International

05-05-2022 Bureau Report + Agencies PARIS/ NEW DELHI: India and France on Wednesday called for “an immediate cessation of hostilities” in Ukraine, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi again stopping short of condemning Russia’s invasion of its neighbor. India, which imports much of its military hardware from Russia, has long walked …

05-05-2022 LONDON/ ISLAMABAD: Former Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) Member Provincial Assembly (MPA) and British Pakistani businessman Dr Ashraf Chohan has won a defamation case at the London High Court filed by Labour Member Parliament (MP) Naz Shah over an alleged defamatory tweet made in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter …

05-05-2022 Bureau Report NEW DELHI: India registered about 475,000 more total deaths in 2020 than the previous year, government data released months ahead of schedule on Tuesday showed, as the World Health Organization (WHO) readies its estimates of excess COVID-19 deaths whose methodology New Delhi has opposed. Some experts estimate …

05-05-2022 KABUL/ WASHINGTON: The Washington Post reported that Afghanistan’s “fastest-growing drug industry operates from desert outposts in plain view.” The Islamic Emirate has yet to comment in reaction to the report. The report said that the meth industry is “growing at breakneck speed, stoking fears among Western experts and officials …

05-05-2022 MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA: Facebook-owner Meta is opening up access to a large language model for artificial intelligence research, the social media company said on Tuesday. Meta said its model was the first 175-billion-parameter language model to be made available to the broader AI research community. “Large language models” are …

05-05-2022 BEIJING/SHANGHAI: The Chinese capital Beijing shut dozens of metro stations and bus routes on Wednesday in its campaign to stop the spread of COVID-19 and avoid the fate of Shanghai where millions of residents have been under strict lockdown for more than a month. New evidence has emerged that …

04-05-2022 JERUSALEM: The Israeli regime is holding more than 600 Palestinian detainees without charge or trial in its detention centers across the occupied territories, a rights group said. HaMoked, an Israeli rights group that regularly gathers figures from the regime’s prison authorities, announced on Monday that as of May there …

04-05-2022 Bureau Report + Agencies NEW DELHI/ BERLIN: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged 10 billion euros ($10.51 billion) to help India achieve its climate goals after meeting its Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Berlin on Monday, but the leaders remained far apart in their stance on the Ukraine war. In …

04-05-2022 MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree on retaliatory economic sanctions in response to the “unfriendly actions of certain foreign states and international organizations”, the Kremlin said on Tuesday. The document does not provide any details of which individuals or entities may be affected by the measures. …

04-05-2022 WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden on Tuesday criticized as “radical” a draft US Supreme Court decision that would overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide, a bombshell that was denounced by Democrats and stunned even some moderate Republicans. The court confirmed that the text, published …