Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pulled Turkey out of an international accord designed to protect women, the country’s official gazette said, despite calls from campaigners who see the pact as key to combating rising domestic violence.

US and Chinese officials concluded what Washington called “tough and direct” talks in Alaska, which laid bare the depth of tensions between the world’s two largest economies at the outset of the Biden administration.

Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin yesterday arrived in India for the first face-to-face meetings between New Delhi and the Biden administration, with shared alarm about China set to figure highly.

The US House of Representatives on Thursday passed bills providing a pathway to citizenship for immigrants nicknamed “Dreamers,” who are living illegally in the United States after entering as children, as well as for a large number of immigrant farmworkers.

The Afghan government and the Taliban yesterday agreed to try to accelerate peace talks, at a meeting in Moscow that followed an international conference there on the peace process, Afghanistan’s top peace official and a Taliban spokesman said.

The United Nations’ biodiversity summit, COP15, will take place in October in the Chinese city of Kunming after being delayed a year due to the pandemic, the UN said yesterday.

The International Criminal Court has given Israel and the Palestinians one month to ask the tribunal to postpone its war crimes investigation, provided they can prove they are carrying out their own probes.

Covid-19 has done little to alter the ranking of the world’s happiest countries, with Finland at the top for a fourth year running, an annual UN-sponsored report said yesterday.

Pakistan’s powerful army chief has called on arch rivals India and Pakistan to “bury the past” and move towards cooperation, an overture towards New Delhi that follows an unexpected joint ceasefire announcement last month between the two countries’ militaries.

The first high-level US-China meeting of the Biden administration got off to a fiery start on Thursday, with both sides leveling sharp rebukes of the others’ policies in a rare public display that underscored the level of bilateral tension.

The Kremlin said today that Moscow always hoped for the best but prepared for the worst when it was asked about the possibility of a new Cold War between the United States and Russia.

Japan government has decided to extend emergency grant aid of USD 10 million for displaced Rohingyas and host communities in Bangladesh.

North Korea said it would sever diplomatic relations with Malaysia after a court there ruled that a North Korean man could be extradited to the United States to face money-laundering charges, state media KCNA reported.

Armed gunmen killed at least 13 Mexican police in an ambush in the central State of Mexico, local authorities have said, one of the worst mass slayings of security forces to rock the country in recent years.

Germany, France and other European nations have announced plans to resume using AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine after EU and British regulators moved to shore up confidence in the shot, saying its benefits outweigh the risks.

The United States and China leveled sharp rebukes of each others’ policies in the first high-level, in-person talks of the Biden administration, with deeply strained relations of the two global rivals on rare public display during the meeting’s opening session in Alaska.

Thousands of opponents of military rule in Myanmar marched in the town of Natmauk, the birthplace of revered national hero Aung San, in defiance of a crackdown by security forces, local media reported.

Covid-19 appears likely to develop into a seasonal disease, the United Nations said yesterday, cautioning though against relaxing pandemic-related measures simply based on meteorological factors.

Surviving Covid-19 protects most people against reinfection for at least six months, but elderly patients are more likely to be laid low by the virus a second time, researchers reported yesterday.

US President Joe Biden defended his decision to waive any punishment for Saudi Arabia’s crown prince in the killing of a US-based journalist, claiming that acting against the Saudi royal would have been diplomatically unprecedented for the United States.