International

07-05-2022 COLOMBO: Thousands of shops, schools and businesses closed on Friday as public and private sector workers in Sri Lanka went on strike, demanding the president and his government step down for their mishandling of the island’s worst financial crisis in decades. Hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic and rising …

06-05-2022 LONDON: Voters in Britain went to the polls in local government elections on Thursday where they are expected to punish Prime Minister Boris Johnson over a cost-of-living crisis and fines for breaking his own COVID-19 lockdown rules. The elections are seen as a test of support for Johnson, who …

06-05-2022 UNITED NATIONS/ TEHRAN: The ambassador of Iran to the United Nations called on the international community to take the necessary measures to combat Islamophobia and violation of basic human rights of Muslims. In a statement at the 43rd session of the UN General Assembly’s Committee on Information, held in …

06-05-2022 WASHINGTON/ NEW YORK: Donations have flooded into abortion clinics and abortion-rights advocacy groups since the leak of a U.S. Supreme Court draft ruling that showed the justices apparently poised to overturn the 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade decision. The draft ruling, which was published by Politico on Monday evening, …

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 …