Bogota mayor Carlos Fernando Galan has called on the Chinese-led consortium building the city’s first metro line to send more workers to its stations, after the country’s top auditor warned that delays in several parts of the project could push back its opening in March 2028. “We are entering a critical stage, which is the final stretch,” Galan said in an interview published by local news magazine Semana on Monday. “We have to ask Metro Linea 1 to get moving and put more staff in the...

The International Criminal Court on Monday unsealed arrest warrants against four senior Taliban leaders, accusing them of the crime against humanity of gender persecution against women, girls and members of the LGBTQ community in Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power in 2021. The court said in a statement that warrants were issued in July and September last year for the Taliban’s supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, and the head of Afghanistan’s Supreme Court, Abdul Hakim Haqqani. Also...

Quebec separatists eyed a return to power in Canada’s majority French-speaking province on Monday in an election that could test Prime Minister Mark Carney’s message of national unity to confront the United States. Carney is popular in Quebec and the possible success of the separatist Parti Quebecois (PQ) is not seen as a repudiation of his stance towards US President Donald Trump, whose trade war and annexation threats have infuriated Canadians. Instead, the PQ’s rise after 12 years in...

Moscow on Monday downplayed reports that a laboratory technician had died of plague, stressing that postmortem tests had not detected the disease, while Washington said it was closely monitoring the situation. Reports on Friday that plague had killed a 28-year-old woman named Darya Shipilova, who had been working for the anti-plague institute in Siberia’s Irkutsk region, sparked alarm. The news outlet People of Baikal, citing unnamed sources close to the regional security services, said she may...

The US Energy Department will announce US$150 million in new funding for power lines in Alaska on Monday as Vice-President J.D. Vance visits the state, where Republicans are ‌fighting to hold a critical Senate seat in the November midterm elections. Vance is set to rally voters for Republican Senator Dan Sullivan, who is locked in a tight re-election battle with Democrat Mary Peltola. Flipping the seat is key to the Democratic Party’s strategy to take control of the US Senate and recent polls...

A school bus flipped over onto its roof during a multivehicle crash in central Florida on Monday morning, killing two people – including a 10th grade girl – and injuring several others, authorities said. Some 39 people were on the school bus that was headed to Winter Haven High School in Winter Haven when an oncoming car crossed the centre line and caused the crash, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said at a news conference. “It was a horrible crash,” Judd said. “It was a terrible, tragic morning....

For more than eight decades, the remains of US fighter pilot Morton Sher lay unrecovered in China. A photograph of a memorial to him in a Hunan village eventually helped investigators find where his plane crashed in 1943. Sher was buried in his hometown of Greenville, South Carolina, in December 2025, a homecoming that offers a rare example of what US-China cooperation can achieve for families of missing servicemen. That cooperation has now drawn fresh attention. After the recent summit between...