International

The death toll from the Maui wildfires reached 89 on Saturday, making it the deadliest US wildfire in more than a century — and the total is likely to rise in coming days as search teams with cadaver dogs continue sifting through the ruins of Lahaina. The scale of the damage came into sharper focus, four days after a fast-moving blaze leveled …

PESHAWAR: The Pakistan Digital Census, 2023, has put the population of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa at 40.8 million recording an increase of 5.3 million at the growth rate of 2.3 per cent since 2017. The province’s population was 35.5 million in 2017, according to official figures. The census results show that KP’s more than 34 million population lives in rural areas, while …

LIN: Beneath the turquoise waters of Lake Ohrid, the “Pearl of the Balkans”, scientists have uncovered what may be one of Europe’s earliest sedentary communities, and are trying to solve the mystery of why it sheltered behind a fortress of defensive spikes. A stretch of the Albanian shore of the lake once hosted a settlement of stilt houses some 8,000 …

MOSCOW: Russia launched its first probe to the Moon in almost 50 years on Friday, a mission designed to give fresh impetus to its long-struggling space sector, which has been also hit by sanctions since the conflict in Ukraine. The launch of the Luna-25 probe is Moscow’s first lunar mission since 1976, when the USSR was a pioneer in the …

EL CAJON: California firefighters are using artificial intelligence to help spot wildfires, feeding video from more than 1,000 cameras strategically placed across the state into a machine that alerts first responders when to mobilise. In an example of the potential of the ALERTCalifornia AI programme launched last month, a camera spotted a fire that broke out at 3am local time …

WASHINGTON: The peculiar wobble of a subatomic particle called a muon in a US laboratory experiment is making scientists increasingly suspect they are missing something in their understanding of physics — perhaps some unknown particle or force. Researchers on Thursday announced new findings about the muon (pronounced MEW-on), a magnetic and negatively charged particle similar to its cousin the electron …

TULKARM: Israeli forces killed a Palestinian man during a raid in the occupied West Bank, his family said on Friday, as mourners gathered for the funeral. Mahmoud Jihad Jarad, 23, was shot dead by troops during an overnight raid on Tulkarm refugee camp in the northern West Bank, official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported. A family member, Iyad Abdulrahim Jarad, …

LONDON: More than 100,000 migrants have crossed the Channel on small boats from France to southeast England since Britain began publicly recording the arrivals in 2018, official figures revealed on Friday. Some 755 migrants were detected on Thursday on 14 small boats headed for England’s southern coast, the UK interior ministry statistics showed, the highest tally on a single day …

PARIS: The number of new Covid-19 cases reported worldwide rose by 80 per cent in the last month, the World Health Organisation said on Friday, days after designating a new “variant of interest”. The WHO declared in May that Covid is no longer a global health emergency, but has warned that the virus will continue to circulate and mutate, causing …

BEIRUT: At least 26 soldiers have been killed in an ambush by the militant Islamic State group in eastern Syria, a monitor said on Friday, the deadliest in a new wave of attacks blamed on the jihadists. Despite losing their last piece of territory in Syria in 2019, IS has maintained hideouts in the vast Syrian desert from which it …