International

WASHINGTON: The White House has advised the chip industry to diversify its supply chain in case Russia retaliates against threatened US export curbs by blocking access to key materials, people familiar with the matter said. The potential for retaliation has garnered more attention in recent days after Techcet, a market research group, published a report on Feb 1 highlighting the …

PARIS: Thousands of protesters headed towards Paris on Friday in convoys from across France, with many hoping to blockade the capital in opposition to Covid vaccination rules and other restrictions despite police warnings to back off. Inspired by Canadian truckers paralysing border traffic with the US, the French protesters set off from Bayonne, Perpignan, Lyon, Lille, Strasbourg and elsewhere with …

WASHINGTON: After months of waiting, US President Joe Biden on Friday signed an executive order giving half of the $7 billion in frozen Afghan assets to Afghanistan, while keeping the other half for victims of the Sept 11 terror attacks. The US administration blocked the assets belonging to Afghanistan’s central bank, known as Da Afghan Bank or DAB in August …

KABUL: The Taliban have detained two foreign journalists on assignment with the UN refugee agency and a number of its Afghan staff working in the country’s capital, UNHCR said on Friday. The development in Kabul comes as President Joe Biden was expected to issue an executive order that would allow US financial institutions to facilitate access to $3.5 billion of …

MOSCOW: Russia is massing yet more troops near Ukraine and an invasion could come at any time, perhaps before the end of this month’s Winter Olympics, Washington said on Friday. Moscow, for its part, stiffened its truculent response towards Western diplomacy, saying answers sent this week by the EU and Nato to its security demands showed “disrespect”. Commercial satellite images …

United States President Joe Biden will speak to Vladimir Putin on Saturday after the United States warned that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could begin in days. Meanwhile, the US State Department has ordered non-emergency US embassy staff to leave Ukraine amid rising tensions with Russia. “Despite the reduction in diplomatic staff, the core embassy team, our dedicated Ukrainian colleagues, and State …

Renowned scholar Professor Noam Chomsky on Thursday said that Islamophobia has taken a “most lethal form” in India, turning some 250 million Indian Muslims into a “persecuted minority”. “The pathology of Islamophobia is growing throughout the West — it is taking its most lethal form in India,” the famed author and activist, who is also Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute …

Ayesha Imthiaz, a devout Indian Muslim who considers wearing a hijab an expression of devotion to Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him), says a move by her college to expel hijab-wearing girls is an insult that will force her to choose between religion and education. “The humiliation of being asked to leave my classroom for wearing a headscarf by college …

As the controversy and protests over banning hijab in schools continued in India, drawing condemnation from Pakistani and US officials, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on Saturday said “motivated comments on our internal issues are not welcome”. In a short statement issued on Twitter, the spokesperson for the ministry, Arindam Bagchi, said, “A matter regarding dress codes in some educational …

ISLAMABAD: The power division conceded on Thursday its earlier path to circular debt reduction was unrealistic, as the previous projection for the ongoing fiscal year was underestimated by Rs450 billion and required higher tariff increases than anticipated. Based on revised estimates, the Cabinet Committee on Energy (CCoE) approved a revised circular debt management plan (CDMP) that would need about Rs2.17 …