International

LONDON: The UK government on Thursday said the traditional State Opening of Parliament will take place in May, raising questions about whether Queen Elizabeth II will attend. The monarch, who turns 96 next month, lays out her government’s legislative programme in a speech from a gilded throne in the House of Lords, in a ceremony filled with pomp and pageantry. …

WASHINGTON: The United States and the United Nations warned Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers on Thursday that the failure to reopen girls’ schools could hurt their efforts to get international recognition and rebuild the Afghan economy. The Taliban had announced earlier that high schools in Afghanistan will open their doors to girls on Wednesday but later reversed their decision until it’s decided what would …

SEOUL: North Korea fired a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on Thursday, Tokyo and Seoul said as they voiced outrage at Pyongyang’s most powerful launch since 2017. The missile was fired on Thursday afternoon from Sunan — likely the same site as a failed test last week — and had a range of 6,200 kilometers (3,850 miles), Seoul’s Joint Chiefs …

WUZHOU: Recovery teams deployed drones and thermal imaging equipment on Thursday across a mountainous area where a China Eastern plane inexplicably crashed with 132 people on board. Four days after flight MU5735 ploughed into rugged terrain near Wuzhou in southern China, officials are still yet to declare all of the 123 passengers and nine crew dead. More human remains have been found, …

ISLAMABAD: The number of illegal border crossings at EU’s external borders in the first two months of 2022 rose by 61 per cent from a year ago to nearly 27 000, according to preliminary calculations released by the European Union. There were 11,850 detections of illegal border crossings in February, about a quarter more than in the same month of …

NEW DELHI: Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi arrived in Delhi on Thursday, the highest-ranking visit from Beijing two years after their troops engaged in a brutal clash over the region of Ladakh although no shot was fired. Mr Wang arrived in Delhi from a short visit to Kabul, reports said, and a day after India’s Ministry of External Affairs slammed his comments at the …

BRUSSELS/KYIV: US President Joe Biden said on Thursday that Nato would “respond” if Russian President Vladimir Putin used a chemical weapon in his war on Ukraine. “We will respond if he uses it. The nature of the response would depend on the nature of the use,” Biden said after a Nato summit in Brussels. The United States and allies upped …

DAMASCUS: Iran’s top diplomat on Wednesday welcomed efforts to “normalise relations” between some Arab countries and Syria, days after President Bashar al-Assad made a surprise visit to the United Arab Emirates. Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian made the remarks on a visit to Damascus during which he met Assad, his Syrian counterpart Faisal Mekdad and National Security Bureau chief Ali Mamlouk. …

GENEVA: The United Nations said on Wednesday it wanted the whole world covered by weather disaster early warning systems within five years to protect people from the worsening impacts of climate change. A third of the world’s people, mainly in the least-developed countries and developing small island states, are without early warning coverage, the UN said, with 60 percent of …

WASHINGTON: Madeleine Albright, who fled the Nazis as a child in her native Czechoslovakia during World War Two but rose to become the first female US secretary of state and, in her later years, a pop culture feminist icon, died on Wednesday at the age of 84, her family said. Albright was a tough-talking diplomat in an administration that hesitated …