International

BIRMINGHAM: Britain needs more migrant labour to boost productivity as it faces a toxic mix of soaring inflation and shrinking growth, the country’s main business lobby group warned on Monday. The verdict from the Confederation of British Industry came at its annual gathering in Birmingham, Britain’s second biggest city. The CBI conference comes after the government of Prime Minister Rishi …

KYIV/VIENNA: Ukraine said on Monday that it had discovered four Russian torture sites in its southern city of Kherson, which Moscow’s forces quit this month leaving behind a trail of misery and destruction. The Kremlin meanwhile vowed to track down and punish those it said were responsible for the “brutal” murder of nearly a dozen Russian servicemen who were allegedly …

ISTANBUL: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday threatened to launch a ground operation into Syria after cross-border air strikes on Kurdish positions and deadly fire on Turkey. “There is no question that this operation be limited to only an aerial operation,” Erdogan told reporters on a flight home from Qatar after attending the opening of the World Cup. The …

US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin on Tuesday emphasised the need to improve crisis communications during a meeting with his Chinese counterpart while raising concern about “increasingly dangerous” behaviour by Chinese military aircraft. The roughly 90-minute meeting in Cambodia, described as “productive and professional” by a US official, was the pair’s first since a visit to Taiwan by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi …

Beijing shut parks, shopping malls and museums on Tuesday while more Chinese cities resumed mass testing for Covid-19, as China fights a spike in cases, deepening concerns about its economy and dampening hopes for a quick post-coronavirus reopening. China reported 28,127 new local cases nationally for Monday, nearing its daily peak from April, with infections in the southern city of …

Thirty-eight people were killed and two were injured in a fire at a factory in central China, state media said on Tuesday, with authorities blaming workers for illegal welding. The fire broke out at a plant in Anyang city in Henan province on Monday afternoon, news agency Xinhua reported. Rescue services first received reports of a fire at 4:22pm (0822 …

An earthquake that struck Indonesia’s West Java killed at least 268 people, many of them children, with 151 still missing, disaster relief officials said on Tuesday, as rescuers searched the rubble of destroyed buildings for survivors. The shallow 5.6-magnitude quake struck Indonesia’s most populous province on Monday afternoon, causing significant damage to the town of Cianjur, about 75 kilometres southeast of the …

The United Nations on Tuesday denounced Iran’s increasingly harsh and deadly crackdown on mass protests that have been rocking the country for more than two months. “UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk says the rising number of deaths from protests in Iran, including those of two children at the weekend, and the hardening of the response by security forces, underline the critical …

The US is pressuring Ukraine to be open to peace talks with Moscow, with a top Pentagon official saying Kyiv’s forces will find it hard to recover all the territory Russia has captured in the war. US Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley said on Wednesday that US and allied support has not diminished, but added that Kyiv’s success in countering Russia’s …

SAN JOSE: Elizabeth Holmes’s startup Theranos made her a multi-billionaire hailed as the next US tech visionary by age 30, but it all evaporated in a flash of lawsuits, ignominy and, finally, an 11-year prison sentence on Friday. The rise and fall of Holmes, who in January was convicted of defrauding investors of her biotech startup, is a heavily chronicled …