International

Sri Lanka will slash its army by a third to 135,000 personnel by next year and to 100,000 by 2030, the state minister of defence said on Friday, as the country tries to cut costs in the face of its worst economic crisis in more than seven decades. “Military spending is basically state-borne expenditure which indirectly stimulates and opens avenues …

At least five people were killed and several others were injured in a blast outside the foreign ministry in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul, officials said. Kabul police chief Khalid Zadran said an explosion took place on the road outside the Afghan foreign ministry in which five of “our civilians were martyred” and a number of others were injured. “The Islamic Emirate …

PARIS: The world’s oceans, which have absorbed most of the excess heat caused by humanity’s carbon pollution, continued to see record-breaking temperatures last year, according to research published on Wednesday. Climate change has increased surface temperatures across the planet, leading to atmospheric instability and amplifying extreme weather events such as storms. Oceans absorb about 90 per cent of the excess …

NEW DELHI: The growth of Google’s Android ecosystem is on the brink of stalling in India due to an antitrust order that asks the company to change how it markets the platform, the US company has said in a Supreme Court challenge. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) fined Alphabet Inc-owned Google $161 million in October for exploiting its dominant …

TEHRAN: Iran has sentenced a man to death after his conviction for spying for British intelligence services, the Islamic republic’s judicial news agency reported on Wednesday. “Alireza Akbari was sentenced to death for corruption on earth and for harming the country’s internal and external security by passing on intelligence,” Mizan Online reported. It did not specify Akbari’s age, occupation, date of arrest …

ATHENS: Greece’s former King Constantine II, who died on Tuesday night aged 82, will be buried privately at a former royal estate north of Athens, the Greek government said on Wednesday. Deposed by military rulers and spurned by his subjects who voted to ditch the monarchy in 1974, Constantine II was the only son of King Paul and Queen Frederica …

DHAKA: Huge crowds swarmed the streets of Bangladeshi cities on Wednesday to demand Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s resignation and fresh elections, with public anger mounting over rising food and fuel costs. Opposition allies staged rallies in Dhaka and nine other cities — the latest of several demonstrations in recent months that have occasionally been quelled by violence. Bangladesh is one …

WASHINGTON: Airlines in the United States resumed departures and a ground stop was lifted on Wednesday after a system outage the previous night had forced a halt to all departing flights. As the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) scrambled to fix the cause of the problem, over 4,300 flights were delayed and 700 cancelled. The FAA had ordered airlines to pause …

LONDON: Prince Harry has hit back at “hurtful” responses to his record-selling memoir, saying he was particularly upset by the “lie” he had boasted that he had killed 25 people in Afghanistan when serving as a military helicopter pilot. In his book “Spare”, King Charles’s younger son recounts his two tours of Afghanistan, first as a forward air controller in …

Most symptoms from long Covid clear up within a year for people who had mild initial infections, a large Israel study said Thursday, with the findings welcomed as “reassuring”. At least 17 million people in Europe suffered from long Covid symptoms months after recovering from their initial infection during 2020 and 2021, according to modelling from the World Health Organisation. …