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...

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan – After his wheat crop failed and wells dried up, Ghulam Abbas sold his animals and joined thousands of other farmers migrating to cities as Afghanistan’s worst drought in living memory ravages the war-torn country. A huge shortfall in snow and rain across much of the country over the normally wet colder months decimated the winter harvest, threatening the already precarious livelihoods of millions of farmers and sparking warnings of severe food shortages. Like hundreds of farming families in Charkint village in the normally fertile northern province of Balkh, Abbas, 45, has moved with 11 family members to the provincial capital Mazar-i-Sharif to find work. “I don’t remember a drought as severe as this year’s,” Abbas, who has been a farmer for more than three decades, told AFP. “We never had to leave our village or sell our animals because of a drought in the past.” As dry conditions and high temperatures persist, there are growing concerns about the spring and summer crops that will be harvested later this year. Afghanistan’s 2018 wheat harvest is already expected to be the lowest since at least 2011, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, set up by USAID in 1985. Faced with an estimated shortfall of 2.5 million tonnes of wheat this year, more than two million people could become “severely food insecure” and would be in “desperate...