Author: Finance for Sight

JERUSALEM: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Tuesday to achieve victory in the Gaza war and secure the return of hostages, as Israel remembered its fallen soldiers and civilian victims of attacks. “In the name of the fallen, and for their sake, we will continue to pursue the mission of victory – including the return of all our hostages”, Netanyahu said in a video statement marking Memorial Day. At 8:00 pm (1700 GMT), sirens sounded across Israel to mark the start of a minute’s silence in honour of its dead. The annual day of commemoration has always weighed heavily on Israelis,…

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM: Israel rejected on Tuesday accusations by rights group Amnesty International that it was committing “genocide” against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, dismissing the claims as “baseless lies”. “The radical anti-Israel organisation Amnesty has once again chosen to publish baseless lies against Israel,” foreign ministry spokesman Oren Marmorstein told AFP in a statement. He said that Israel is “fighting to defend itself against Hamas”, the Palestinian group, and that the military does not target civilians. Marmorstein added that Hamas calls for “genocide against Israel” and “does everything in its power to carry that out – the atrocities of October…

SRINAGAR: More than half of the tourist destinations in Indian the Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) have been closed to the public from Tuesday, according to a government order reviewed by Reuters, in a bid to tighten security after last week’s attack on holiday-makers. Twenty-six people were killed and 17 were injured when gunmen opened fire at tourists in IIOK’s Pahalgam, police said, which they called the worst such attack in the country in nearly two decades. India has blamed Pakistan for the attack, while Islamabad denied any role and called for a neutral probe. An Indian security force…

MOSCOW: The Kremlin said on Tuesday that Ukraine had not responded to many offers by Russia President Vladimir Putin to start direct peace negotiations, and that starting this process was Moscow’s primary focus, Russian news agencies reported. Harris is more predictable than Trump: Kremlin Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia could not respond to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiyy’s proposal for a 30-day ceasefire without settling all “nuances”, the agencies reported.

ROME: Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said in an interview published on Tuesday that “times are not mature yet” for a summit between the European Union and the United States. Italian Prime Minister Meloni meets with Trump at his Florida resort “We are working on it, but it does not depend only on us,” she told daily Corriere della Sera, when asked whether the two sides could strike a deal on tariffs by the end of May.

TEHRAN: Iran’s interior minister on Monday blamed “negligence” for a massive explosion that killed 65 people at the country’s largest commercial port, with firefighters still battling a blaze at the facility two days later. The blast occurred on Saturday at the Shahid Rajaee Port in Iran’s south, near the strategic Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which one-fifth of global oil output passes. “The death toll has reached 65 in this horrific incident,” Mohammad Ashouri, governor of the southern Hormozgan province where the port is located, told state television, adding that the fire has not been fully extinguished yet. Officials…

RIO DE JANEIRO: Foreign ministers from the BRICS group of developing nations met on Monday to discuss a shared defense of the global trade system, coordinating their response to the barrage of new tariffs from US President Donald Trump. The meeting in Rio de Janeiro is expected to produce a joint statement criticizing “unilateral measures” on trade from the group formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa and recently expanded to include six more nations. “The ministers are negotiating a declaration to reaffirm the centrality of… multilateral trade negotiations as the main axis of action in trade,” Brazilian…

TEHRAN: Iran’s interior minister on Monday blamed “negligence” for a massive explosion that killed 65 people at the country’s largest commercial port, with firefighters still battling a blaze at the facility two days later. The blast occurred on Saturday at the Shahid Rajaee Port in Iran’s south, near the strategic Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which one-fifth of global oil output passes. “The death toll has reached 65 in this horrific incident,” Mohammad Ashouri, governor of the southern Hormozgan province where the port is located, told state television, adding that the fire has not been fully extinguished yet. Officials…

TEHRAN: Firefighters in Iran battled raging fires on Monday at the country’s largest commercial port, two days after a massive explosion killed at least 46 people, state TV reported. The blast took place on Saturday at Shahid Rajaee Port in Iran’s south near the strategic Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which one-fifth of global oil output passes. “The death toll in the Shahid Rajaee Port fire has reached 46,” the official IRNA news agency reported, quoting Mehrdad Hassanzadeh, the crisis management director for Hormozgan province. Officials had said more than 1,000 people were injured but Hassanzadeh said most have…

THE HAGUE: A top Palestinian official told the International Court of Justice on Monday that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza as a “weapon of war”, starting off a week of hearings at the UN’s top court. Israel is not participating at the ICJ but hit back immediately, dismissing the hearings as “part of the systematic persecution and delegitimisation” of the country. The ICJ is hearing dozens of nations and organisations to draw up a so-called advisory opinion on Israel’s humanitarian obligations to Palestinians, more than 50 days into its total blockage on aid entering war-ravaged Gaza.…