International

KABUL: The Taliban halted a blood donation drive by women activists to mark International Women’s Day on Tuesday, activists said. Afghanistan generally marked the women’s day in a muted fashion, with activists cowed by the threat of arrest or detention by the regime. Speaking outside a Kabul hospital with seven other activists, Monesa Mubarez, the head of a women’s rights …

KYIV: Desperate civilians fled besieged cities in Ukraine on Tuesday as fresh fighting raged between Ukrainian and Russian forces. On the 13th day of the conflict the number of refugees flooding across Ukraine’s borders to escape towns devastated by shelling and air strikes passed two million, the UN said. Buses streamed out through an evacuation corridor from the northeastern city …

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will travel to Turkey on Wednesday for talks with his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba, the TASS news agency cited the Russian foreign ministry as saying. The meeting was to take place on the sidelines of a summit being hosted by Turkey, a Nato member nation, but no further details were announced. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces were bolstering defences …

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan and the United States have decided to relaunch the process of Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA), Assistant US Trade Repr­e­s­entative Christopher Wilson said on Monday. Talking to a group of journalists, Mr Wilson, who had a day-long session at the Ministry of Commerce, said that “both sides felt very productive meeting to relaunch the process since both …

Prime Minister Imran Khan received a telephone call from European Council President Charles Michel on Monday and reiterated the call for finding a solution to the Russia-Ukraine conflict through “dialogue and diplomacy”. The premier posted the update on Twitter, saying he shared concerns over the continued military conflict, highlighted its adverse economic impact on developing countries and stressed the urgent …

Wearing a patterned dress, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II greeted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at her Windsor Castle home on Monday, her first in-person engagement since falling ill with Covid-19. Although visibly frailer, she appeared smiling and laughing after the pair shook hands in front of a table with a large bouquet of yellow and blue flowers — the colours …

GENEVA: The head of Sri Lanka’s Roman Catholic Church on Monday urged the United Nations to investigate the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings that killed 279 people, calling the massacre a “political plot”. In an address to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith demanded a mechanism to probe the attacks, which have been blamed on local Islamic …

PARIS: France’s army said on Monday that its force in Mali had killed Yahia Djouadi, a “senior leader” of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) responsible for finance and logistics. Djouadi, an Algerian also known as Abu Ammar al-Jazairi, was killed overnight from February 25 to 26 around 160km north of Timbuktu in central Mali, the army said in …

WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that the Biden administration was neither sending troops to Russia nor was imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine as doing so could lead to a direct conflict with a nuclear power. In interviews to various US media outlets during the weekend, Secretary Blinken explained that a no-fly zone would require the …

TEHRAN: A top Iranian official said on Monday that his country is seeking creative ways to restore its nuclear deal with world powers after Russia’s foreign minister linked sanctions on Moscow over its war on Ukraine to the ongoing negotiations. The tweet by Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s powerful Supreme National Security Council, offers the first high-level acknowledgment of the demands …