The European Union has not recognised the Taliban, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Saturday, nor is it holding political talks with the militants, a week after they seized control of Afghanistan.

The Dutch defense ministry says that the first group of Afghans evacuated from Kabul on Dutch military transport planes has arrived at a barracks in the northern Netherlands that has been transformed into a temporary accommodation center.

Thirty-seven migrants are feared dead after a dinghy carrying dozens of people capsized off the coast of Spain's Canary Islands, the sole survivor to have been found so far told Spain's maritime rescue services on Thursday.

Sydney’s Delta outbreak has not peaked and residents must brace for more deaths, authorities said yesterday, as Australia’s largest city continued to break records for new daily infections despite a nearly two-month lockdown.

Swiss researchers said Monday they had calculated the mathematical constant pi to a new world-record level of exactitude, hitting 62.8 trillion figures using a supercomputer.

Two Armenian soldiers were killed in border clashes with Azerbaijani forces on Monday, Yerevan said, in the latest military incident between the Caucasus rivals since last year’s war over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

An Il-112 light military transport aircraft, developed by the Russian army, suffered an “accident” during a test flight, its developer told AFP yesterday.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev who ended the USSR’S decade-long war in Afghanistan in 1989, on Tuesday warned against repeating the mistakes of the US invasion of the country. 

Germany’s defence minister yesterday urged Nato to learn lessons from its Afghanistan mission – slammed as a “debacle” by critics.

Germany’s president yesterday criticised Western powers over chaotic scenes at Kabul airport where thousands of Afghans gathered in a bid to flee the country after the Taliban swept back to power.

Britain yesterday cautioned the Taliban that Afghanistan must never be used to launch terror attacks but added that the West must try to positively influence the insurgents who have grabbed power after the United States withdrew its forces. 

Russia’s embassy in Kabul said yesterday that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country with four cars and a helicopter full of cash and had to leave some money behind as it would not all fit in, the RIA news agency reported.

Russia yesterday said a water-dropping plane carrying eight people  had crashed in Turkey during a firefighting mission. 

Britain will not abandon Afghanistan, Prime Minister Boris Johnson vowed on Friday, even as he confirmed the imminent withdrawal of most embassy staff in the face of a rapid Taliban onslaught. 

Russia yesterday recorded its highest daily coronavirus death toll for a third day running, as the country continues to struggle with the Delta variant amid sluggish vaccination rates. 

Jude Walker, an 11-year-old boy, is on an odyssey he hopes will help save the planet: he is walking to London from northern England in a bid to garner support for a carbon tax to tackle carbon emissions.

Russia has asked a BBC journalist working in Moscow to leave the country by the end of the month when her visa expires in retaliation for what it views as British discrimination against Russian journalists, state TV reported late on Thursday.

Russia yesterday reported its highest daily coronavirus death toll since the start of the pandemic, as rising cases in parts of world fuelled by the Delta variant continued to cause havoc.

A British judge on Wednesday gave the US government extra grounds to appeal a refusal to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, after it argued the initial ruling relied on a witness who misled court.

Belarus on Wednesday ordered the United States to reduce its embassy staff after Washington imposed a fresh round of sanctions on the regime of President Alexander Lukashenko.