International

KABUL: The next round of negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government should be held at home, President Ashraf Ghani said on Monday, backing calls to move the talks from Qatar. The warring sides have been engaged in direct talks since September at a luxury hotel in Doha, where the Taliban have their political office. Negotiators from both sides …

LONDON: John Le Carre, the author of spy thrillers like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, has died aged 89. David Cornwell, known to the world as John le Carre, died after a short illness in Cornwall, south-western England, on Saturday evening. He is survived by his wife, Jane, and four sons. The family said in a brief statement he died of …

CALIFORNIA: Google services, including YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive, were restored for most users on Monday, following a global outage that affected thousands. Google’s website that logs outages said the services that were affected for nearly an hour should be restored for most users. The company has some of the most widely used services in the world. YouTube records over …

KHARTOUM: The United States on Monday removed Sudan from its state sponsors of terrorism blacklist and declared a “fundamental change” in relations, less than two months after the Arab nation pledged to normalise ties with Israel. The move opens the way for aid, debt relief and investment to a country going though a rocky political transition and struggling under a …

WASHINGTON: The United States on Monday for the first time accused Iran of direct involvement in the “probable death” of former FBI agent Bob Levinson, who vanished 13 years ago, and imposed sanctions on two intelligence agents. Releasing the finding a month before President-elect Joe Biden takes office, Donald Trump’s administration urged his successor to prioritise the release of at …

The United States imposed long-anticipated sanctions on Turkey on Monday over Ankara’s acquisition of Russian S-400 air defence systems, further complicating already strained ties between the two Nato allies. Turkey condemned the sanctions as a “grave mistake” and urged Washington to revise its “unjust decision”. It said sanctions would inevitably harm mutual relations and threatened unspecified retaliatory steps. Senior US …

A deputy governor of Kabul province and his aide were killed on Tuesday by a bomb in the Afghan capital, officials said, the latest in a wave of targeted killings in the country. Mahbobullah Mohebi was killed when a bomb attached to his vehicle detonated while he was on his way to his office, the interior ministry said. Mohebi’s secretary, …

BANGALORE: Autho­rities vowed to crack down on workers who went on a violent rampage at a Taiwanese-run iPhone factory in southern India over allegations of unpaid wages and exploitation, with 100 people arrested so far. The workers rioted on Saturday at Wistron Infocomm Manufacturing’s facility on the outskirts of Bangalore, India’s IT hub, with videos of the violence showing glass …

WASHINGTON: The Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine began leaving the company’s Michigan factory on Sunday, ready to be injected into the arms of millions of the most vulnerable Americans as the global death toll topped 1.6 million. Doses will be shipped out in boxes containing dry ice that are capable of staying at -70 degrees Celsius (-94 degrees Fahrenheit), the frigid temperature …

BEIJING: A confident-sounding Comm­unist Party of China spoke of a brighter future as it remembered the victims at a ceremony on Sunday on the 83rd anniversary of the Nanjing massacre. Over six weeks, Japanese troops raped and killed tens of thousands and by some estimates hundreds of thousands of people after conquering Nanjing, then the capital of China, on Dec …