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Russia’s Putin open to Ukraine peace deal: US envoy
Russian President Vladimir Putin is open to a “permanent peace” deal with Ukraine, United States special envoy Steve Witkoff has said.
President Donald Trump’s envoy made the claim in a TV interview late on Monday, following “compelling” talks with Putin in Saint Petersburg last week. However, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned that agreeing terms on a deal is “not easy”, while Ukraine and its European allies have called on Washington not to be deceived by Moscow’s delay tactics regarding a ceasefire.
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Trump freezes $2bn in Harvard funding after university rejects demands
The Trump administration has said it is freezing more than $2bn (£1.5bn) in federal funds for Harvard University, hours after the elite college rejected a list of demands from the White House.
“Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges,” the Department of Education said in a statement.
The White House sent a list of demands to Harvard last week which it said were designed to fight antisemitism on campus. They included changes to its governance, hiring practices and admissions procedures.
Harvard rejected the demands on Monday and said the White House was trying to “control” its community.
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Pakistan accelerates deportation of Afghans: UN
Pakistan has ramped up the forced mass deportation of Afghan refugees and migrants, with nearly 60,000 having crossed the border since the start of April, the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM) said.
Nearly three million Afghans in Pakistan are facing deportation after Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced in October a three-phase plan to send them back to their home country. The IOM said in a statement on Tuesday that it has assisted more than one million people returning from Pakistan and Iran.
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Trump blames Zelensky for starting war after massive Russian attack
Donald Trump has blamed Volodymyr Zelensky for starting the war with Russia – a day after a massive Russian attack killed 35 people and injured 117 others in Ukraine.
The US president said the Ukrainian leader shared the blame with Russian President Vladimir Putin for “millions of people dead” in the Ukraine war.
“You don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles,” he told reporters at the White House, also blaming former US President Joe Biden for the conflict.
Trump’s comments come after widespread outrage over Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian city of Sumy on Sunday, which was the deadliest Russian attack on civilians this year.
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Good cops, bad cops – how Trump’s shifting tariff team kept world guessing
In the chaotic minutes after US President Donald Trump’s administration abruptly reversed course and paused dozens of sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs, one man quickly became the public face of the decision: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
“It took great courage,” the bespectacled 62-year-old former hedge fund manager told the dozens of reporters gathered around him on 9 April. “Great courage to stay the course until this moment.”
Notably absent during the press briefing – after which markets rocketed – were the other two men tasked with delivering Trump’s tariff message to the American people: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and trade adviser Pete Navarro.
Bessent’s centre-stage role in the tariffs announcement, some trade policy veterans have suggested, starkly highlights how shifting power dynamics within the White House brought the US back from the brink of an all-out global trade war, even if all the players are broadly supportive of Trump’s economic agenda.
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Iraq sandstorm leaves many with breathing problems
More than 1,000 people have been left with respiratory problems after a sandstorm swept across Iraq’s central and southern parts of the country, health officials said.
One official in Muthanna province reported to the AFP news agency at least 700 cases of what they said was suffocation.
Footage shared online showed areas cloaked in a thick orange haze, with local media reporting power cuts and the suspension of flights in a number of regions.
Dust storms are common in Iraq, but some experts believe they are becoming more frequent due to climate change.
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Palestinian student activist arrested at US citizenship interview
An organiser of pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University has been arrested by immigration officials as he attended an interview as part of his application for US citizenship, his lawyer says.
Mohsen Mahdawi, a green card holder who is due to graduate next month from the New York City college, was detained on Monday in Colchester, Vermont.
His lawyer said Mr Mahdawi was taken into custody “in direct retaliation” for his role in campus demonstrations against the Israel-Gaza war.
Others who took part in campus protests against the war, including Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University’s Rumeysa Ozturk, have been detained.
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The Indian airport that halts flights for a divine procession
For a few hours on a warm April day, jets paused and silence reclaimed the skies above the international airport in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of the southern Indian state of Kerala.
The airport’s closure was not due to bad weather or a technical glitch, as one might assume, but to make way for a Hindu temple procession that marches right across its runway.
Devotees pull ornate wooden chariots bearing temple idols along a 2km (1.2 miles) stretch of the runway, a tradition so revered that it shuts down operations for a few hours at the airport, which usually handles 90 landings and take-offs daily. Elephants, a common part of Hindu religious events in India, also walk on the runway.
The event, which took place last Friday, is part of the annual Painkuni festival held by the famed Sree Padmanabha Swamy Temple, home to treasures worth billions of rupees.
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What Trump really wants from Canada
Machias Seal Island is a tiny dot on maps of North America. But the uninhabited, fogbound rock is significant for its location in an area known as the “Grey Zone” – the site of a rare international dispute between Canada and the United States.
The two neighbours and long-time allies have each long laid claim to the island and surrounding water, where the US state of Maine meets Canada’s New Brunswick province – and with that claim, the right to catch and sell the prized local lobsters.
John Drouin, a US lobsterman who has fished in the Grey Zone for 30 years, tells of the mad dash by Canadian and American fishermen to place lobster traps at the start of the summer catching season each year.
“People have literally lost parts of their bodies, have had concussions, [their] head smashed and everything,” he says.
The injuries have been caused when lobstermen have been caught up in each other’s lines. He says one friend lost his thumb after it became caught up in a Canadian line, what Mr Drouin calls his battle scar from the Grey Zone.