International

KABUL: The main spokesman for Afghanis­tan’s Taliban administration will move his office from the capital to the city of Kandahar, the information ministry said, a sign of the growing importance of the region that is home to its supreme leader. The province of Kandahar is the historical birthplace of the Taliban movement. Supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada lives there and rarely …

PARIS: France’s public health watchdog said on Thursday that mass testing of drinking water revealed traces from a banned pesticide in half the samples, showing how potentially harmful chemicals persist in the environment. The National Agency for Food, Environment and Workplace Security (Anses) began a testing regime in 2019 to identify around 200 complex chemical compounds originating from pesticides or …

NEW DELHI: India and China broke into fresh diplomatic sparring on Thurs­day, accusing each other of creating visa hassles for their journalists posted in New Delhi and Beijing. The exchange came days after India objected to China renaming or “standardising” names of 11 locations in the eastern state of Arunchal Pradesh, which China calls southern Tibet and claims as its …

Israeli police arrested more than 350 people during the early hours of Wednesday after clashes at Jerusalem’s flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque, a police spokesperson said. In a statement, police said they had “arrested and removed over 350 individuals that violently barricaded” themselves inside the mosque in the Old City of annexed east Jerusalem. Those arrested included “masked individuals, stone and firework …

The Foreign Office (FO) on Wednesday took exception to British Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s “discriminatory and xenophobic” remarks on Pakistani men, saying that they painted a “misleading picture”. A day earlier, Braverman said that British-Pakistani men “hold cultural values at odds with British values”. During a Sky News interview about plans to tackle child sexual abuse, she spoke about “the predominance of British-Pakistani males …

NEW DELHI: Indian opposition parties on Wednesday condemned the removal from some schoolbooks of references to how independence hero Mahatma Gandhi’s pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity angered some Hindu extremists and led to his assassination. The new edition of a political science book for 17-18-year-olds, published by the autonomous National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), also removed a reference …

Former US president Donald Trump on Wednesday called on his fellow Republicans in Congress to slash funding for the US Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), going on the offensive a day after pleading not guilty in New York to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Trump, who is seeking to regain the presidency in 2024, took aim …

STUTTGART: Rayyan Alshebl made his first contact with Germany in 2009, watching Bayern Munich football matches on television in Syria. A few years later, he would seek refuge there after a civil war in his home country forced him to flee. Today, he is not only a German citizen but mayor-elect of Ostelsheim — a village of 2,500 near the …

BEIJING: French Pres­ident Emmanuel Macron said Europe must resist reducing trade and diplomatic ties with China as he began a state visit on Wednesday, seeking to refute any sense there was an “inescapable spiral” of tension between Beijing and the West. Macron said maintaining dialogue with China was key given its close relations with Russia, which is waging a war …

THE HAGUE: A global police operation has shut down one of the world’s largest online marketplaces where cybercriminals can buy stolen identities and passwords, international law enforcement said on Wednesday. Genesis Market sold the identities of over two million people for as little as $0.70, allowing hackers to target bank accounts and carry out online fraud, officials in several countries …