Briefly

MALI

25 soldiers killed in attack by gunmen

Twenty-five Malian soldiers were killed and six injured in an apparent extremist attack on Monday, the government said, in the latest bout of violence to hit the war-torn West African state. A dozen assailants were also "neutralized", the government said in a statement, during what it called a "terrorist attack" on a military base in the northern town of Bamba. A local official said the attackers arrived on motorbikes and in cars. Mali has been struggling to contain an extremist revolt that first broke out in the north in 2012, and has since spread to the center of the country and neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger.

AUSTRALIA

Pell freed after child sex abuse acquittal

Cardinal George Pell was released from prison on Tuesday, hours after Australia's High Court quashed his conviction for child sex abuse, bringing to an abrupt end the most high-profile pedophilia case faced by the Catholic Church. The 78-year-old left Barwon Prison near Melbourne after the court overturned five counts of sexually abusing two 13-year-old choirboys in the 1990s. Pell, who had steadfastly maintained his innocence throughout a lengthy court process, left the jail where he had been held for the past year and issued a statement saying that a "serious injustice" had been remedied by the decision.

AFGHANISTAN

Taliban to end talks over prisoner swap

The Taliban will no longer participate in "fruitless" discussions with the Afghan government over a prisoner swap that had formed a key part of a deal with the United States, the insurgents said. In a tweet first sent in the Pashto language on Tuesday, the Taliban's political spokesman Suhail Shaheen blamed the administration of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani for delaying the prisoner release "under one pretext or another". The two foes have been holding talks in Kabul since last week to try to finalize the prisoner swap that was originally supposed to have happened by March 10.

VANUATU

Cyclone Harold tears into Pacific nation

Tropical Cyclone Harold lashed the South Pacific island of Vanuatu for a second day on Tuesday, ripping off roofs and downing telecommunications, and was moving toward Fiji where it is expected to slightly weaken. The powerful cyclone made landfall on Monday in Sana province, an island north of Vanuatu's capital Port Vila, with winds as high as 235 kilometers per hour knocking out communications overnight, according to reports by the government's disaster and weather bureaus. The winds blew roofs off houses, tore down trees and destroyed a council building in Luganville, which has a population of 16,000, according to a Radio New Zealand report.

UNITED STATES

White supremacists branded as terrorists

The United States on Monday designated the ultranationalist Russian Imperial Movement group as a terrorist organization, in what the State Department called the first such move against a white supremacist group. Monday's measure came after the State Department in its latest annual terrorism report in November said ethnically and racially driven terrorism had risen alarmingly in 2018 both worldwide and in the US. The Russian Imperial Movement's members cast themselves as Russian Orthodox nationalists who favor restoring the monarchy and privileging the interests of ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians.

Agencies - Xinhua