Author: Himalaya Post

BEIRUT – The death toll of an explosion at a weapons depot in northwestern Syria has risen to 69, mostly civilians including 17 children, a monitor said Monday as search operations continued. Sunday’s blast of unknown origin in the town of Sarmada in Idlib province took the lives of 52 civilians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The explosion also killed 17 members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a jihadist-led alliance, according to the Britain-based monitor, which relies on a network of sources inside Syria. “Rescue operations are still ongoing,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP, more than 24 hours after the blast at the depot inside a residential building. Most of the civilians killed were family members of HTS fighters displaced to the area from the central province of Homs, he said. HTS controls more than half of Idlib province and is led by jihadists from Syria’s former Al-Qaeda affiliate.Most of the rest is held by rebels, while the regime also holds a slither of the province’s southeast. The Islamic State jihadist group also has sleeper cells in the area.In recent months, a series of explosions and assassinations — mainly targeting rebel officials and fighters — have rocked the province. While some attacks have been claimed by IS, most are the result of infighting since last year between other groups. Regime forces have in the past week...

SEOUL –  North and South Korea agreed Monday to hold a summit in Pyongyang in September after high-level talks in the Demilitarized Zone that divides the peninsula. The two sides “agreed at the meeting to hold a South-North summit in Pyongyang in September as planned”, the joint statement said, without giving a precise date. A trip by the South’s President Moon Jae-in to the North’s capital would be the first such visit for more than a decade, as the diplomatic thaw on and around the peninsula builds. But despite the rapprochement, international sanctions against the North for its nuclear and missile programmes have kept economic cooperation between the two Koreas from taking off, while little progress has been made on the key issue of Pyongyang’s denuclearisation. “The September summit can be viewed as North Korea’s strategy to find a breakthrough in its stalled talks with the US,” said Asan Institute of Policy Studies analyst Go Myong-hyun. “For South Korea, President Moon wants to improve inter-Korean ties but that’s hard without progress in US-North Korea talks,” he told AFP. At the historic first summit between Moon and the North’s leader Kim Jong Un in Panmunjom in April they agreed the South’s president would visit Pyongyang during the autumn. The first South Korean president to go to the North’s capital was Kim Dae-jung, who met the current leader’s father and predecessor...