave. The Pentagon said it was looking into the complaint. China claims large swathes of the South ...

A new global temperature forecast from the UK’s Met Office says that 2016 is likely to be even warmer than 2015. This year has already been provisionally declared the warmest on record thanks to a combination of global warming and a strong El Nino. The Met Office believes that temperatures in 2016 could be 1.1C above pre-industrial levels. Last week ...

Mobile phone companies in Brazil have been ordered by a court to impose a block of the popular WhatsApp smartphone application for two days. A court in Sao Paulo state made the order because it said WhatsApp had repeatedly failed to co-operate in a criminal investigation. It is not clear if mobile companies will fully comply with the order. Facebook ...

The impacts stemming from the big earthquakes that struck Nepal earlier this year could have been much, much worse, say scientists. An international team has just published a review of the events, showing the number of landslides was far lower than people had feared. And the group could find no evidence of Himalayan glacial lakes suffering significant damage – a ...