International news

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed on Thursday to pursue, track and punish the gunmen and their backers in a strong reaction to a deadly attack on tourists in Kashmir.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he would cut short a trip to South Africa on Thursday and return to Kyiv following a Russian missile attack on the Ukrainian capital.

An Israeli airstrike hit a police station in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday, killing at least 10 people, local health authorities said, and Israel's military said it had struck a command centre of Hamas.

An overnight Russian combined missile and drone attack triggered fires, smashed buildings and buried residents under rubble in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, killing nine people and injuring more than 70.

More than 150 people were injured in Istanbul after they jumped from buildings in panic as one of the strongest quakes in years hit the city on Wednesday.

China is set to launch its Shenzhou-20 mission that will carry three astronauts to the Chinese space station Tiangong on Thursday (0917 GMT), state media said on Wednesday.

India announced a raft of measures to downgrade its ties with Pakistan on Wednesday, a day after 26 men were killed in an attack on a tourist destination in India's Jammu and Kashmir territory.

Jordan has outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, the country's most vocal opposition group, and confiscated its assets after members of the outfit were found to be linked to a sabotage plot.

Twenty-six people were killed and 17 were injured when gunmen opened fire at tourists in India's Jammu and Kashmir territory, police said on Wednesday, the worst such attack in the country in nearly two decades.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called on Hamas on Wednesday to cede responsibility for the Gaza Strip, hand over its arms to the Palestinian Authority and turn itself into a political party.

Talks between the US, Ukraine and European officials to discuss ending Russia's war in Ukraine faltered on Wednesday as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly cancelled his trip to London and negotiations were downgraded.

A strong earthquake with a magnitude of 6.2 shook Istanbul on Wednesday, Turkey's AFAD disaster agency said, one of the strongest quakes to strike the city of 16 million in recent years.

An Israeli airstrike on a school sheltering displaced families in northern Gaza killed at least 10 people, while another hit a children's hospital, local health authorities said, taking Wednesday's death toll to 20.

A Russian drone hit a bus carrying workers in the Ukrainian city of Marhanets early on Wednesday, killing nine people in a wave of attacks that targeted civilian infrastructure in east, south and central Ukraine, officials said.

Pope Francis' body was due to be moved to St Peter's Basilica on Wednesday to allow worshippers and the public to pay their final respects ahead of a funeral expected to bring US President Donald Trump and dozens of other world leaders to Rome.

The chief of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees), Philippe Lazzarini, has denounced the escalating "deliberate famine" in Gaza after 50 days of an Israeli-imposed blockade on aid.

At least 20 people were killed and many others were injured after suspected militants opened fire on tourists in India's Jammu and Kashmir region on Tuesday.

Pope Francis' funeral will be held on Saturday in St. Peter's Square, Roman Catholic cardinals decided on Tuesday, setting the stage for a solemn ceremony that will draw leaders from around the world.

Cardinals gathered at the Vatican on Tuesday to plan Pope Francis' funeral, which leaders from around the world will attend ahead of a conclave next month to elect a new head of the Roman Catholic Church.

Hundreds of Filipinos gathered at a solemn Mass held for Pope Francis on Tuesday, following his passing that has stirred deep sorrow among Catholics around the world, many of whom saw him as a humble and compassionate leader.

Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed on Monday bilateral talks with Ukraine for the first time since the early days of the war, and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv was eager to discuss a halt to attacks on civilian targets.

Pope Francis, the first Latin American leader of the Roman Catholic Church, died on Monday after suffering a stroke and cardiac arrest, the Vatican said in a video statement.

Ukraine issued air raid alerts for Kyiv and the country's eastern half as blasts shook the city of Mykolaiv early on Monday, authorities said, hours after the one-day Easter ceasefire declared by Russian President Vladimir Putin came to an end.

US Vice President JD Vance began a four-day visit to India on Monday and will hold talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as New Delhi rushes to avoid steep US tariffs with an early trade deal and boost ties with the Trump administration.

The Israeli military on Sunday said a review into last month's killing of emergency responders in Gaza found there had been "several professional failures" and that a commander would be dismissed over the incident.

US President Donald Trump is threatening to cut another $1 billion in funding for Harvard University, this time targeting health research, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, as the administration's row with elite schools escalated.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had instructed the military to intensify pressure on Hamas after the group rejected an Israeli proposal for another temporary truce.

Russia and Ukraine blamed each other on Sunday for breaking a one-day Easter ceasefire announced by President Vladimir Putin, with both sides accusing the other of carrying out hundreds of attacks.

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.

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.