International

PORTLAND: Britain on Monday began housing migrants on board a barge docked off the southwest English coast, in its latest controversial immigration policy that has drawn heavy criticism from locals and rights campaigners. The “Bibby Stockholm”, which has been moored for weeks in Portland on the Dorset coastline, accepted the first of up to 500 young, male inhabitants due to …

ISLAMABAD: Days after India blamed Pakistan for not creating a conducive environment for talks, the Foreign Office, in its rejoinder has put the onus on New Delhi for creating an environm­ent for dialogue and peace in the region. Addressing the weekly press briefing on Monday, Foreign Office Spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said dialogue was important between Pakistan and India in an environment …

DUBAI: More than 3,000 United States military personnel have arrived in the Red Sea aboard two warships as part of a ‘beefed up response’ from Washington after tanker seizures by Iran, the US Navy said on Monday. The deployment adds to a growing US military buil­dup in tense Gulf waterways vital to the global oil trade and led Tehran on …

WASHINGTON: The United States said on Monday that Washington does comment on “obviously unfounded” cases, but former prime minister Imran Khan’s arrest in the Toshakhana case was not one of those. US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller made these comments at a news briefing in Washington where he had to face a number of probing questions about the PTI chairman’s arrest and Washington’s refusal …

ISLAMABAD: South Asia has the highest percentage of children ex­­p­osed to extreme high temperatures, compared to all other regions, according to a Unicef analysis released on Monday. Unicef estimates that 76 per cent of children under-18 in South Asia — 460 million — are exposed to extreme high temperatures where 83 or more days in a year exceed 35 degree …

NEW DELHI: Hindus and Muslims have clashed in the Indian state of Haryana a week after violence erupted during a Hindu procession in a Muslim neighbourhood, with a tomb and several vehicles torched and shops ransacked, police said on Monday. At least seven people have been killed in the clashes, including the cleric of a mosque set on fire last week in …

Much of the eastern United States was lashed with intense storms on Monday, leaving at least two people dead, hundreds of thousands without power, and thousands of flights canceled or delayed. Millions of people were under severe weather alerts, including tornado watches, as rain, strong winds, and hail swept east along nearly the entire eastern seaboard, from Alabama to New …

Rescue workers combed through the rubble of damaged buildings in the city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday, the day after Russian strikes killed at least seven people. Pokrovsk sits just 50 kilometres from the eastern frontline, where Moscow says it is gaining ground and repelling Ukrainian attacks. Two missiles — launched 40 minutes apart — damaged residential buildings, …

WASHINGTON: US scientists responsible for a historic nuclear fusion breakthrough say they have repeated the feat, this time achieving a greater yield of energy. “We can confirm the experiment produced a higher yield than the December 2022 experiment,” public information officer Paul Rhien said on Monday in an emailed statement, without disclosing specific figures. He added the California lab planned …

TOKYO: Japan on Sunday marked the 78th anniversary of the US atomic bombing on Hiroshima, where its mayor urged the abolition of nuclear weapons and called the Group of Seven leaders’ notion of nuclear deterrence a “folly”. The day to commemorate the victims of the world’s first nuclear attack comes as Russia has raised the spectre of using nuclear weapons …