KABUL: Fourteen members of the Afghan security forces were killed in two separate attacks on Thursday in the first deadly assaults officials have blamed on the Taliban since the end of a three-day ceasefire. The temporary truce ended on Tuesday but an overall lull in the country’s grinding violence has largely held despite the latest […]
The US military withdrawal from Afghanistan is considerably ahead of schedule, an official told AFP on Wednesday, as President Donald Trump reiterated calls for the Pentagon to bring troops home. The developments came as questions loomed over the next phase of Afghanistan’s long war following a historic, three-day ceasefire that led to a major drop in civilian […]
Washington: The US is considering a range of sanctions to punish China for its crackdown on Hong Kong, people familiar with the matter said, as the Trump administration weighs whether to declare the former colony has lost its autonomy from Beijing. The Treasury Department could impose controls on transactions and freeze assets of Chinese officials and […]
Taiwan will provide the people of Hong Kong with “necessary assistance”, President Tsai Ing-wen said, after thousands in the Chinese ruled territory protested against Beijing’s plans to impose new national security laws. Taiwan has become a refuge for a small but growing number of pro-democracy protesters fleeing Hong Kong, which has been convulsed since last year by […]
The director of the Chinese virology institute in Wuhan, the city where COVID-19 cases were first identified, has said that while there were three live strains of bat coronavirus in their labs — none of them match the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic that has claimed over 340,000 lives worldwide. Claims made by US President Donald Trump and others that […]
The United States is pushing relations with China to “the brink of a new Cold War”, China’s foreign minster said on Sunday, rejecting US “lies” over the coronavirus while saying Beijing was open to an international effort to find its source. Keeping up the worsening war of words with Washington over the pandemic and a […]
Japan’s prime minister on Thursday lifted for most of the country a state of emergency imposed to tackle the coronavirus, but kept it in place for Tokyo and Osaka. “Today we decided to lift the state of emergency in 39 (out of 47) prefectures,” Shinzo Abe said in a nationally televised news conference. HT
London: Scientists from the University of Oxford are starting a first-of-its-kind study to see whether available drugs can help keep older, more vulnerable people with mild cases of Covid-19 from becoming severely ill. More than 500 U.K. doctors’ offices are recruiting for the trial of drugs that are already approved for other purposes, such as […]
At least six security personnel, including an Army major, were killed on Friday when a roadside bomb struck a patrol vehicle in a remote area in southwestern Pakistan, close to the border with Iran. The Army said in a statement that a vehicle of paramilitary Frontier Corps was targeted through a remote-controlled improvised explosive device […]
India is launching its biggest ever evacuation exercise in decades deploying a raft of civilian aircraft and naval ships to bring back home thousands of Indians stranded in the Gulf and various other parts of the world. Over three lakh people in Gulf have registered for evacuation but the government will bring back only those […]