International

WASHINGTON: Beijing-linked hackers accessed the email account of the US ambassador to China in an espionage operation thought to have compromised at least hundreds of thousands of US government emails, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. A spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington said China consistently opposed hacking and it rejected “groundless” speculation about the source of cyber-attacks. “China …

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Friday said it was ready to play its part in promoting a dialogue between Russia and Ukraine to bring the ongoing conflict between the two countries to an end. Foreign Office Spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch during a weekly press briefing noted that dialogue was necessary for the conflict to end. “Both Russia and Ukraine are our friends. …

There is limited political will in Sweden to ban Holy Quran desecrations that have upset large parts of the Muslim world, including Pakistan, and it would be complicated to do even if there were backing for such a move, experts and politicians said on Friday. The Swedish Embassy in Baghdad was stormed and set alight in the early hours of Thursday by …

JERUSALEM: The Israeli military may arrest reservists who have pledged not to report for duty as part of protests at the government’s judicial overhaul plans, Army Radio reported on Thursday after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded a crackdown. The seeping of the constitutional disputes into the conscript military has jarred Israelis who long saw it as an apolitical melting pot for a …

Middle East powerhouses Saudi Arabia and Iran have summoned Swedish diplomats to denounce Stockholm’s permission for protests that desecrate the Holy Quran on free speech grounds. The separate moves by both majority-Muslim countries, announced in statements late on Thursday, came amid heightened tensions between Sweden and Iraq over a Sweden-based Iraqi refugee who last month desecrated the Holy Quran outside Stockholm’s main …

Indian police have arrested four men accused of parading two women naked in front of a mob in a northeastern state where months of ethnic violence have left at least 120 dead. The suspects were identified from a video clip of the incident in early May that went viral on social media on Wednesday, causing outrage across the country. “Four main accused arrested in …

WASHINGTON: The top Republican in the US House of Representatives said on Thursday he did not promise Donald Trump that he would pass a measure aimed at expunging the former president’s two impeachments. “There’s no deal,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told NBC following a report by the Politico news outlet that he had made such an agreement with Trump, the current front-runner for his …

MUMBAI: At least 16 people were killed on Thursday after a landslide smashed into their village in India’s Maharashtra state, officials said, with locals fearing the toll could rise significantly. India’s National Disaster Response Force said that 16 people had been killed and that they had called off the rescue operations because of continuous rains and “threat of further landslide”. …

WASHINGTON: A senior US Army official on Thursday expressed deep concern about the fate of an American soldier held by North Korea. Private Second Class Travis King was due to return to the United States to face disciplinary consequences earlier this week after serving jail time in South Korea when he left the airport, joined a tour of the border and …

PARIS: When a Nasa spacecraft successfully knocked an asteroid off course last year it sent dozens of boulders skittering into space, images from the Hubble telescope showed on Thursday. Nasa’s fridge-sized DART probe smashed into the pyramid-sized, rugby ball-shaped asteroid Dimorphos roughly 11 million kilometres from Earth in September last year. The spacecraft knocked the asteroid significantly off course in …