International

There could be some progress within weeks in resolving a three year-long rift between Gulf Arab states, a senior United States State Department official said on Wednesday, citing signs of “flexibility” in negotiations. The dispute dates from 2017 when the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt imposed a boycott on Qatar, severing diplomatic and transport ties and accusing it …

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump admits he tried to minimise the lethal threat of coronavirus at the outset of the pandemic in audio recordings released on Wednesday from interviews with veteran US journalist Bob Woodward. “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump said in an interview with Woodward on March 19, according to a CNN preview of the book Rage, due to …

NEW DELHI: Indian and Chinese troops were facing off on Wednesday, barely a few hundred metres apart, in a remote Himalayan region where shots were fired for the first time in decades, Indian officials said. The nuclear-armed neighbours have accused each other of firing in the air during a fresh flare-up in the Ladakh region on Monday, violating long-standing protocols to avoid …

CAIRO: Saudi Arabia told an Arab League meeting on Wednesday it supports all efforts to reach a comprehensive solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But a statement released by the Saudi foreign ministry on remarks made by Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud included no direct mention of a normalisation deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. The prince said Riyadh …

WASHINGTON: The US announced a sharp cut on Wednesday to troop numbers in Iraq, as President Donald Trump seeks to honour his pledge to halt the country’s “endless wars” overseas, with just two months to go until the election. The move, reducing the Pentagon’s footprint in Iraq from 5,200 military personnel to just 3,000, and an expected parallel announcement on …

KABUL: Afghanistan’s vice president Amrullah Saleh sustained minor injuries on Wednesday when an explosion targeted his convoy and killed at least 10 people, as government-backed negotiators and the Taliban prepared to meet in Doha for long-delayed peace talks. The attack in the capital Kabul was quickly condemned as an attempt to frustrate the peace process, with top Afghan and foreign …

The Indian air force inducted into service five French-made Rafale fighter jets on Thursday amid heightened tensions with China along their disputed frontier. New Delhi has sent reinforcements of fighter jets and military equipment to the Ladakh region after the tense standoff there escalated to hand-to-hand combat between Indian and Chinese soldiers on June 15 that left 20 Indians dead. At the ceremony at …

Pakistan’s Defense and Foreign Policy Community Offers a limited Worldview: Ayesha Siddiqa By: Qaisar Abbas Washington: Known defense analyst and scholar on South Asia, Ayesha Siddiqa has said the defense and foreign policy community in Pakistan lacks independent thinking and diversity of viewpoints. “With this methodology, only a limited perspective can be promoted in developing defense and foreign policy, which …

MINSK: Belarus on Tuesday said it had detained a leading opposition figure, Maria Kolesnikova, as she tried to flee across the Ukrainian border but Kiev said she was being held after resisting a forced deportation. There were conflicting reports of whether Kolesnikova was trying to leave Belarus or being removed, with some saying she had torn up her passport to …

BEIJING: China’s leaders held a triumphant ceremony to celebrate beating the coronavirus on Tuesday, as billions of people around the world still suffer the fallout from the pandemic and the global death toll nears 900,000. The upbeat mood in Beijing comes as concerns grow about a resurgence of Covid-19 across Europe, with France tightening restrictions, cases in Britain spiking and …