International

SEOUL: The Republic of Korea is ready at anytime to facilitate a third Trump-Kim summit and ensure its success, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said on Thursday. Speaking to senior editors of the Asia News Networkon the eve of the network’s 20th anniversary, Moon said that he would do everything to ensure the success of any future meetings between the sitting …

United States’ attempts to drive Iranian oil exports down to zero come against the backdrop of a global market that is sufficiently well supplied to avoid price disruptions, senior US officials said on Thursday. “There’s roughly a million barrels per day (bpd) of Iranian crude (exports) left, and there is plenty of supply in the market to ease that transition …

Sri Lankan authorities swept up more people, including foreigners, for questioning on Thursday as they probed deeper into the Easter Sunday bombings, which killed 359 people in potentially the deadliest operation claimed by the militant Islamic State. Police said an Egyptian and several Pakistanis were among those detained overnight, although there was no immediate suggestion they had direct links to the …

China is leading the United States in a race to deploy hyper sonic missiles that would defeat existing air defense systems, according to senior US officials. The combination of speed, manoeuvrability and altitude of these missiles makes them difficult to track and intercept. They travel at speeds of more than five times the speed of sound or about 6,200 kilometers …

The first five presidents of the International Criminal Court’s oversight body on Thursday called for a review of the institution’s functioning, following its April 12 decision not to investigate possible war crimes committed during the 17-year Afghan war, allegedly by militants, the US army, Central Intelligence Agency and Afghan armed forces. According to the United Nations, at least 32,000 civilians …

Sri Lankan Defence Secretary Hemasiri Fernando told Reuters on Thursday that he had resigned, taking responsibility for the suicide bomber attacks on the country last Sunday. He said that while there had been no failure on his own part, he was taking responsibility for failures of some institutions he headed as the secretary of defence. He said that security agencies were actively …

WASHINGTON: US Spe­cial Represen­tative Zalmay Khalilzad said on Thursday that a hike in civilian casualties in Afghanistan indicated that this war has “gone too long”. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reported on Wednesday that in the first quarter of 2019, there were 1,773 civilian casualties in Afghanistan — 581 deaths and 1,192 injured. The UN also reported 582 child …

VLADIVOSTOK: North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin vowed to seek closer ties as they met for the first time on Thursday, in talks aimed at countering US influence. Putin emerged from the meeting in Russia’s Vladivostok saying that like Washington, Moscow supports efforts to reduce tensions on the Korean peninsula and prevent nuclear conflicts. But he insisted that …

BEIRUT: The US-backed assault to drive the IS from its Syrian capital Raqqa in 2017 killed more than 1,600 civilians, 10 times the toll the coalition itself has acknowledged, Amnesty International and the monitoring group Airwars said on Thursday. Amnesty and Airwars, a London-based group set up in 2014 to monitor the impact of the US-led campaign against the IS, …

KARACHI: Another Pakistani fisherman has died in an Indian jail within a month, leaving the fisherfolk community in the grip of fear and panic as more than 100 of them are languishing in Indian prisons. The spokesman for the Fishermen Cooperative Society (FCS) said that they received information about the death of Sohail Rasheed from authorities on Thursday afternoon. Rasheed …