31-03-2026 Bureau Report + Agencies NEW DELHI/ NEW YORK: US President Donald Trump had a productive conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the White House said on March 28, referring to the talks between the two leaders. The New York Times reported that billionaire businessman Elon Musk joined the phone …

31-03-2026 NEW YORK: The United Nations General Assembly this week overwhelmingly backed a resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade “the gravest crime against humanity”. Welcoming the vote, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the wealth of many Western nations was “built on stolen lives and stolen labor”. Noting the “barbaric …

30-03-2026 By SJA Jafri ISLAMABAD: In the middle of 1971, at the height of the Cold War, a Pakistani government plane carrying US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger flew overnight from Islamabad to Beijing. The trip was secret, the facilitator was Pakistan and the geopolitical consequences were generational. More than …

30-03-2026 BEIRUT: War between Israel and Hezbollah is pushing Lebanon’s fragile state and society towards breaking point, straining sectarian and political fault-lines as Shi’ite Muslims are displaced and enmity deepens between the Iran-backed group and its opponents. Of all Lebanon’s many crises since a 1975-90 civil ​war, the renewed conflict …

30-03-2026 Bureau Report + Agencies NEW DELHI: As India’s diplomats negotiated an accord that would ease punitive US tariffs on the South Asian country’s exports in January, New Delhi slashed its purchases of Russian crude oil in a move that was widely seen as a painful concession to President Donald …

30-03-2026 PARIS: A court in Paris has sentenced prominent Islam scholar Tariq Ramadan to 18 years in jail for raping three women, two years after he was given a jail term for a separate rape offence in Switzerland. The French rape case unfolded in 2017, when two of the three …

30-03-2026 EVIAN-LES-BAINS, FRANCE: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has joined a meeting of G7 foreign ministers in France for talks in which the US-Israeli war with Iran is the main focus. Rubio is expected to face pressure to de-escalate the conflict as concerns continue to grow over its impact …

30-03-2026 VIENNA: Austria has announced plans to ban social media for children aged under 14, becoming the latest country to consider introducing restrictions for children online. It follows lengthy negotiations within the conservative-led three-party coalition government, but it is not yet clear how or when the ban will be implemented. …

30-03-2026 DOHA/ WASHINGTON: Qatar’s prime minister has held talks with senior US officials in Washington, DC, amid the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran and fallout across the Gulf. Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, who also serves as Qatar’s foreign minister, met US Vice President JD Vance and …

29-03-2026 NEW YORK/ PARIS/ LONDON: Millions of people were expected to protest against the Trump administration at more than 3,000 “No Kings” events across the United States. Although organizers do not yet have an exact count of how many people attended, it’s clear that hundreds of thousands of people turned …