Category: Eastern Sources

BRUSSELS: Alexander Pumpyansky, the son of Russian tycoon Dmitry Pumpyansky, won an appeal against sanctions the European Union introduced over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the bloc’s court said on Wednesday. In the ruling, the court said the EU council had admitted that from March 9, 2022 – two weeks after the invasion of Ukraine and six months before the first set of sanctions – Pumpyansky was no longer president and member of the board of Sinara nor board member of TMK,…

HELSINKI: Finland will close its entire border with Russia to travellers for the next two weeks in a bid to halt the unusually large flow of asylum seekers to the Nordic nation, which the government and its allies say is an orchestrated move by Moscow. Finland last week shut all but one of its border posts to travellers from Russia, keeping open only the northernmost crossing located in the Arctic.But this too would now close, the government said on Tuesday….

China said a surge in mycoplasma-caused pneumonia in children shows signs of ebbing, but warned that other respiratory illnesses are likely to hit the broader population hard during the mainland’s first winter after Covid restrictions. Health authorities in Beijing say flu, adenovirus and respiratory syncytial virus have surpassed mycoplasma as the most frequently detected pathogens among patients at the city’s top pediatric medical centers.Nearby Tianjin and financial hub Shanghai have also seen their mycoplasma positivity rates trending down in recent…

Three Palestinian students attending US colleges were shot on Saturday night in Burlington, Vermont, and were being treated for injuries on Sunday, according to the students’ former school in the West Bank. Ramallah Friends School said in a Facebook post on Sunday that three of its graduates had been shot near the University of Vermont Campus – Hisham Awartani, who attends Brown University in Rhode Island, Kinnan Abdel Hamid, who attends Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and Tahseen Ahmed, who attends…

AUTRYVILLE: Deputies responding to a call about shots fired in North Carolina on Sunday found four people shot to death in what appeared to be a campsite for homeless people, authorities said. An initial review of the crime scene indicated someone killed three people before killing themselves, Sampson County Sheriff’s Capt. Eric Pope told WRAL-TV. Two men and two women were found dead around a tent at the end of a private road rutted with huge potholes near Autryville, authorities…

BEIJING: Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi warned his South Korean counterpart on Sunday not to politicise economic and tech issues as the two prepared to meet Japan’s top diplomat on the sidelines of a trilateral meeting aimed at boosting cooperation. “China and South Korea have become cooperation partners with highly integrated interests and highly interconnected production and supply chains,” Wang told South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin, according to a Chinese foreign ministry readout. “Both sides should jointly resist the…

RIYADH: Saudi Arabia‘s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Tuesday urged all nations to cease weapon exports to Israel, according to Al Arabiya Post. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Price made this request during an extraordinary BRICS Joint Meeting, which was being held virtually to address the Israel-Hamas conflict. South Africa is hosting the BRICS groups of nations to convene the virtual BRICS Extraordinary Joint Meeting. Saudi Arabia further demanded the start of a serious and comprehensive peace process to establish a…

The Chinese government’s efforts to shut down mosques have extended beyond Xinjiang, an area long criticized for the persecution of Muslim minorities. This expansion has reached the Ningxia region and Gansu province, areas with significant Hui Muslim populations. As per a Human Rights Watch report , which utilizes public documents, satellite imagery, and eyewitness accounts, indicates that these closures are part of an official strategy termed “consolidation.” In addition to closing mosques, local authorities have been altering mosque architectures to…

BOGOTA: Former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe will appear before the attorney general’s office next week over a 1997 paramilitary massacre, authorities said Thursday. While Uribe was governor of the Antioquia department, a group of 150 right-wing paramilitary members killed at least 15 people in the village of El Aro. Last week, paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso, at a hearing with Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace, said Uribe “always knew about the operation.” The country has for decades been convulsed by fighting…

BEIJING: A Chinese man wanted for allegedly embezzling millions of yuan (hundreds of thousands of dollars) from his company and then fleeing to Morocco was extraditedback to China on Saturday, the Ministry of Public Security said. The man, a financial executive at the company, used passwords for its bank accounts to transfer money to his personal account, the ministry said in a statement.It didn’t name the company but said that Shanghai police filed a case against the man in February…

November 16, 2023 WASHINGTON — Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated eight individuals and six entities pursuant to Western Balkans-related Executive Order (E.O.) 14033 and Russia-related E.O. 14024. In a coordinated action, the U.S. Department of State also designated two individuals and 12 entities pursuant to E.O. 14024. “Russia has continued to use its influence in the Western Balkans to stymie the region’s integration into international institutions and organizations, as well as…

PARIS: France has issued an international arrest warrant for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, accused of complicity in crimes against humanity over chemical attacks in 2013, a judicial source and plaintiffs in the case said Wednesday. The judicial source told AFP Assad was also suspected of complicity in war crimes for the attacks, blamed by the opposition on the regime, that killed more than 1,400 people near Damascus in August 2013. International warrants were also issued for the arrests of Assad’s…

Backgrounder. Imran Khan is a former Pakistani cricket player, politician, philanthropist, and prime minister of Pakistan (2018–22). He became a national hero by leading Pakistan’s national team to a Cricket World Cup victory in 1992 and later entered politics as a critic of government corruption in Pakistan. Khan’s calls for investigations into government corruption, along with supporting evidence released in the Panama Papers, led to the resignation of Nawaz Sharif, Pakistani businessman and politician who served as prime minister in…

TAIPEI: Taiwan said on Wednesday that China sent 43 military aircraft and seven ships near the self-ruled island, the latest sign that Beijing plans no let-up in its campaign of harassment, threats and intimidation. Taiwan’s defenceministry said 37 of the aircraft had crossed the median line in the Taiwan Strait, which China no longer recognises as an informal divider between the sides.It said Taiwan had monitored the situation, scrambled jet fighters, dispatched ships and activated land-based missile systems, all standard…

Jordan, a key US ally, said Wednesday it has recalled its ambassador from Israel and told Israel’s ambassador to remain out of the country in protest over the “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza. Jordan’s deputy PM said the return of the ambassadors is linked to Israel “stopping its war on Gaza … and the humanitarian catastrophe it is causing.” Jordan signed a peace deal with Israel in 1994. Meanwhile, Bolivia said on Tuesday it had broken diplomatic ties with Israel because…

DUBAI: The only cancer treatment hospital in the Gaza Strip has gone out of service after it ran out of fuel, health officials said on Wednesday. The director of the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship hospital told a press conference aired by Al-Jazeera TV that the hospital, which mainly treats cancer patients, had used up its fuel and was now out of service. “We tell the world don’t leave cancer patients to a certain death due to the hospital being out of service,”…