International

China on Friday said it was cancelling several defence meetings and suspending key climate talks with the United States after a visit by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan this week. Beijing will “suspend the China-US climate change talks” and nix plans for a call between military leaders as well as two security meetings, the foreign ministry said, citing Pelosi’s “disregard …

FAGRADALSFJALL: Curious onlookers made their way on Thursday to the site of a volcano erupting near Iceland’s capital Reykjavik to marvel at the bubbling lava, a day after the fissure appeared in an uninhabited valley. The eruption was around 40 kilometres from Reykjavik, near the site of the Mount Fagradalsfjall volcano in southwestern Iceland that spewed magma for six months …

Pakistan’s Ambassador to Afghanistan Mansoor Ahmad Khan said on Friday that he spoke on the phone briefly with Anas Mallick, a Pakistani journalist who reportedly went missing in Kabul a day earlier, adding that he was in the Afghan capital and was “safe”. “Regarding reports about Pakistani journalist Anas Mallick, I have just talked to him on [the] phone briefly. …

BEIRUT: Lebanon marked two years on Thursday since a massive explosion ripped through Beirut — a grim anniversary marked by angry protests and the dramatic collapse of blast-damaged grain silos in a cloud of dust. The 2020 disaster, one of history’s biggest non-nuclear explosions, killed more than 200 people and decimated vast areas of the capital after a stockpile of …

WASHINGTON: The US Justice Department charged four police officers on Thursday over the death of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman killed in a botched 2020 raid on her home in Louisville, Kentucky. Attorney General Merrick Garland said the officers face federal charges of civil rights offenses, unlawful conspiracy, making false statements unconstitutional use of force and obstruction. “We allege that …

SANTIAGO: Experts in Chile on Tuesday were investigating the appearance of an enormous sinkhole, bigger than a tennis court, that has appeared near a copper mine in the Atacama desert. Experts were dispatched to examine the hole, some 32 metres (104 feet) across and twice as deep, which appeared in an area about 800 kilometres (nearly 500 miles) north of …

China’s largest-ever military exercises encircling Taiwan kicked off Thursday, in a show of force straddling vital international shipping lanes after a visit to the island by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi left Taiwan Wednesday after a trip that defied a series of stark threats from Beijing, which views the self-ruled island as its territory. Pelosi was the highest-profile elected …

A United Nations committee ruled that France discriminated against a Muslim woman who was prevented from attending vocational training in a public school while wearing her headscarf, according to a UN document. In 2010, Naima Mezhoud, now aged 45, was due to train as a management assistant at a course held in a state high school, where teenagers are prohibited …

DUBAI: Iran’s top nuclear negotiator and a senior US envoy will travel to Vienna this week for talks on reviving the 2015 nuclear pact, officials from both governments said on Wednesday, rekindling a process that stalled in June. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said Tehran was ready to reach a deal that guarantees its rights, according to state media. …

OLATHE: Abortion rights advocates celebrated on Tuesday as the Midwestern US state of Kansas voted to maintain the right to the procedure, the first major poll on the flashpoint issue since the Supreme Court overturned nationwide access in June. Kansans rejected an amendment that would have scrapped language in the state constitution guaranteeing the right to the procedure and could have paved …