International News

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a unilateral Easter ceasefire in Ukraine, ordering his forces to end hostilities at 6 p.m. Moscow time (1500 GMT) on Saturday until the end of Sunday.

Hamas's armed wing said on Saturday the fate of Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander was unknown after the group found the guard who was holding the hostage killed.

Iran and the United States started a new round of nuclear talks in Rome on Saturday to resolve their decades-long standoff over Tehran's atomic aims, under the shadow of President Donald Trump's threat to unleash military action if diplomacy fails.

At least 148 people were found dead in Democratic Republic of Congo after a motorised wooden boat caught fire and capsized, media reports citing local officials said on Friday.

Israel has not ruled out an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities in the coming months despite President Donald Trump telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the U.S. was for now unwilling to support such a move, according to an Israeli official and two other people familiar with the matter.

A US judge barred the Trump administration from rapidly deporting hundreds if not thousands of migrants to countries other than their own without giving them a chance to show they fear being persecuted, tortured or killed there.

The Trump administration on Thursday ordered a social media vetting for all US visa applicants who have been to the Gaza Strip on or after January 1, 2007, an internal State Department cable seen by Reuters showed, in the latest push to tighten screening of foreign travellers.

Israeli airstrikes hit around 40 targets across the Gaza Strip over the past day, the military said on Friday, hours after Hamas rejected an Israeli ceasefire offer that it said fell short of its demand to agree a full end to the war.

Hamas wants a comprehensive deal to end the war in Gaza and swap all Israeli hostages for Palestinians jailed in Israel, a senior official from the Palestinian group said, rejecting Israel's offer of an interim truce.

US strikes on the Ras Isa fuel port in western Yemen killed at least 38 people on Thursday, Houthi-run media said, one of the deadliest days since the US began its attacks on the group.

A US citizen hijacked a small Tropic Air plane in Belize on Thursday at knifepoint, injuring three others before being shot and killed, police said.

A former Harvard Medical School morgue manager accused of stealing and selling organs and other parts of cadavers donated to the school for medical research and education has agreed to plead guilty.

Four people have died and one is seriously injured after a cable car crashed to the ground near Naples in southern Italy on Thursday.

Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin on Wednesday met Russian nationals freed from captivity in the Gaza strip after Hamas' October 2023 attacks on Israel and said Moscow's longstanding ties with Palestinians helped secure their freedom.

Israeli troops will remain in the buffer zones they have created in Gaza even after any settlement to end the war, the country's Defence Minister Israel Katz said on Wednesday, as efforts to revive a ceasefire agreement faltered.

US President Donald Trump touted "big progress" in tariff talks with Japan on Wednesday, in one of the first rounds of face-to-face negotiations since his barrage of duties on global imports roiled markets and stoked recession fears.

Russian attacks killed at least three people in Ukraine's south and injured 10 more on Thursday, local authorities said, after an overnight barrage of missiles and drones.

French jails were hit by a second wave of attacks overnight, including three cars set alight at Tarascon prison in southern France, the Justice Minister and a prison workers' union said on Wednesday, as authorities sought to identify those responsible.

Gaza has become a "mass grave" for Palestinians and those trying to help them, medical charity MSF said on Wednesday, as medics said the Israeli military killed at least 13 in the north of the enclave and continued to demolish homes in Rafah in the south.

UNICEF has projected that its 2026 budget will shrink by at least 20 per cent compared to 2024, a spokesperson for the UN children's agency said on Tuesday, after US President Donald Trump slashed global humanitarian aid.

US President Donald Trump threatened to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status on Tuesday and said the university should apologise, a day after it rejected what it called unlawful demands to overhaul academic programmes or lose federal grants.

Jordan has arrested 16 people for plotting attacks on targets inside the kingdom involving rockets and drones.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that it was not easy to agree with the United States on the key parts of a possible peace deal to end the war in Ukraine and that Russia would never again allow itself to depend economically on the West.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is "deeply alarmed" at Sunday's strike by Israeli forces on the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, his spokesperson said on Tuesday.

US Vice President JD Vance fumbled the biggest award in college football by breaking the trophy in half during Ohio State's visit to the White House, on live TV.

Harvard rejected numerous demands from the Trump administration that it said would cede control of the school to a conservative government, on Monday.

Mediators Egypt and Qatar have presented a new Israeli proposal for a Gaza ceasefire to Hamas, Egyptian state-affiliated Al Qahera News TV said on Monday, but a senior Hamas official said at least two elements of the proposal were nonstarters.

An all-woman crew, including pop star Katy Perry, have completed a Blue Origin flight into space, marking a historic moment in space tourism.

Fugitive jeweller Mehul Choksi has been arrested in Belgium and will file an appeal for release, his lawyer said on Monday, seven years after details of his involvement in one of India's biggest bank frauds became public.

Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who enchanted readers with his intellectual rigour and lyrical prose for five decades and nearly became president of his country, died on Sunday aged 89.

Two Russian ballistic missiles slammed into the heart of the northern Ukrainian city of Sumy on Sunday, killing 34 people and wounding 117 in the deadliest strike on Ukraine this year, officials said.

Thirty two people were killed by a Russian missile strike on the northern Ukrainian city of Sumy on Sunday, its acting mayor Artem Kobzar said.

Two Israeli missiles hit a building inside a main Gaza hospital on Sunday, destroying the emergency and reception department and damaging other structures, medics said.

Israeli forces have completed the encirclement of Gaza's Rafah, the military said on Saturday, part of an announced plan to seize more areas of the enclave, accompanied by large-scale evacuations of the population.

Russia launched a barrage of drones in an overnight attack on Ukraine, injuring four people and damaging residential and commercial buildings in Kyiv and other parts of the country, Ukrainian officials said on Saturday.

China's capital hunkered down on Saturday as rare typhoon-like gales swept northern regions, forcing the closure of historic sites and disrupting travel while bringing late snowfalls and hailstone showers in some areas.

Iran and the United States will hold high-level talks in Oman on Saturday aimed at jump-starting negotiations over Tehran's fast-advancing nuclear programme, with US President Donald Trump threatening military action if there is no deal.

Nearly 100 people have died since Wednesday after heavy rain lashed parts of India and Nepal, officials and media said, and the weather department has predicted more unseasonal rain for the region.

A tourist helicopter plummeted upside down into New York City's Hudson River on Thursday killing all six people on board, including a Spanish family with three children and the pilot, Mayor Eric Adams said.

A Pakistani-born Canadian businessman accused of helping to orchestrate the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, arrived in New Delhi on Thursday after the US extradited him in the first such transfer in a terrorism case.

Hezbollah lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah says the Iran-aligned group is ready to enter talks with the Lebanese government on a national defence strategy, with the focus on ensuring the removal of Israeli troops from Lebanon's territory.

Technical consultations between the US and Ukraine on a minerals deal will begin in Washington on Friday and will not interfere with Kyiv's other financial commitments, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Olha Stefanishyna said on Thursday.

Russia released a dual Russian-US citizen jailed for donating to a charity providing aid to Ukraine, her lawyer said on Thursday, in what the Wall Street Journal described as a swap for a Russian-German national jailed in the United States.

A devastating roof collapse at a popular nightclub in the capital of the Dominican Republic has claimed at least 184 lives, authorities said late on Wednesday, as the search for survivors turned increasingly grim.

An Israeli airstrike killed at least 26 Palestinians, including children, in a house in Shejaia in Gaza City, local health authorities said on Wednesday.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukrainian forces had captured two Chinese men fighting for Russia in eastern Ukraine, potentially threatening a fragile peace effort in the three-year-old war.

As calls for Lebanon's Hezbollah to disarm gain momentum, a senior Hezbollah official told Reuters the group is ready to hold talks with the Lebanese president about its weapons if Israel withdraws from south Lebanon and stops its strikes.

Russian forces staged huge drone attacks on eastern Ukraine late on Tuesday, triggering fires and injuring at least 22 people, regional officials said.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has rejected a new Israeli proposal to control aid deliveries in Gaza, saying it risks "further controlling and callously limiting aid down to the last calorie and grain of flour".

A catastrophic roof collapse at a nightclub in the Dominican Republic's capital left at least 79 people dead on Tuesday and emergency crews were working frantically after nightfall to pull survivors from the rubble.

At least 50 hippos and other large animals have been killed by anthrax poisoning in eastern Congo's Virunga National Park and have been spotted floating along a major river that feeds one of Africa's great lakes, the head of the park said on Tuesday.

Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday that more countries would get nuclear weapons in the coming years, blaming the West for pushing the world towards the brink of World War Three by waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

China vowed not to bow to "blackmail" from the United States as a global trade war ignited by US President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs showed little sign of abating on Tuesday, even as battered stock markets steadied.

US President Donald Trump said on Monday he would like the war in Gaza to stop and thinks that will happen relatively soon, as he hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.

The heads of six UN agencies have called for an urgent renewal of the ceasefire in Gaza, warning of aid shortages and hunger since Israel resumed its all-out assault.

Ukraine will send a team to Washington this week to move forward with negotiations on a more expansive draft for a minerals deal offered by the United States, the deputy prime minister said on Monday.

A second child with measles has died in Texas in an outbreak of the childhood disease that has resulted in nearly 500 cases in Texas and has spread across 22 states.

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has said she would peacefully fight her five-year ban from running for office and draw inspiration from American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., as thousands of people rallied in Paris to back her.

The Israeli military has provided new details that changed its initial account of the killing of 15 emergency workers near the southern Gaza city of Rafah last month but said investigators were still examining the evidence.

Two British members of parliament who were refused entry to Israel and briefly detained are travelling back to London, a British minister said on Sunday.

Thousands of protesters gathered in Washington, D.C., and across the U.S. on Saturday, part of some 1,200 demonstrations that were expected to form the largest single day of protest against President Donald Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk.

Israeli occupation forces committed multiple massacres against families in the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours, resulting in the killing of at least 60 Palestinians and the injury of 162 others, according to medical reports.

U.S. President Donald Trump fired General Timothy Haugh as director of the National Security Agency on Thursday, according to two officials familiar with the decision, and congressional Democrats denounced the removal of the nonpartisan official from a top security post.

Israel stepped up airstrikes on Syria, declaring the attacks a warning to the new rulers in Damascus as it accused their ally Turkey of trying to turn the country into a Turkish protectorate.

The Trump administration moved forward with the sale of more than 20,000 US-made assault rifles to Israel last month, according to a document seen by Reuters, pushing ahead with a sale that the administration of former president Joe Biden had delayed.

The Israeli military said on Friday it had killed Hassan Farhat, a commander of Palestinian group Hamas, in the Sidon region of southern Lebanon.

Russia launched a barrage of drones in an overnight attack on Ukraine on Friday, killing at least four people and injuring 35 in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, regional officials said.

Myanmar's junta leader attended a regional summit in Bangkok on Friday, a week after a massive earthquake devastated parts of the impoverished war-torn country, killing more than 3,100, and spurring an appeal for help by the United Nations chief.

Hackers targeting Australia's major pension funds in a series of coordinated attacks have stolen savings from some members at the biggest fund and compromised more than 20,000 accounts in A$4.2 trillion (AED 10.3 trillion) retirement savings sector.

South Korea's Constitutional Court on Friday decided to oust President Yoon Suk Yeol, upholding parliament's impeachment motion over his short-lived imposition of martial law last year that sparked the country's worst political crisis in decades.

At least seven migrants have died, including one boy, one girl and two women, after their boat sank off the Greek island of Lesbos, Greece's coastguard said on Thursday.

The death toll from Myanmar's devastating earthquake has surpassed 3,000, with hundreds more missing, as forecasts of unseasonal rain presented a new challenge for rescue and aid workers trying to reach people in a country riven by civil war.

Russian forces unleashed an hour-long barrage of drones on Kharkiv, Ukraine's second city, late on Wednesday, triggering a number of fires but causing no casualties in the second such attack in the course of the day, the regional governor said.

Hamas decided not to respond or engage with Israel's counter-proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza, an official told Reuters on Wednesday, affirming it is committed to the mediators' plan instead.

Israel launched airstrikes on military airbases and infrastructure sites in the Syrian cities of Damascus, Hama and Homs on Wednesday, the Israeli military said.

The White House has confirmed that tech billionaire Elon Musk will stay on to complete his mission to slash government spending and downsize the federal workforce, dismissing media reports that he will leave the role soon.

At least one person was killed and 10 injured, including three children, in overnight drone attacks by Russia on Ukraine, officials said on Wednesday. Various attacks also damaged energy facilities in two regions, according to the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Israel announced a major expansion of military operations in Gaza on Wednesday, saying large areas of the enclave would be seized and added to its security zones, accompanied by large-scale evacuation of population.

A fourth US Army soldier, who together with three others went missing in Lithuania last week when their vehicle sank in a peat bog, has been found dead, US and Lithuanian officials said on Tuesday.

The United Nations on Tuesday dismissed as "ridiculous" an assertion by Israel that there was enough food in the Gaza Strip to last for a long period of time, despite the closure of all 25 bakeries supported by the World Food Programme (WFP).

United Nations officials who surveyed earthquake damage in Myanmar urged the global community to ramp up aid before the looming monsoon season worsens already catastrophic conditions, with the death toll at 2,719 and expected to surpass 3,000.

Syria suffered a nationwide power outage on Tuesday night due to malfunctions at several points in the national grid, a spokesperson from the energy ministry told Reuters.

U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, the man accused of shooting and killing the CEO of UnitedHealth Group's insurance division Brian Thompson in New York last year.

Aid groups in Myanmar on Tuesday described scenes of devastation and desperation after an earthquake that killed more than 2,700 people, stressing an urgent need for food, water and shelter and warning the window to find survivors was fast closing.

The Trump administration has fired staff at U.S. health agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration and National Institutes of Health, as it embarked on its plan to cut 10,000 health jobs, according to sources familiar with the situation and a health official.

The Israeli military said it killed a Hezbollah operative in an airstrike on Beirut's southern suburbs early on Tuesday, while three other people were reported killed and seven injured, further testing a shaky four-month ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.

Far-right party chief Jordan Bardella called on the French to rally this weekend to protest against a ruling that banned Marine Le Pen from running for public office for five years after being found guilty of embezzling European Union funds.

A gas pipeline operated by Malaysia state energy firm Petronas caught fire on Tuesday on the outskirts of the capital Kuala Lumpur, authorities said, with operations ongoing to try to tackle the blaze.

Fifteen emergency and aid workers from the Red Crescent, Palestinian Civil Defence and the United Nations have been recovered from a grave in the sand in the south of the Gaza Strip, UN officials said on Monday.

Families of patients and the wounded at the UAE field hospital in Rafah, southern Gaza, extended heartfelt Eid Al-Fitr greetings to UAE President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, expressing deep gratitude for the UAE’s ongoing humanitarian support.

Survivors were pulled out of rubble in Myanmar and signs of life were detected in the ruins of a skyscraper in Bangkok on Monday as efforts intensified to find people trapped three days after a massive earthquake in Southeast Asia that killed at least 2,000.

Israel has proposed an extended truce in Gaza in exchange for the return of about half the remaining hostages, Israeli officials said on Monday, as the military issued new evacuation orders and said "intense operations" were planned in the south of the enclave.

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen was convicted of embezzlement on Monday and handed an immediate five-year ban from public office, a sentence that will bar her from running in the 2027 presidential race unless she successfully appeals beforehand.

The bodies of eight Palestine Red Crescent medics who came under fire in Gaza just over a week ago have been recovered, though a ninth worker is still unaccounted for, the Red Cross said.

Lithuania said on Monday rescuers have recovered the armoured vehicle of four missing US soldiers that last week sunk in a peat bog in a military training area in the Baltic country, not mentioning the soldiers.

Five miners died on Monday and four were injured in an accident in a coal mine in the northern Spanish region of Asturias, the regional emergency services said. Two more workers were unharmed.

Rescuers freed a woman from the ruins of a hotel in Myanmar, officials said on Monday, a glimmer of hope three days after a massive earthquake that killed around 1,700 as searchers in Myanmar and Thailand raced against time to find more survivors.

US President Donald Trump has threatened to impose secondary tariffs on buyers of Russian oil if he feels Moscow is blocking his efforts to end the war in Ukraine.

The toll from Myanmar's earthquake continued to rise on Sunday, as foreign rescue teams and aid rushed into the impoverished country, where hospitals were overwhelmed and some communities scrambled to mount rescue efforts with limited resources.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged on Sunday to step up pressure on Hamas in Gaza while continuing negotiations to secure the release of hostages and working to implement US President Donald Trump's "voluntary emigration" plan.

A Russian drone strike on Ukraine's second-largest city killed two people and wounded 35 late on Saturday, officials said, as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged Kyiv's partners to respond to such attacks while seeking peace in the three-year-old war.

Sir Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, will be boarding Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity and blasting off to space on Sunday.

Singapore is reviewing penalties for violent offences following an outcry over a 12-day prison sentence for a student who strangled his girlfriend until she blacked out.