Author: Daily Sabah With Reuters

The White House is urging federal agencies to refrain from laying off their cybersecurity teams, as they scramble to comply with a Thursday deadline to submit mass layoff plans to slash their budgets, according to an email seen by Reuters. Greg Barbaccia, the United States federal chief information officer, sent the message on Wednesday, in response to questions about whether cybersecurity employees’ work is national security-related, and therefore exempt from layoffs. “We believe cybersecurity is national security and we encourage Department-level Chief Information Officers to consider this when reviewing their organizations,” he wrote in the email to information technology employees…

Russia’s air base in Syria is sheltering about 9,000 people seeking refuge from a wave of sectarian violence, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday. Zakharova said Moscow was shocked by events in Syria and hoped those responsible for the violence would be punished.

Yemen’s Houthis said on Tuesday they will attack any Israeli ship that violates the group’s ban on Israeli ships passing through the Red and Arabian seas, the Bab al-Mandab Strait and the Gulf of Aden, effective immediately. The leader of Yemen’s Houthis said on Friday that the group would resume its naval operations against Israel if Israel did not lift a blockage of aid into Gaza within four days.

President Donald Trump told CEOs of major companies on Tuesday that new tariffs may go higher than 25%. “The tariffs are having a tremendously positive impact,” Trump told the Business Roundtable, brushing off the stock market reaction. He said they may rise above 25%. “The higher it goes the more likely it is they’re going to build” in the United States. He also defended Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is leading a White House effort to shrink the federal government. “We’ve had some little hiccups, not big hiccups, but we saved a tremendous amount of money,” Trump said.

Britain will not impose retaliatory trade tariffs in response to U.S. duties on all steel and aluminium imports which are due to come into force on Wednesday, a British government official said on Tuesday. While the European Union plans to hit back against the 25% US tariffs on imports of the metals, the official – who asked not to be identified – said Britain would continue to engage with the U.S. in an attempt to secure an exemption. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s official spokesman said on Monday that the UK and the US had a strong economic relationship which was…

Armed Israeli settlers stole hundreds of sheep from a Bedouin community in the Jordan Valley, local residents say, in one of the largest recent incidents in which Bedouins in the area have reported being attacked and harrassed. Such attacks in the area have increased since the Gaza war began but witnesses said the scale of Friday’s incident near Ein al-Auja, north of the city of Jericho in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, went far beyond anything witnessed previously. “This was the biggest one there has been,” said Hani Zayed, a resident of the community, who said he lost 70 sheep in…

Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested and taken into custody on Tuesday in Manila on an International Criminal Court warrant for the “war on drugs” that defined his term in office and which killed thousands of Filipinos. Here are some facts about the drug war during Duterte’s presidency from 2016 to 2022: CAMPAIGN VOWS TO ‘KILL’ As longtime mayor of the southern Philippine city of Davao, Rodrigo Duterte was known as “the punisher” for his harsh policies. His profanity-packed speeches and death threats to drug gangs were a feature of his successful campaign for the presidency in 2016. Among…

Only seven countries met World Health Organization (WHO) air quality standards last year, data showed on Tuesday, as researchers warned that the war on smog would only get harder after the United States shut down its global monitoring efforts. Chad and Bangladesh were the world’s most polluted countries in 2024, with average smog levels more than 15 times higher than WHO guidelines, according to figures compiled by Swiss air quality monitoring firm IQAir. Only Australia, New Zealand, the Bahamas, Barbados, Grenada, Estonia and Iceland made the grade, IQAir said. Significant data gaps, especially in Asia and Africa, cloud the worldwide…

Ukraine has carried out a drone attack on Moscow before a visit of Organization of Security and Co-operation in Europe’s (OSCE) Secretary General to the Russian capital on Tuesday, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said. “This is not the first time that a visit to Moscow by a high-ranking foreign delegation has been accompanied by an attack by Ukrainian armed forces drones,” Zakharova wrote in a post on the Telegram messaging app. “Overnight, too, the Kyiv regime has sent drones into the capital when the OSCE Secretary General is visiting it.” The OSCE is the world’s largest regional security…

Russia wants to see a united and friendly Syria because instability there could affect the entire region, the Kremlin said on Tuesday. “This is too explosive a region and, of course… the destabilisation or disintegration of one of the countries in the region can have disastrous consequences for the region as a whole. Therefore, we want to see Syria united, prosperous, developing, predictable and friendly,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. He said Russia was in contact with other countries about the situation in Syria after a flare-up of violence there in the past week.