International

MOSCOW: Russian investigators formally charged Evan Gershkovich with espionage on Friday, but the Wall Street Journal reporter denied the charges and said he was working as a journalist. Russia’s Federal Security Service, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, said on March 30 that it had detained Gershkovich in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg and had opened an espionage case against the …

TAIPEI: China sent warships and aircraft near Taiwan for a second day on Friday and said the island remains its “inseparable part”, after President Tsai Ing-wen angered Beijing by meeting US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Three Chinese warships sailed in waters surrounding the self-ruled island, while a fighter jet and an anti-submarine helicopter also crossed Taiwan’s air defence identification zone (ADIZ), said …

WASHINGTON: US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas defended himself on Friday over accusations that he accepted years of luxury travel trips from a Republican billionaire, saying that it was “personal hospitality” that did not need to be registered. Staunch conservative Thomas was a guest of mega-donor Harlan Crow for yachting in New Zealand, private jet flights across the globe and …

ISLAMABAD: Ambassador of Ethiopia to the Islamic Republic in Islamabad Jemal Beker Abdula on Friday said his country would bring Pakistan and Africa closer by connecting business communities of both countries through various initiatives. Speaking with the business fraternity here at the Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ICCI), he said business persons from Pakistan and Africa needed to establish …

An Italian tourist was killed and five people were wounded in a car ramming in Tel Aviv on Friday that came hours after two Israeli sisters were killed in a shooting attack in the occupied West Bank. The attacks, after a night of crossborder strikes in Gaza and Lebanon, added to an atmosphere of heightened Israeli-Palestinian tensions following Israeli police raids …

KARACHI: A “scathing note”, a “necessary unravelling”, a “mediocre judgem­ent” — Justice Athar Min­allah’s detailed note issued on Friday on the Supreme Court’s suo motu proceedings on the provincial polls’ delay attra­c­ted all kinds of reactions from people on both sides of the fence and the ones sitting on it. “A mediocre judgement by all standards, technicality supersedes substantial issues,” PTI Senior …

PARIS: Earth had its joint second-warmest March on record with Antarctic sea ice shrinking to its second-lowest extent for that month, the EU’s climate monitoring agency said on Thursday. “The month was jointly the second-warmest March globally,” tied with 2017, 2019 and 2020, the Copernicus Climate Change Service said. The hottest March on record was in 2016. Its report is based on …

Israel’s military hit sites in Lebanon and Gaza early on Friday, in retaliation for rocket attacks it blamed on Hamas, as tensions following police raids this week on the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem threatened to spiral out of control. Israeli authorities said two people were killed during a shooting attack in the occupied West Bank on Friday. Israel’s military said …

Stormy Daniels, the adult film star at the centre of the criminal case against Donald Trump, said she does not think the former president should go to prison if convicted of concealing hush money payments he made to her. “I don’t think that his crimes against me are worthy of incarceration. I feel like the other things that he has done, if …

The World Health Organisation chief pressed China on Thursday to share its information about the origins of Covid-19, saying that until that happened all hypotheses remained on the table, more than three years after the virus first emerged. “Without full access to the information that China has, you cannot say this or that,” said Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in response to …