PHILADELPHIA: White House hopeful Joe Biden yesterday branded Donald Trump’s moves to fill a Supreme Court vacancy less than two months before the US presidential election an “abuse of power,” as some of the president’s own party also objected. The prospect of an expedited Senate confirmation vote has sparked furious […]
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WASHINGTON: A US judge early today blocked the Commerce Department from requiring Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google to remove Chinese-owned messaging app WeChat for downloads by late today. US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler in San Francisco said in an order that WeChat users who filed a lawsuit “have shown […]
VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis has signed off on a two-year extension of a deal with China on the appointment of bishops that critics have condemned as a sell-out to the communist government, a senior Vatican source said yesterday. The two-year provisional deal, which gives the pope the final say on […]
North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un inspects a flood-hit site in Taechong-ri, Unpha County, North Hwanghae Province, North Korea in this picture released September 11, 2020. SEOUL: North Korean leader Kim Jong-un praised his military for its prompt efforts to rebuild towns hit hard by typhoons and summer floods, state […]
WILMINGTON: Joe Biden branded President Donald Trump a “climate arsonist” yesterday for failing to acknowledge global warming’s role in deadly wildfires sweeping the western United States, while Trump said the crisis stemmed from lax forest management. Dozens of conflagrations have raged with unprecedented scope across more than 1.6 million hectares […]
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan said yesterday he would like convicted rapists to be publicly executed or chemically castrated, reacting to a question on the rape of a woman on a highway last week that has caused uproar in the South Asian nation. Last week, a mother of two […]
WASHINGTON: The US announced on Monday (Sep 14) it would block a range of Chinese products made by “forced labour” in the Xinjiang region, including from a “vocational” centre that it branded a “concentration camp” for Uighur minorities. “The Chinese government is engaged in systematic abuses against the Uighur people” […]
TOKYO: Yoshihide Suga, the man expected to become Japan’s next prime minister, is a farmer’s son with a reputation for inscrutability, who has become a key government adviser, spokesman and policy enforcer. The 71-year-old easily won the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s leadership race today and is all but certain to […]
HONG KONG: Concerns were growing today for the fate of a group of Hong Kongers in mainland custody after a senior Chinese official declared them “separatists” and lawyers were pressured to drop them as clients. Authorities said they intercepted the 12 Hong Kongers trying to flee by boat to Taiwan […]
WASHINGTON: US ambassador to China Terry Branstad is stepping down, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced today, at a time of increasingly strained ties between the world’s two biggest economies. Thanking Branstad for his service, Pompeo said in a tweet that he had “contributed to rebalancing US-China relations so that […]