International

DHAKA: A popular Islamic preacher who claimed Israel was using Covid vaccines to spy on the world’s population has been convicted in Bangladesh over his controversial sermons. Kazi Ibrahim, 62, is the chief cleric of a mosque in downtown Dhaka and used his platform to make multiple spurious claims about coronavirus. Several of his sermons went viral at the peak …

ANKARA: Sweden and Finland must deport or extradite up to 130 “terrorists” to Turkiye before the Turkish parliament will approve their bids to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), President Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday. The two Nordic states applied last year to join Nato following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but their bids must be approved by all 30 …

KABUL: Several aid organisations have restored some operations in Afghanistan after they received assurances from Taliban-run authorities that women could work in areas such as health, in spite of restrictions last month barring female NGO workers. The International Rescue Committee (IRC), Save the Children and CARE said this week they were again operating some programmes, mostly in health and nutrition. The …

US President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida held “very productive” talks last week on semiconductor-related export controls on China, White House Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell said on Tuesday. The Biden administration in October published a sweeping set of export controls, including measures tightly restricting Chinese access to US chipmaking technology, as part of an effort to slow Beijing’s technological …

Officials in Nepal said on Wednesday there was no chance of finding any survivors of the country’s deadliest plane crash in 30 years, but workers will continue to search for the remains of the last missing passenger. Rescue teams used drones and rappelled down deep gorges on Tuesday to sift through the charred remains of the Yeti Airlines ATR 72 turboprop, …

Ukraine’s interior minister was among 16 people, including two children, who were killed when a helicopter crashed near a kindergarten outside the capital Kyiv, officials said Wednesday. In a video that circulated online from the aftermath of the incident, cries could be heard at the scene which was consumed by a fire. There were no immediate details on the cause …

The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) clarified on Tuesday that talks with India can only take place after the country reverses its “illegal action of August 5, 2019”, which was aimed at illegally altering the demography of the Muslim-majority state of Indian occupied Kashmir. “Without India’s revocation of this step, negotiations are not possible,” it said. The statement comes a day …

An elite Bangladesh police unit is engaged in the rampant extortion, harassment and wrongful arrests of the Rohingya refugees it has been tasked with protecting, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday. The Armed Police Battalion (APBn) operates in camps housing nearly one million members of the stateless minority, most of whom fled neighbouring Myanmar after a military crackdown that is now …

The death toll from a Russian missile strike in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro rose to 40 on Monday with dozens more missing, making it the deadliest civilian incident of Moscow’s three-month campaign of hurling missiles at cities far from the front. Kyiv says the mass civilian deaths, which it describes as terrorism, demonstrate why it needs more weapons to defeat Russian …

JAKARTA: Two workers including a Chinese national were killed at a nickel smelting plant in Indonesia at the weekend after a riot broke out during a protest over labour conditions, officials said on Monday. The clashes began on Saturday evening at the facility on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island operated by PT Gunbuster Nickel Industry (GNI), a local unit of China’s Jiangsu …