A three-member Taliban team has arrived in Kabul to begin a prisoner exchange process, which is likely to kickstart talks between the group and negotiators named by the Afghan government to end the country's 18-year war.

After weeks of back and forth, the process is set to begin with the arrival of the Taliban team, which will set up camp at a luxury hotel in Kabul. "In this regard, they will do a kind of deal with the opposite side (Afghan government)," Mujahid said. "Their practical work would start in coming days."

Born in Homs in 1989, Syrian artist Nour Zantah watched the violation of her country in the opening months of the civil war. Nour revisits her city by communicating important issues through her art, which combines her creative forces with personal narratives.

ADDIS ABABA — Ethiopia has postponed parliamentary elections scheduled for August due to the coronavirus outbreak, the electoral board said on Tuesday, a move endorsed by some key opposition parties.

The vote had been regarded as an important test of the reformist agenda of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in what was once one of the continent's most repressive nations.

William Davison, the International Crisis Group think tank's senior analyst for Ethiopia, said the election postponement could be used to strengthen Ethiopian democracy.

The Rev. Joseph E. Lowery fought to end segregation, lived to see the election of the country’s first black president and echoed the call for “justice to roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream” in America.

WASHINGTON – The Trump administration on Tuesday offered to begin lifting Venezuela sanctions if the opposition and members of President Nicolas Maduro’s Socialist Party form an interim government without him, marking a shift in a U.S. policy that has failed to end his grip on power.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo formally announced the administration’s power-sharing “Democratic Transition Framework” for Venezuela, which proposes for the first time a “sequenced exit path” from tough U.S. sanctions, including on the vital oil sector, if Maduro and his allies cooperate. 

LA PAZ – A former Bolivian interior minister known as “Minister for Cocaine” for his role in turning the impoverished nation into a narco-state during a military dictatorship in the 1980s has died after decades in prison, local media said on Tuesday, citing a Bolivian government minister.

Government opponents and human rights activists have welcomed a decision by Uganda’s constitutional court to overturn legislation that gave police “supernatural powers” to stop public gatherings and protests.

The court’s judges declared section 8 of Uganda’s Public Order Management Act illegal and unconstitutional.

The police used the law to brutally disperse rallies organized by opposition politician Kizza Besigye in the lead-up to the 2016 elections, and more recently to block meetings and concerts by pop star turned politician Bobi Wine.

The Hague ordered the Dutch state to pay compensation to victims of colonial massacres in the 1940s.

Andi Monji, 83, who traveled to the Netherlands to tell his story to the court, was awarded €10,000 (£9,000) while eight widows and three children of other executed men, mainly farmers, were awarded compensation of between €123.48 and €3,634 for loss of income.

Idlib, Syria – Everything Fatima Um Ali needs to protect herself and her family from the novel coronavirus is out of reach. There is no running water, soap is expensive, and hand sanitizer is an unaffordable luxury. She cannot even imagine what social distancing for her family of 16 would look like in the three tents they share in a makeshift camp near the Turkish-Syrian border.

"We try with our limited capabilities to keep clean. All those sanitizers, cleaning materials that you are talking about, we can't get," Um Ali tells CNN.

The Taliban has refused to negotiate with a team announced by the Afghan government, the armed group's spokesman has said, in a potential setback to the next steps in the United States-brokered peace process.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said on Saturday the group will not negotiate with the 21-member team as it was not selected in a way that included "all Afghan factions."

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