International

Palestinian factions in Lebanon are eager to open a second front against Israel if the Shia-backed group Hezbollah leads the charge, fighters and analysts said. “Wherever [Israel] is ready for [the fight] to happen, it will happen,” said Ahmed Habet, a member of the Palestinian party Fatah in Burj al-Barajneh, a refugee camp in Lebanon’s capital Beirut, reports Al Jazeera. ...

Israel, reeling from the deadliest attack on its territory, declared war on Hamas Sunday as the conflict’s death toll surged above 1,100 after the Palestinian militant group launched a surprise assault from Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu steeled the nation for a “long and difficult” war a day after Hamas fired a barrage of thousands of rockets at Israel and ...

Powerful earthquakes in Afghanistan have killed more than 2,000 people and injured more than 9,000, the Taliban administration said on Sunday, in the deadliest tremors in years in the quake-prone mountainous country. Amid the confusion, the death toll from Saturday’s quakes spiked from 500 reported on Sunday morning by a Red Crescent spokesperson and 16 from Saturday night. The quakes ...

At least 198 people were killed in Gaza on Saturday in Israeli air strikes, the health ministry in the Palestinian enclave said, after Hamas extremists fired a barrage of rockets into Israel which responded with air strikes, reports AFP. The ministry said up until 4:20 pm (1320 GMT) there were ‘198 martyrs and 1,610 wounded with different injuries’ in the ...

At least 40 people were killed after a glacial lake burst its banks and triggered flash floods this week in the Indian Himalayas, government officials told Reuters on Friday as rescuers searched for dozens missing for a second day. The Lhonak Lake in the mountainous northeastern state of Sikkim overflowed on Wednesday after a cloudburst triggered torrential rains and an ...

An attack Thursday on a Syrian military academy killed 112 people, a war monitor said, with state media blaming “terrorist organisations” for the drone strike in government-held Homs. Separately, Turkish air raids in the country’s Kurdish-held northeast killed at least 11 people, according to Kurdish forces, after Ankara had threatened retaliation for a bomb attack. In the central city of ...

The Indian army said on Wednesday that 23 soldiers were missing after a powerful flash flood caused by intense rainfall tore through a valley in the mountainous northeast Sikkim state. “Due to sudden cloud burst over Lhonak Lake in North Sikkim, a flash flood occurred in the Teesta River… 23 personnel have been reported missing and some vehicles are reported ...

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to a team of scientists who created a ground-breaking technique using lasers to understand the extremely rapid movements of electrons that were previously thought impossible to follow, reports CNN. Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier “demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to ...

Indonesian President Joko Widodo inaugurated Southeast Asia’s first high-speed railway on Monday as it was set to begin commercial operations, a key project under China’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative that will drastically reduce the travel time between two key cities. The project has been beset with delays and increasing costs, and some observers doubt its commercial benefits. But Widodo ...

Katalin Kariko of Hungary and Drew Weissman of the United States won the Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday for work on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology that paved the way for Covid-19 vaccines. The pair, who had been tipped as favourites, were honoured for “for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19,” ...