Author: Himalaya Post

ISTANBUL – Nine people died on Thursday when a boat carrying migrants sank off Turkey’s Aegean coast, local media reported. The mishap occurred off Kusadasi district of Turkey’s southwestern province of Aydin, the state-run Anadolu Agency said. Hurriyet daily said the boat was carrying 13 illegal migrants on route to a Greek island and four were rescued. The Aegean Sea was once the main route for migrants being smuggled into Europe via Turkey. A deal signed between Turkey and the European Union in March 2016 has reduced the flow of illegal...

TANJUNG, Indonesia — The Indonesian island of Lombok was shaken by a third big earthquake in little more than a week Thursday as an official said the death toll from an earlier quake had topped 220. The strong aftershock, measured at magnitude 5.9 by the U.S. Geological Survey, caused panic and damage. It was centered in the northwest of the island and didn’t have the potential to cause a tsunami, Indonesia’s geological agency said. Videos showed rubble strewn across streets and clouds of dust enveloping buildings. In northern Lombok, some people leaped from their vehicles on traffic jammed roads while an elderly woman standing in the back of a pickup truck wailed “God is Great.” The aftershock had caused more “trauma,” said national disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho. Nyoman Sidekarya, chief of the provincial search and rescue agency that covers Lombok, told The Associated Press that the death toll from Sunday’s magnitude 7.0 quake is now 227. Several agencies have been releasing higher death toll figures than the 131 announced on Wednesday by the National Disaster Mitigation Agency, which has a coordinating role in disaster relief. The agency says it is has not verified these other figures but expects the toll to climb. Grieving relatives were burying their dead and medics tended to people whose broken limbs hadn’t yet been treated in the days since Sunday’s quake. The...

MOSCOW – The Russian ruble tumbled Thursday to its lowest level against the dollar in almost two years after the United States said it was imposing fresh sanctions on Moscow over the nerve agent attack on a former spy in Britain. Washington’s punitive measures led to the ruble falling to 66.48 against the dollar on Thursday morning, its lowest value since November 2016. The latest wave of sanctions also saw the Russian stock market index RTS dive 3.2 percent and the MOEX index fall nearly 1.2 percent at around 0745 GMT on Thursday. Russian banks were also affected, with shares in the state-run Sberbank sliding 4.7 percent. The US State Department announced the sanctions late on Wednesday, calling them a response to “the use of a ‘Novichok’ nerve agent in an attempt to assassinate UK citizen Sergei Skripal” — who was a double agent — and his daughter Yulia in March. The action is aimed at punishing President Vladimir Putin’s government for having “used chemical or biological weapons in violation of international law,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement. The new sanctions are to take effect following a 15-day Congressional notification period, she said. Another senior State Department official told reporters that the administration decided to impose a “presumption of denial” for the sale to Russia of “national security sensitive” US technologies that require federal government...