International

WASHINGTON: The United States is working to assist 44 Americans who want to leave Afghanistan and several others detained by Taliban authorities, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday. Blinken was speaking before Congress where lawmakers from the rival Republican Party went on the offensive over the 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan and demanded the release of an internal dissent cable …

MOSCOW: Any attempt to arrest President Vladimir Putin after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for the Kremlin chief would amount to a declaration of war against Russia, his ally Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday. The ICC issued an arrest warrant on Friday, accusing Putin of the war crime of illegally deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine. It said there …

ISLAMABAD: Global trade was worth a record $32 trillion in 2022, but amid deteriorating economic conditions and rising uncertainties, growth turned negative in the second half of the year and is set to stagnate in the first half of 2023. The silver lining was the strong performance of trade in “green goods”, whose growth held strong throughout the year, says …

SHANGHAI: More than 400 people lost their billionaire status last year, most from China, as global monetary tightening, Covid-19 disruptions and Beijing’s crackdown on major tech companies hurt the super wealthy, a ranking of the world’s wealthiest showed. China lost 229 billionaires from the Hurun Global Rich List 2023, accounting for more than half of the 445 people who disappeared from …

NEW DELHI: Russia is unable to deliver vital defence supplies it had committed to India’s military because of the war in Ukraine, the Indian Air Force (IAF) says. New Delhi has been worried that Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 could affect military supplies from India’s largest source of defence equipment. The IAF statement is the first official confirmation …

KARACHI: The interim foreign minister of Afghanistan, Amir Khan Muttaqi, has once again asked the world to lift sanctions imposed on the country and expressed the willingness to work together with all nations, including the US. In an op-ed published in Al Jazeera, Mr Muttaqi, however, didn’t address the friction points — respecting the rights of Afghans, lifting curbs on women’s access to …

India’s parliament disqualified the leader of the opposition Congress party, Rahul Gandhi, on Friday, a day after a magistrate’s court jailed him for two years in a defamation case linked to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surname. Gandhi “stands disqualified from the membership of Lok Sabha”, a parliament notice said, referring to the lower house of parliament.     Gandhi, 52, was found …

LONDON: The UK on Wednesday launched an independent judge-led inquiry into alleged unlawful killings by members of the armed forces in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013. The inquiry will look at a number of detention operations and how allegations of wrongdoing were investigated by military police, in particular, whether there were any cover-ups. Launching the inquiry, senior judge Charles Haddon-Cave …

UNITED NATIONS: The future of humanity’s “lifeblood” — water — is under threat worldwide, the UN secretary-general warned on Wednesday at the opening of the global body’s first major meeting on water resources in nearly half a century. “We’ve broken the water cycle, destroyed ecosystems and contaminated groundwater,” Antonio Guterres said at the three-day summit in New York, which gathers …

VIENNA: Gustav Klimt’s well-known Attersee lake painting tilted by two degrees, Egon Schiele’s painting of a tree in late autumn rotated by five degrees. As part of the initiative “A Few Degrees More”, Vienna’s Leopold Museum has tilted 15 paintings by the number of degrees unchecked climate change could affect the landscapes depicted. The initiative, launched on Wednesday, comes after …