International

The foreign ministerial BIMSTEC meeting has emphasized the importance of enhancing physical, maritime, and digital linkages to strengthen economic ties and people-to-people exchanges among the member states. This was observed at the first ever meeting of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) Foreign Ministers in New York on the sidelines of the annual Session ...

World leaders warned of potential repercussions on Saturday after Lebanese militant group Hezbollah announced its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli air strike on a suburb of Beirut. The killing of the Iran-backed group’s chief has intensified fears of all-out war in the Middle East. US President Joe Biden welcomed “a measure of justice”. – Iran – ...

Tropical Depression Helene brought life-threatening flooding on Friday to wide sections of the US Southeast, where at least 43 people have been killed by a storm that swamped neighborhoods, triggered mudslides, threatened dams and left more than 3.5 million homes and businesses without power. Before moving north through Georgia and into Tennessee and the Carolinas, Helene hit Florida’s Big Bend ...

Japan’s next prime minister Shigeru Ishiba on Friday outlined his ideas to reshape the nation’s military alliance with Washington, after winning the conservative ruling party’s leadership race, reports AFP. The seasoned 67-year-old former defence minister beat arch-nationalist Sanae Takaichi — who would have been the country’s first-ever woman leader — in the final round. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has ...

Israeli strikes on Lebanon killed 72 people on Wednesday, the health ministry in Beirut said, raising the toll from the latest wave of bombardments. The ministry said in a series of statements that “Israeli airstrikes” killed 38 people in southern Lebanon, 12 in the eastern Bekaa region and 22 in three towns north and south of Beirut. Nearly 400 people ...

  The cryptocurrency industry is “rife with fraud and hucksters and grifters”, one of the United States’ top financial regulators has told the BBC. The chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Gary Gensler, says the “investing public around the globe has lost too much money” because of crypto companies not following the laws his agency tries to ...

A female cat has more freedom in Afghanistan than a woman does, Hollywood actor Meryl Streep has said at the United Nations in a bid to get world leaders to focus on the plight of Afghan women and girls, reports Reuters. “The way that … this society has been upended is a cautionary tale for the rest of the world,” ...

Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a Marxist-leaning politician with no political lineage, took oath as Sri Lanka’s president on Monday, a day after he won a comprehensive victory in the debt-ridden South Asian country’s presidential election. Anura Kumara Dissanayake may lack the political lineage of some of his rivals, but his leftist anti-poverty policies and pledge to fight corruption handed him victory ...

Lebanon’s health ministry said Israeli strikes on the south killed 182 people and wounded more than 700 Monday, in the worst toll by far in nearly a year of cross-border clashes between Hezbollah and Israel. “Israeli enemy strikes on southern towns and villages since this morning” have killed “182 people and wounded 727 others”, the health ministry said, with casualties ...

A blast at a coal mine in eastern Iran has killed at least 19 people and injured 17 others, state media reported Sunday, reports AFP. “The number of people killed in the Tabas mine incident… rose to 19,” the official IRNA news agency said, adding that “17 others were wounded” in the blast late Saturday.