International

WASHINGTON: Joe Biden, the consoler-in-chief, will no doubt find exactly the right message on Sunday as he visits Texas to meet the families of children massacred as they celebrated the end of the school year. But Biden, the dealmaker, has remained conspicuous in his absence from the war of words being waged over gun control that has followed the atrocity, …

A passenger plane with 22 people on board went missing in Nepal on Sunday, the operating airline and officials said, as poor weather hampered a search operation. Nepal’s air industry has boomed in recent years, carrying goods and people between hard-to-reach areas as well as foreign trekkers and climbers. But it has a poor safety record. The Twin Otter aircraft …

COLOMBO: Cash-strapped Sri Lanka took delivery on Saturday of Russian oil — which could soon be subject to a European embargo — to restart operations at the country’s only refinery, the energy minister said. The island nation is suffering its worst economic meltdown since independence, with shortages of fuel and other vital goods making life miserable for its 22 million …

Israeli police faced off with Palestinians holed up inside Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque on Sunday as hundreds of Jews visited the holy compound ahead of a contentious Jewish nationalist march through the heart of the Old City. The annual Jerusalem procession celebrates Israel’s capture of the Old City in the 1967 Middle East war and draws thousands of cheering, chanting participants …

Spraying a cow with pesticides, health workers target blood-sucking ticks at the heart of Iraq’s worst detected outbreak of a fever that causes people to bleed to death. The sight of the health workers, dressed in full protective kit, is one that has become common in the Iraqi countryside, as the Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever spreads, jumping from animals to humans. …

Israel President Isaac Herzog has said that he recently received a delegation of Pakistani-Americans, calling it an “amazing experience” and referring to it as an example that showed him “great change” vis-a-vis Israel’s ties with the Muslim world. Herzog delivered these remarks during a special address at the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting on May 26 in Davos, Switzerland, while talking …

LONDON: Indian author Geetanjali Shree and US translator Daisy Rockwell have won the International Booker Prize for Hindi novel “Tomb of Sand”, a first for a book in an Indian language. The prestigious 50,000 ($63,000, 59,000-euro) prize is awarded to fiction from around the world that has been translated into English and is shared between the author and translator. The …

LYSYCHANSK: Russian troops were moving in on the strategic city of Severodonetsk on Friday in a relentless offensive to control Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, bombing residential areas and claiming the capture of a key town. At least nine people were killed a day earlier in shelling of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, raising fears that Russia had not lost interest in …

BERLIN: Japan for the first time has joined fellow members of the Group of Seven industrialised nations in pledging to end public financing for fossil fuel projects abroad by the end of the year to help combat global warming. “We commit to end new direct public support for the international unabated fossil fuel energy sector by the end of 2022,” …

Twenty-six people were missing on Saturday after a ferry ran out of fuel and sank in bad weather off the coast of Indonesia, officials said. The country’s search and rescue agency said the vessel was carrying 43 people when it capsized on Thursday in the Makassar Strait, the sea separating the islands of Sulawesi and Borneo. News of the accident …