Least developed countries

Malaysia said on May 17 that its foreign minister would meet his Indonesian and Thai counterparts to discuss the surge in stricken boatpeople from Bangladesh and Myanmar flooding to Southeast Asia.
 
Foreign Minister Anifah Aman was to meet Indonesia's Retno Marsudi in the Malaysian city of Kota Kinabalu on May 18, a government official said.
 

Sudan heads to the polls next week in elections widely expected to extend President Omar al-Bashir's quarter-century of rule, despite continued unrest and a faltering economy.

Bashir is facing 15 little-known challengers in the vote - which takes place over three days starting from April 13 - but main opposition parties are boycotting.

Leaders from Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan signed a cooperation deal on March 23 over a giant Ethiopian hydroelectric dam on a tributary of the river Nile, in a bid to ease tensions over regional water supplies.

The UN's health agency said Thursday that the scale of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has been vastly underestimated and "extraordinary measures" were needed to contain the disease.
      

The wreckage of the Air Algerie airliner carrying 116 people that disappeared early on Thursday has been found in a semidesert area in Mali near the border with Burkina Faso.

A statement from the Elysée Palace in Paris said the aircraft had been “clearly identified in a state of disintegration” and there were no survivors among the 110 passengers and six crew members.

Asylum application in Greece have climbed to nearly 9,000 over the past 12 months, while 926 people were granted refugee status on their first application, authorities said on Monday.