International

MNA International Desk: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made a historic visit to Pearl Harbor Tuesday, offering condolences to the thousands killed in the Japanese sneak attack 75 years ago. Abe’s visit comes seven months after President Barack Obama traveled to Hiroshima to pay his respects to the thousands who died there. The two leaders used the ceremony to affirm their nations’ alliance, with Obama calling for people to “resist the urge to turn inward,” perhaps a reference to President-elect Donald Trump and calls around the globe for nations to reconsider their international dependencies. The pair paid homage to the ...

MNA International Desk: Twenty-one people, mostly Christians, were killed and dozens more affected after consuming toxic liquor on Christmas Eve in central Pakistan, police said Tuesday. The incident happened in a Christian colony in Toba Tek Singh city, 338 kilometres (210 miles) south of Islamabad. “Residents in Mubarakabad Basti brewed liquor on Christmas Eve and consumed it. The liquor, which turned out to be toxic, killed 21 people and seriously affected 50 others,” local police officials said.. Most of the deaths had occurred by late Monday. Those killed by toxic liquor included 19 Christians and two Muslims. Though legal breweries ...

MNA International Desk: All 92 people on board a Russian military aircraft are feared dead after it crashed into the Black Sea. The plane disappeared from radar two minutes after taking off from Sochi at 05:25 (02:25 GMT), heading for Latakia in Syria, the defence ministry said. Debris and 11 bodies have been found, with no reports of survivors. The Tu-154 was carrying soldiers, reporters and 64 members of the famed Alexandrov military music ensemble who were to perform for Russian troops. More than 100 divers are involved in a round-the-clock search operation at the site of the crash, Russia’s ...

MNA International Desk: Japan said on Thursday it has paid millions of dollars in UNESCO annual funding dues after holding back the payment over a World War II-era history row, reported news agency. UNESCO last year agreed to China’s request to include documents in its Memory of the World register recording atrocities by Japanese troops after the fall of the Chinese city of Nanjing 1937. Japan—one of UNESCO’s biggest contributors—had protested the listing and warned that it might pull its funding for the Paris-based organization. Tokyo said it feared the memory project risked being politicized. Tokyo then failed to pay ...

MNA International Desk: An articulated lorry has ploughed into a busy Christmas market in the heart of Berlin, killing 12 people and injuring 48 on Monday evening. Almost 50 people are in hospital and at least four have suffered serious injuries. Germany’s Interior Minister, Thomas de Maiziere, said “many things” pointed to a deliberate attack. Police said on Twitter that the lorry driver had been arrested. The market is at Breitscheidplatz, close to the Kurfuerstendamm, the main shopping street in the city’s west. Security sources cited by the German news agency DPA said that the driver of the truck was ...

MNA International Desk: Many liberals and progressives are still clinging to one faint, almost-certainly-doomed hope that Donald Trump can be blocked from the presidency through the Electoral College. That’s because the November 8 vote was technically not to make Trump president, but only to determine who 538 electors in various states across the country will be. It is those electors who will cast the votes that legally elect the president on Monday, December 19. In modern times, the casting of electoral votes has been a purely ceremonial occasion in which the state results from Election Day have been rubber-stamped. Thirty-seven ...

MNA Internationale Desk: An Indonesian military Hercules C-130 transport plane crashed on Sunday in bad weather in the easternmost province of Papua, killing all 13 people on board. The plane was carrying 12 tons of food supplies and cement from Timika to Wamena, a distance of about 200 kilometers (125 miles), when it crashed just minutes before its scheduled landing, said air force chief of staff Agus Supriatna. The plane was also carrying three pilots and 10 other personnel. The plane was expected to land at 06:13 am local time. Aboard the aircraft were three pilots, eight technicians, a navigator ...

MNA International Desk: Vladimir Putin was the world’s most powerful person for a fourth straight year in 2016, with US president-elect Donald Trump in second place, Forbes magazine said Wednesday in its annual rankings, reported news agency. “Russia’s president has exerted his country’s influence in nearly every corner of the globe,” the US business magazine wrote. The 64-year old Russian leader is “unconstrained by conventional global norms (and) his reach has magnified in recent years,” Forbes said. The magazine wrote that at number two, Trump, who takes over the US presidency in a little more than a month, “has a ...

MNA International Desk: The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has determined that Russia did in fact try to help Donald Trump win the US presidency rather than work to simply interfere with the election, according to a secret report conducted by the agency. A secret CIA assessment found that Russian operatives covertly interfered in the election campaign in an attempt to ensure the Republican candidate’s victory, the Washington Post reported, citing officials briefed on the matter. A separate report in the New York Times said intelligence officials had a “high confidence” that Russia was involved in hacking related to the election. ...

MNA International Desk: At least 52 people have died and hundreds are injured after a strong Indonesian earthquake as it struck Aceh province on Sumatra island on Wednesday, an official said. The shallow 6.5-magnitude quake hit Pidie Jaya district at dawn, toppling homes, flattening buildings and sending people running for higher ground. There was no tsunami alert. The death toll has continued to rise as rescue crews sift through the rubble, sometimes by hand, to find those trapped below. “52 people have died, 73 sustained serious injuries and 200 others are lightly injured,” national disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho ...

MNA International Desk: Shinzo Abe, Japanese Prime Minister, will visit Pearl Harbor this month with US President Barack Obama, becoming his country’s first leader to take a trip to the site of the Japanese attack 75 years ago. “This will be a visit to console the souls of the victims,” Abe told reporters on Monday. “I would like to show to the world the resolve that horrors of war should never be repeated.” The December 26-27 visit will come seven months after Obama became the first serving US president to visit the Japanese city of Hiroshima, on which the United ...

MNA International Desk: Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is resigning after losing a key referendum on constitutional reform, reported news agency. The result drops the country into political disorder, but with the European Union already reeling from multiple crises and struggling to overcome anti-establishment forces, many sought to downplay the broader significance of the vote. Wolfgang Schaeuble, German finance minister, said Italy should endure the economic reforms begun by Mr Renzi. He also argued investors should be comfortable about the Italian referendum, which was a domestic issue, and said he saw no grounds for there to be a crisis for ...

MNA Feature Desk: Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary leader who built a communist state on the doorstep of the United States, died on Friday. Cuba has declared nine days of national mourning to mark the death, Castro demise at the age of 90 has prompted emotional scenes in Havana and Miami, tributes and reflections from world leaders, and ushered the island into an uncertain era. In his final years, Fidel Castro no longer held leadership posts. He wrote newspaper commentaries on world affairs and occasionally met with foreign leaders but he lived in semi-seclusion. However, his death which would once ...

MNA International Desk: The Head of Turkish opposition newspaper arrested of the board of Turkey’s opposition daily newspaper Cumhuriyet, has been arrested following a probe into “terrorist activities”, the publication confirmed. Akin Atalay was taken into custody at Istanbul’s main international airport after arriving from Germany, said Cumhuriyet, which also saw nine of its staff arrested last week amid swelling concern over media freedom in Turkey. The paper has in recent years taken a strong line against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP). Atalay was targeted by a warrant that was part of a probe ...

MNA International Desk: A gunman opened mass shooting in downtown Seattle on Wednesday evening following an argument and wounded five people, one man critically, near protests against the surprise victory of Republican Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election. An anti-Trump rally, which started at Westlake Mall, turned into a march and was proceeding down nearby streets at the time of the shootings, according to witnesses. Seattle Asst. Chief says that a lone suspect was in a crowd near or watching the anti-Trump protests, when an argument of some sort developed. One of the people in the argument stepped away, ...

MNA International Desk: US-led coalition air strike killed 16 civilians, including a child, overnight in a village near the Islamic State group’s Syrian stronghold of Raqa, reported news agency. “At least 16 civilians, including six women and a child, were killed in raids carried out overnight by the international coalition targeting areas in the village of Al-Heisha,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The village is controlled by the Islamic State group and has been a target of a new assault by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces as it pushes to capture the jihadists’s Syrian bastion of Raqa. The ...

MNA International Desk: The US presidential election got underway-on a small scale as seven people in a tiny New Hampshire village cast their ballots at the stroke of midnight. Dixville Notch has had the honor of launching the voting, symbolically, since 1960. Clay Smith was the first of seven people to cast their ballots as Tuesday’s long awaited Election Day began. An eighth resident voted by absentee ballot. The tally was announced in a matter of minutes: four votes for Democrat Hillary Clinton and two for Donald Trump. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson won one vote, and there was a write-in ...

MNA International Desk: The FBI said on Sunday it stood by its earlier finding that no criminal charges were warranted against Democrat Hillary Clinton for using a private email server for government work, lifting a cloud over her presidential campaign two days before the US election. FBI Director James Comey made the announcement in a letter to Congress, saying the agency had worked “around the clock” to complete its review of newly discovered email and found no reason to change its July finding.  “During that process, we reviewed all of the communications that were to or from Hillary Clinton while ...

MNA International Desk: Presidential nominee Donald Trump said he will bring real change to Washington if elected president, as he looked to frame the final days of the 2016 race for the White House against Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump said real change begins with scrapping Obamacare, which he described as an “international joke” and restoring honesty in the federal government. “So we ought to start by getting rid of Hillary Clinton,” Mr. Trump said. The New York businessman said Mrs. Clinton is a “candidate of yesterday” and said he friends in government have shielded her from facing criminal charges over ...

MNA International Desk: Turkish law enforcement agency on Friday arrested about 12 MPs from the country’s main pro Kurdish party, including its two co-leaders, as 8 people were killed in a letha car bombing . An explosion by the forbidden Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey’s main majority Kurdish city killed eight people including two police, and left over 100 injured. Eight people were killed, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim announced, updating an earlier toll, saying that the PKK had again showed its ugly face. The arrest of the HDP co-leaders along with nine other MPs, is a major intensification of a ...

MNA International Desk: At least 17 workers have been killed and more than 20 workers missing in a series of explosions triggered by a blaze inside oil tanker at the Gaddani shipbreaking yard in Pakistan. Some workers may reportedly be trapped inside the yard, with the fire still raging. It is not clear what caused the explosion and the fire. The fire started in a dismantled oil tanker that was stationed in the yard, according to Dawn. Eight explosions occurred inside the oil tanker while the workers were performing gas welding work, and more explosions are now feared due to ...

MNA International Desk: Pope Francis told reporters on Tuesday that the Roman Catholic Church’s restriction on women entering the priesthood is likely to remain in place forever. The remarks — issued aboard the papal plane as the Pope flew back to Rome from Sweden — came in response to a journalist asking whether the church might see female priests in the coming decade, news agency reported. “On the ordination of women in the Catholic Church, the last word is clear,” Francis said, referring to an apostolic letter written by Pope John Paul II in 1994. The letter holds that ordaining ...

MNA International Desk: Amnesty International has called on Pakistan to release hundreds of opposition activists detained before a planned mass protest, as police used tear gas and rubber bullets overnight to prevent demonstrators from entering Islamabad. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is under growing pressure from opposition parties, mainly Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI). It plans to lock down the capital Wednesday as it calls for him to resign over his children’s offshore bank accounts, revealed in the Panama Papers leak. Police have detained around 1,000 PTI supporters from across the country since last week after imposing a ban on all ...

MNA International Desk: Irritated citizens of the Indian capital, Delhi, are sharing images of smog, one day after Diwali celebrations saw huge quantities of fireworks set off. Scales of particulate substance in the air dangerous to health rose to nearly 10 times the safe limit of 100. A World Health Organisation (WHO) survey in 2014 found that 13 of the most polluted 20 cities in the world were in India. Delhi was the most polluted city in the world, the survey added. Diwali or Deepavali is the Hindu festival of lights celebrated every year in autumn in the northern hemisphere ...

MNA International Desk: Iraqi paramilitary forces launched an operation Saturday to cut the Islamic State group’s supply lines between its Mosul bastion and neighbouring Syria, opening a new front in the nearly two-week-old offensive. Forces from the Hashed al-Shaabi, a paramilitary umbrella organisation dominated by Iran-backed Shiite militias, have largely been on the sidelines since the launch of the operation to retake Mosul. But on Saturday, they began a push on the town of Tal Afar on the western approach to the city, the only side where ground forces, which have advanced from the north, east and south, are not ...

করাচিতে সাম্প্রদায়িক হামলায় নিহত ৫ পাকিস্তানি জঙ্গিগোষ্ঠী লস্কর ই জাঙ্গভি আল আলামি এ হামালার দায় স্বীকার করেছে। রয়টার্স পাকিস্তানের বৃহত্তম নগরী করাচিতে এক সাম্প্রদায়িক হামলায় দুই ভাইসহ পাঁচজনকে গুলি করে হত‌্যা করা হয়েছে।  শনিবার শহরের নিজামাবাদ এলাকায় এ হামলা চালানো হয় বলে জানিয়েছে দ‌্য ডন। চলতি মহরম মাসে করাচিতে এ ধরনের চতুর্থ হামলার ঘটনা এটি। পুলিশ জানিয়েছে, অস্ত্রধারী দুই হামলাকারী মোটর সাইকেল যোগে এসে নিজামাবাদ পুলিশ স্টেশনের অদূরে এবং সিন্ধু রেঞ্জার্সের সদরদপ্তর এলাকার একটি বাড়ির সামনে এসে থামে, ওই বাড়িতে মহরম উপলক্ষে একটি মজলিস অনুষ্ঠিত হচ্ছিল। হামলাকারীদের মধ‌্যে একজন ওই বাড়ির বাইরে পুরুষদের জন‌্য স্থাপিত একটি তাঁবুতে প্রবেশ করে পিস্তল ...

MNA International Desk: FBI is to investigate Hillary Clinton again of email scandal and the news came in as the Presidential race is in just about 10 days. Clinton embarks this weekend on the hectic final 10 days of her White House campaign, determined to shake off renewed controversy over the FBI probe into her private emails. The veteran Democrat running to become the first female president of America is still the front-runner to win the November 8 election over her Republican rival Donald Trump. Clinton has a clear lead in the polls, and voting has already begun in 34 ...