Author: AFP

Canada on Wednesday announced additional tariffs on Can$29.8 billion ($20.7 billion) of US goods, retaliating against sweeping American levies on steel and aluminum. “We will not stand idly by while our iconic steel and aluminum industries are being unfairly targeted,” Canadian Finance Minister Dominic Leblanc told reporters. He called US President Donald Trump’s 25 percent steel and aluminum tariffs implemented Wednesday “completely unjustified, unfair and unreasonable.” Leblanc said Canada will be imposing on Thursday 25 percent tariffs on a new list of US goods that include steel products worth Can$12.6 billion, aluminum worth Can$3 billion, and products ranging from computers…

Talks between US and Ukrainian delegations on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia are going “OK”, a senior Ukrainian official said. “The talks are going OK, a lot of questions have been discussed,” the official, who requested anonymity, told AFP of the first high-level talks between Kyiv and Washington since Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky clashed with Donald Trump during an Oval Office meeting last month.

US President Donald Trump said Tuesday he will buy a “brand new Tesla” to show support for his top campaign donor and advisor, Tesla CEO Elon Musk. “To Republicans, Conservatives, and all great Americans, Elon Musk is ‘putting it on the line’ in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB!,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform just after midnight on Tuesday. “But the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby,’ in order to attack and do harm…

Gulf neighbours Saudi Arabia and Qatar on Tuesday condemned Israel’s decision to cut electricity supplies to the Gaza Strip, urging the international community to take action. Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry expressed “condemnation in the strongest terms of the Israeli occupation authorities’ use of collective punishment against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by cutting off electricity to the area”. A Qatari statement said the wealthy Gulf state “strongly condemns the Israeli occupation’s act of cutting electricity to the Gaza Strip, considering it a blatant violation of international humanitarian law”. On Sunday, Israel disconnected the only power line to a water desalination…

Ukraine will present the United States on Tuesday with a plan for a partial ceasefire with Russia, hours after conducting what Moscow said was a “massive” drone attack on the capital and around the country. With US President Donald Trump pushing Ukraine for an agreement to end the war that began with Russia’s invasion in 2022, the Russian military has also ramped up its attacks. The meeting due later Tuesday between Ukrainian and US officials in the Saudi port city of Jeddah will be the most senior since a disastrous White House visit last month when Trump berated Kyiv’s President…

Cuba has granted early release to 553 prisoners, completing a deal struck in the final days of Joe Biden’s US presidency that his successor Donald Trump later abandoned, a Supreme Court official said Monday. “The process was successfully completed,” the court’s vice president Maricela Soza Ravelo said on state television, noting that 378 applications had been filed in January and 175 in February. In one of his final official acts, Biden on January 14 removed Cuba from a US list of state terror sponsors in return for the communist island agreeing to free 553 prisoners. But six days later marked…

China warned the United Kingdom on Tuesday against “provoking tensions” in the South China Sea after its foreign minister David Lammy called Beijing’s actions in the disputed waters “dangerous and destabilising”. “The UK should respect China’s territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea and refrain from provoking tensions or sowing discord over regional disputes,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told a daily news conference in Beijing.

Swedish prosecutors on Tuesday charged a former national security advisor, who resigned in January, for forgetting classified documents at a hotel. Henrik Landerholm — whose appointment two years ago sparked debate due to his longstanding friendship with Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson — was charged with “carelessness with secret information,” the Swedish Prosecution Authority said in a statement. The charge was over a March 2023 incident in which the former national security advisor was reported to have left classified documents behind at a hotel conference centre. The documents “concerned matters of a secret nature, the disclosure of which to a foreign…

The Ukrainian presidency’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak said on Tuesday that Russia must show “very clearly” it wants peace in Ukraine following talks with the US in Saudi Arabia. “Russia needs to say, very clearly, they want peace or not, they want to end this war, which they started or no,” Yermak told reporters on the sidelines of the meetings in Jeddah, “Today, we demonstrated to all the world that we wanted peace,” he added.

Manchester United on Tuesday announced plans to build a new 100,000-capacity stadium close to their historic Old Trafford home, with co-owner Jim Ratcliffe promising it would be the “world’s greatest” football ground. The momentous decision by the Premier League club comes after an extensive consultation process on whether to develop their creaking current ground or move. The stadium, which will be built on land surrounding Old Trafford, will cost around £2 billion ($2.6 billion) and the timescale for the project is five years. United, 20-time English league champions, are one of the world’s most iconic football clubs but have fallen…