A man who claimed to have a bomb in a pickup truck near the U.S. Capitol surrendered to police on Thursday after a standoff that paralyzed a swath of Washington for more than five hours.

The United Kingdom will double its humanitarian and development aid to Afghanistan to 286 million pounds ($393.34 million) this year, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said in a tweet.

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.

Iran yesterday insisted that its nuclear activities are peaceful and conform to safeguard obligations after the UN nuclear watchdog accused Tehran of  accelerating production of highly enriched uranium.

The death toll from a 7.2 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti has risen to 1,941 with more than 9,900 wounded, the Caribbean nation’s civil protection agency said on Tuesday.

The United Arab Emirates yesterday said that it is hosting former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani “on humanitarian grounds”, after he fled his country amid a Taliban takeover. 

Members of the US Congress, including many of President Joe Biden’s fellow Democrats, said on Tuesday they were increasingly frustrated with events in Afghanistan, vowing to investigate what went wrong. 

A chief of staff to a senior politician in Libya’s capital who was abducted earlier this month by armed men has been freed, according to images broadcast by the interim government.

Forty-seven migrants are feared to have died off the coast of Mauritania after a boat was found drifting with seven survivors on board, an official with the UN’s migration agency said Tuesday.

Britain on Tuesday announced a resettlement scheme for Afghans fleeing the Taliban after their return to power, offering an initial 5,000 places in the first year, rising to up to 20,000 in the long term.

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.

Pfizer and BioNTech on Monday submitted preliminary clinical data to US health authorities as part of their effort to seek authorization for a third dose of their Covid-19 vaccine for all Americans.

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.

Seventy-seven people died and at least 40 are still missing in Turkey after flash floods hit Black Sea regions last week, officials said on Monday.

Bob Dylan has been sued in a New York court by a woman who says the US rock and folk legend sexually abused her almost 60 years ago when she was 12. 

Rescuers in Haiti Monday used heavy equipment and their bare hands to hunt for survivors under buildings flattened three days ago by a massive earthquake that killed more than 1,400 people, while an approaching storm threatened more suffering.

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.