International

The United States announced on Monday that India would allow imports of US pork and pork products for the first time, welcoming the removal of an old block on US farm trade. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and US Trade Representative (USTR) Katherine Tai made the announcement in a statement. “This new opportunity marks the culmination of nearly two decades of …

KABUL: The Taliban’s foreign minister said on Monday he held talks in Iran on the weekend with Ahmad Massoud, son of the late legendary Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, and guaranteed his security if he returned home. Massoud’s Panjshir Valley forces provided the last resistance in September to the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, weeks after government troops capitulated. In …

NEW YORK: Nineteen people, including nine children, died in a fire at a Bronx apartment building on Sunday in one of the worst blazes in New York City in decades. Mayor Eric Adams called the fire’s toll horrific. “This is going to be one of the worst fires that we have witnessed during modern times.” More than sixty people were …

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapa­ksa asked China to help restructure debt repayments as part of efforts to help the South Asian country weather a worsening financial crisis, his office said in a statement on Sunday. Rajapaksa made the request during a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Colombo on Sunday. Sri Lanka has benefited from billions of …

NEW YORK: More than 800,000 non-citizens and so-called Dreamers in New York City will have access to the ballot box and could vote in municipal elections as early as next year after Mayor Eric Adams allowed legislation approved by the City Council a month ago to automatically become law on Sunday. Opponents have vowed to challenge the new law. Unless …

JERUSALEM: The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem has accused radical Israeli groups of threatening the presence of Christians in the holy city, in remarks that Israeli officials rejected as baseless. In a column in the Times of London on Saturday, Theophilos III said he believed the aim was to drive the Christian community from Jerusalem’s Old City. Israel captured East Jerusalem, including the Old …

AL CAMP: Palestinian teenager Amal Nakhleh’s first name means “hope” in Arabic, but his parents are in despair because he is chronically ill and one of the few minors held without charge by Israel. “Since his arrest last year I have only seen him twice, including last week when he told me he wanted to go on hunger strike,” journalist …

COX’S BAZAR: Thou­sands of people were left homeless after a fire gutted parts of a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh, police said on Sunday. About 850,000 of the persecuted Muslim minority — many of whom escaped a 2017 military crackdown in Myanmar that UN investigators concluded was executed with “genocidal intent” — live in a network of camps in Bangladesh’s …

ABUJA: Nigeria said on Sunday that gunmen killed at least 200 people and displaced thousands more in multiple raids in the northwest over the last week, dealing a heavy blow to authorities struggling to restore order. Herders and farmers in Africa’s most populous country have clashed over access to land in northwest and central Nigeria for years, but some groups …

WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday said Russia had to choose between dialogue and confrontation, ahead of talks in Geneva on soaring tensions over Ukraine. “There’s a path of dialogue and diplomacy to try to resolve some of these differences and avoid a confrontation,” Blinken told CNN’s “State of the Union” show. “The other path is confrontation and …