Two Rohingya women killed as Myanmar army shells village: MP

YANGON • Two women, one of them pregnant, were killed and seven other people injured after Myanmar troops shelled a Rohingya village last Saturday, according to a lawmaker and a villager, two days after the United Nations' highest court ordered the country to protect the minority group.

Mr Maung Kyaw Zan, a national Member of Parliament for Buthidaung township in northern Rakhine state, said shells fired from a nearby battalion hit Kin Taung village in the middle of the night.

The military denied responsibility, blaming instead rebels who they said attacked a bridge in the early hours of the morning.

REUTERS

Israel's PM and his opponent to meet Trump on Mid-East peace plan

JERUSALEM • Israeli centrist party leader Benny Gantz says he has accepted an invitation to meet US President Donald Trump in Washington today to discuss a peace plan for the Middle East.

Mr Gantz is the main political rival of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is also travelling to Washington to meet Mr Trump.

Mr Trump had invited both of them to hear details of the White House's long-delayed peace plan ahead of an Israeli election in March, the third in less than a year.

REUTERS

Germany warns of mass exit of Jews if anti-Semitism persists

FRANKFURT • Foreign Minister Heiko Maas warned yesterday that Jews could leave Germany on a "massive" scale if urgent action was not taken to stem rising anti-Semitism.

Writing in Der Spiegel weekly on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, Mr Maas said anti-Jewish insults and attacks, in real life and online, had become "a daily occurrence". Almost one in two Jews has considered leaving Germany, he said, a country that has long taken pains to confront its Nazi past.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE