1 January 2017 By Secretary-General António Guterres On my first day as Secretary-General of the United Nations, one question weighs heavily on my heart. How can we help the millions of people caught up in conflict, suffering massively in wars with no end in sight? Civilians are pounded with deadly force. Women, children and men are killed and injured, forced ...

HEIDELBERG: An Afghan migrant attacked a Bible-reading woman in a refugee camp in Austria, it has been reported. The 50-year-old woman was reportedly attacked by a 22-year-old Afghan migrant whose identity has not been disclosed by the authorities yet. According to the local media reports, citing the police authorities, the man has confessed he attacked the woman and described ‘personal ...

TURKEY: At least one gunman shot his way into an Istanbul nightclub packed with hundreds of New Year’s revellers on Sunday, killing 35 people and wounding more than 40 in what the provincial governor described as a terrorist attack. One assailant shot a police officer and a civilian as he entered the Reina nightclub before opening fire at random inside, ...

Several hundred Iraqi Christians flocked on Saturday to a northern town recently retaken from Islamic State, celebrating Christmas for the first time since 2013, their joy tainted with sadness over the desecration of their church. Once home to thousands of Assyrian Christians, Bartella emptied in August 2014 when it fell to Islamic State’s blitz across large parts of Iraq and ...

Security for the long Christmas weekend was heightened throughout Italy and at the Vatican on Saturday following the killing by police of the man believed to be responsible for the Berlin market truck attack. As investigators sought to determine if Anis Amri had accomplices in Italy, and associates of the 24-year-old were arrested in his home country of Tunisia, national ...

Tunisia arrested the nephew of the suspected Berlin truck attacker and two other jihadist suspects who are “connected” to the Tunisian assailant Anis Amri, the interior ministry said Saturday. A statement said the three suspects, aged between 18 and 27, were arrested on Friday and were members of a “terrorist cell… connected to the terrorist Anis Amri”. It made no ...

Romanian lawmakers are poised to elect the EU’s first Muslim prime minister in a surprise appointment that comes despite a rising tide of anti-Muslim sentiment elsewhere on the continent. Sevil Shhaideh, a 52-year-old member of the Tatar Muslim minority and a low-key former public administration minister, was proposed by her political mentor Liviu Dragnea, leader of the left-leaning PSD party, ...

A Muslim girl refused to shake the hand of the German president despite him visiting her school to praise students for integrating migrants so well. Footage has emerged of the visit of Joachim Gauck to the Theodor Heuss School in Offenbach at the end of last month. It shows him arriving at the school in his official car with students ...

Tunisian anti-terrorism police were on Wednesday questioning the family of Anis Amri, the prime suspect in the deadly truck assault on a Berlin Christmas market, a security official told AFP. “A unit of the anti-terrorism brigade has questioned the suspect’s family,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. German prosecutors on Wednesday named 24-year-old Tunisian national Amri as their ...

The United Nation Secretary General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan Tadamichi Yamamoto has said the Taliban group must reconsider the notion of achieving objectives on the battlefield. Briefing the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), Mr. Yamamoto said “Once again, I call upon the Taliban to commit to direct talks with the Afghan Government, without preconditions.” He said “The Taliban leadership must ...