International

KHARTOUM: Sudan’s Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok has said that normalising ties with Israel is a “complicated” issue needing wide debate within society, media reported on Sunday. Earlier this month, Israel signed US-brokered deals to normalise ties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. The administration of US President Donald Trump wants Sudan to follow suit, and Secretary of State Mike …

PORTLAND: Police clashed with anti-racism protesters and pushed back members of the press in downtown Portland, Oregon, into early Sunday morning, making more than 20 arrests. The violence followed a relatively peaceful rally by the right-wing Proud Boys group and counter protests by anti-fascist and Black Lives Matter activists on Saturday. Videos published online showed police pushing protesters and photographers …

PARIS: French investigators were on Sunday studying a video claiming responsibility for the meat cleaver attack in Paris that targeted satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo as the government condemned an act of “Islamist terrorism”. Eight people were still under arrest, including the suspected perpetrator of Friday’s attack that left two badly wounded outside Charlie Hebdo’s former offices in Paris. The man is 18 years old, born in …

NEW DELHI: Former Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh, who brought New Delhi and Islamabad tantalisingly close to a peace deal over Kashmir in Agra, died here on Sunday at the age of 82. Mr Singh had been in coma from a fall at his home in August 2014. That was a few months after losing the Lok Sabha election as …

SEOUL: North Korea on Sunday warned the South Korean navy to stop crossing into its territorial waters as ships search for the body of a Seoul official shot dead at sea by Pyongyang’s soldiers. State media said the North will begin its own search for the body and warned that the South’s naval operations threatened to raise tensions. The fisheries …

TAIPEI: The dispute over international organisations referring to Taiwan as Chinese has moved from wild bird conservation to climate change, after a global alliance of mayors began listing Taiwanese cities as belonging to China on its website. China has ramped up pressure on international groups and companies to refer to democratic, self-ruled Taiwan as being part of China, to the …

China’s capital Beijing will protect whistleblowers who disclose information about public health emergencies, it said on Sunday, part of the country’s efforts to fix some of the systemic faults that hindered its initial response to the Covid-19 outbreak. The Beijing city government said it would offer rewards to health workers who disclose vital information about any imminent health emergency, and …

MADRID: Protesters hit the streets of Madrid against virus restrictions on Sunday, a day before a partial lockdown is extended to more areas of Spain’s capital region try to curb a surge in coronavirus cases. The city with its surrounding region is at the epicentre of a second wave of infections sweeping Spain. Covid-19 has already claimed more than 31,000 …

Fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan broke out on Sunday around the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh and the Armenian Defence Ministry said two Azerbaijani helicopters were shot down. Ministry spokeswoman Shushan Stepanyan also said Armenian forces hit three Azerbaijani tanks. There was no immediate word on casualties. Nagorno-Karabakh is an ethnic Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan that has been out of Azerbaijan’s …

United States President Donald Trump on Saturday nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, and she pledged to become a justice in the mold of the late staunch conservative Antonin Scalia, setting another milestone in Trump’s rightward shift of the top US judicial body. Trump’s announcement during a flag-festooned White House Rose Garden ceremony — with Barrett, 48, by …