International

KYIV: French President Emmanuel Macron said on Saturday he would visit China in April, and urged Beijing to pressure Russia to end the war in Ukraine. China has sought to position itself as a neutral party in the conflict, even as it has maintained close ties with Russia and helped scuttle a joint statement condemning the war at a G20 …

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is heading to Central Asia hoping that greater US engagement will reassure former Soviet republics rattled by the Ukraine war, although Russia’s historic clout limits the extent of cooperation. Days after the anniversary of the Ukraine invasion, the top US diplomat will hold talks on Tuesday in Kazakhstan and then Uzbekistan and meet jointly with …

TEHRAN: An Iranian deputy minister said on Sunday “some people” were poisoning schoolgirls in the holy city of Qom with the aim of shutting down education for girls. Since late November, hundreds of cases of respiratory poisoning have been reported among schoolgirls mainly in Qom, south of Tehran, with some needing hospital treatment. On Sunday, the deputy health minister, Younes …

ROME: Fifty-nine people died, including some children, when a wooden sailing boat carrying migrants crashed against rocks on the southern Italian coast early on Sunday, authorities said. The vessel had set sail from Turkiye several days ago with migrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and several other countries, and crashed in stormy weather near Steccato di Cutro, a seaside resort on …

UNITED NATIONS: Syria faces a double disaster as the areas hardest hit by this month’s earthquake had already been destroyed in 12 years of unrelenting conflict, warned David Beasley, who heads the World Food Programme (WFP), after returning to New York from the devastated regions of Syria and Turkiye on Saturday. “The impact of this quake will be felt for months and …

Israel committed to stopping authorisation of any settler outposts in the occupied West Bank for six months during a meeting on Sunday with Palestinian officials in Jordan when the sides pledged to de-escalate surging violence. In a joint statement at the end of a meeting in the city of Aqaba, Israel, and Palestinian officials said they would work closely to …

Hundreds of passengers were forced to remain on a plane for almost seven hours after it diverted to a remote airport due to a passenger medical emergency. The story was reported by outlets including Australia’s ABC News. The Jetstar flight from Bangkok to Melbourne landed in Alice Springs, in Australia’s Northern Territory, at about 7.20 a.m. on Sunday. An electrical problem …

WASHINGTON: The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sometimes used rectal feeding on its prisoners kept at secret prison facilities overseas, The New York Times reported on Saturday. Previous reports in the US media have highlighted the agency’s use of various torture techniques on its prisoners after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks, but this is the first report that focuses on this discredited practice. The …

G20 finance ministers again failed on Saturday to agree on a joint statement on the global economy at talks in India, after China sought to water down references to the Ukraine war. Instead, the current G20 president of India issued a “chair’s summary” which said “most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine” and that there were “different assessments of …

An Iranian general on Friday warned that his country is still seeking to kill former US president Donald Trump and his secretary of state Mike Pompeo in revenge for assassinating top commander Qasem Soleimani. Tehran has repeatedly vowed to avenge the killing of Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ foreign operations, in a US drone strike on Baghdad airport in January …