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12-10-2025 BRUSSELS: The United Kingdom has said two Royal Air Force (RAF) aircraft joined a 12-hour NATO patrol earlier this week near Russia’s border, following a series of Russian drone and aircraft incursions into alliance airspace. “This was a substantial joint mission with our US and NATO allies,” Defence Minister …

11-10-2025 CARACAS: Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, a 58-year-old industrial engineer, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. Over the past two years, she has reenergized a politically disengaged population after more than a decade of economic and social collapse. Machado has been in hiding in Venezuela since …

11-10-2025 Bureau Report + Agencies NEW DELHI: India on Friday upgraded ties with Afghanistan’s Taliban administration, giving a boost to the diplomatically isolated group, by announcing it would reopen its embassy in Kabul that was shut after the Taliban seized power in 2021. The Afghan Taliban administration will also send …

11-10-2025 WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump has said that he will place a 100 percent tariff on Chinese exports to the United States, in an escalatory move that could set off a blistering trade war between the world’s two largest economies. Trump said on Friday that he would ratchet up …

11-10-2025 GAZA STRIP: Palestinians returning to their homes in the Gaza Strip have told the AFP news agency they are feeling mixed emotions as they make their journeys. In Khan Younis, in the south of the Gaza Strip, Ameer Abu Iyadeh, 32, said, “We thank God for this situation” even …

11-10-2025 Bureau Report ISLAMABAD/ KABUL:The Taliban have blamed Pakistan for an explosion in Kabul and another in the eastern Afghanistan province of Paktika on Thursday, amid mounting tensions between the neighbors and shifting allegiances in South Asia that have alarmed Islamabad. Taliban government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid had confirmed that an …

11-10-2025 BEIJING: China tightened export controls for critical rare-earth metals on Thursday. The new restrictions were announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, and come ahead of an expected meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and United States President Donald Trump’s later this month. The world’s two largest economies have …

10-10-2025 Bureau Report + Agencies NEW DELHI/ KABUL: Afghanistan’s United Nations-sanctioned foreign minister has arrived in India, the first visit by a top Taliban leader since they returned to power in 2021, following the withdrawal of United States-led forces and the fall of Kabul. Amir Khan Muttaqi’s trip on Thursday …

10-10-2025 CAIRO: Top US envoys and prominent regional figures have joined the third day of indirect talks between Israel and Hamas in Egypt on President Donald Trump’s plan to end the war in Gaza. Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are in Sharm el-Sheikh along with Qatar’s prime minister …

10-10-2025 PARIS: After eight years in office, Emmanuel Macron’s position as president is coming under increasing pressure as France’s political crisis escalates. Macron once called himself maître des horologes, master of the clocks but his command of timing is not what it was. For the third time in a year …