World

CARACAS, (Reuters) – Venezuela’s inflation soaring above 60 percent has boosted pressure on President Nicolas Maduro to speed up a transition toward a market-driven economy as the OPEC nation’s model of state-controlled socialism heads toward stagflation.

SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia, (Reuters) – United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon got an unusual treat for his 70th birthday yesterday when the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, presented him with a cake made with coca leaves.

GENEVA, (Reuters) – Hundreds of people were killed, many of them summarily executed, after Sunni Islamist militants overran the Iraqi city of Mosul this week, U.N.

BAGHDAD/ARBIL, (Reuters) – President Barack Obama yesterday threatened U.S. military strikes in Iraq against Sunni Islamist militants who have surged out of the north to menace Baghdad and want to establish their own state in Iraq and Syria.

KINGSTON, (Reuters) – The Jamaican government has decided to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana, joining the trickle of countries moving to soften laws on the drug known on the Caribbean island as “ganja.”

TIKRIT, Iraq, (Reuters) – Sunni rebels from an al Qaeda splinter group overran the Iraqi city of Tikrit yesterday and closed in on the biggest oil refinery in the country, making further gains in their rapid military advance against the Shi’ite-led government in Baghdad.

DAKAR, (Reuters) – Governments in West Africa should decriminalise drug use and treat the issue as a health problem, because a “war on drugs” will fail in the region as it has elsewhere, a new report by regional experts said on Thursday.

WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – A shock primary election defeat for Eric Cantor, the No.

MOSUL, Iraq, (Reuters) – An al Qaeda splinter group seized control of the Iraqi city of Mosul yesterday, putting security forces to flight in a spectacular show of strength against the Shi’ite-led Baghdad government.

WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia lost to a Tea Party challenger yesterday in a stunning Republican primary upset that sent shockwaves through Congress and gave the conservative movement a landmark victory.

BOGOTA, (Reuters) – Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos has begun exploratory peace talks with leftist ELN rebels, he said on Tuesday, just days before voters go to the polls in one of the tightest presidential election battles in decades.

TROUTDALE, Ore., (Reuters) – A gunman walked into an Oregon high school gym with a rifle and shot a student to death yesterday before he was found dead in a bathroom stall, in the third outbreak of gun violence to shake a U.S.

MOSUL, Iraq, (Reuters) – An al-Qaeda splinter group in Iraq seized control of the big northern city of Mosul today, putting security forces to flight in a spectacular show of strength against the Shi’ite-led Baghdad government.

KIEV (Reuters) – Ukraine said yesterday it had reached a “mutual understanding” with Moscow on parts of a plan proposed by President Petro Poroshenko for ending violence in the east of the country.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A political storm over the trade of five Taliban inmates for a captured American soldier intensified yesterday when Obama administration officials told US lawmakers that up to 90 people within the administration – but no members of Congress – were told in advance about the swap.

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – A married couple who shot dead two Las Vegas police officers in a weekend pizza parlour ambush harboured anti-government and white supremacist ideology and threw a swastika on the body of one of the officers they gunned down, police said yesterday.

FREETOWN (Reuters) – Sierra Leone’s president has sacked his chief of staff, accusing him of lack of transparency in a mining deal and involvement in the illegal export of timber from the country, the president’s office said in a statement yesterday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Hillary Clinton said the latest round of congressional investigations into the 2012 attacks on the US diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, would not deter her from seeking the presidency.

(Reuters) – Authorities in Canada and the United States were searching today for three fugitives who escaped from a Quebec jail in a helicopter, the second airborne prison break in the Canadian province in just over a year.

LAS VEGAS, (Reuters) – An armed man and woman shouting about a “revolution” opened fire and killed two Las Vegas policemen who were eating lunch in a pizza parlor on Sunday, then fatally shot a civilian in a nearby Wal-Mart store before killing themselves, police said.