Author: News Desk

Sweden and Finland on Wednesday looked set for fast-track membership of NATO after Turkey lifted a veto on them joining, at a summit where the U.S.-led alliance is due to adopt a broad strategy focused on Russian and China for the next decade. After talks in Madrid, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday agreed with his Finnish and Swedish counterparts a series of security measures to allow the two Nordic countries to progress in their bid to join the U.S.-led alliance. “We will make a decision at the summit to invite Sweden and Finland to become members,” NATO Secretary-General Jens…

NATO allies will continue to supply Ukraine with weapons in its war against Russia for as long as necessary, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in Madrid on Wednesday. “It is good that the countries that are gathered here but many others, too, make their contributions so Ukraine can defend itself – by providing financial means, humanitarian aid but also by providing the weapons that Ukraine urgently needs,” Scholz told reporters as he arrived for the second day of a NATO summit. “The message is: We will continue to do so – and to do this intensively – for as long…

The 19th meeting of the Bahraini-Egyptian Joint Military Cooperation Committee concluded. The meeting was co-chaired by BDF’s Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations Major General Ghanim Ibrahim Al Fadala and Egypt’s Assistant Minister of Defense for Operations Major General Staff Mohammed Abdellah Abdulmawla. Ways to strengthen defence cooperation between Bahrain Defence Force and the Egyptian Armed Forces were reviewed at the meeting.

Social Development Ministry Acting Undersecretary Khalid Abdulrahman Ishaq Al Kooheji announced the launch of children and youth clubs, the annual summer programs. He explained that the programs will be presented during the morning and evening shifts from 10 am to 1 pm and from 4 pm to 6 pm, with Sunday and Tuesday allocated for girls and Monday and Wednesday for boys. Al Kooheji said that the clubs will present 27 programs and workshops during the summer, in line with the various desires of children and youth, which include several programs and purposeful activities in the fields of technology, cooking,…

The National Bureau for Revenue (NBR), in cooperation with the Customs Affairs, has announced the arrival of the first shipment of cigarette packs with digital stamps at Bahrain’s customs clearance ports. The Digital Stamps Scheme aims to track excise goods from the manufacturing stage up to the point of consumption through digital stamps and intends to limit the smuggling of excise goods into the Kingdom, protecting consumers against the circulation of counterfeit or illegal products and ensuring the effectiveness of government revenue collection. The first implementation phase of the scheme has gone into effect since March 11, 2022, when the…

The number of tourists arriving in Bahrain has grown by 984% in the first quarter of 2022, compared to the same period in 2021. According to statistics published by the Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA), the Kingdom received approximately 1.7 million visitors in the first three months of the year, compared to 152,000 in 2021. The Bahrain Tourism and Exhibition Authority (BTEA) affirmed that tourism revenues also rose to BD 292 million ($774 million) during the first quarter of this year compared to BD 30 million Bahrain Dinars ($80 million) during the same period last year, an increase of 875%.…

A German court sentenced a former SS guard, now 101 years old, to five years in prison on Tuesday for assisting in the murder of some 3,500 people at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, bringing to an end one of the last Nazi trials in Germany. Prosecutors had said that Josef S., a member of the Nazi party’s paramilitary SS, helped to send 3,518 people to their deaths at the Sachsenhausen camp, north of Berlin, by regularly standing guard in the watchtower between 1942 and 1945. The trial took nearly nine months as doctors had said the man, whose full name…

The Group of Seven economic powers have agreed to explore imposing a ban on transporting Russian oil that has been sold above a certain price, they said on Tuesday. “We invite all like-minded countries to consider joining us in our actions,” the G7 leaders said in the communique. The war in Ukraine and its dramatic economic fallout, in particular soaring food and energy inflation, has dominated this year’s summit of the group of rich democracies at a castle resort in the Bavarian Alps. The G7 is looking at price caps as a way to prevent Moscow profiting from its invasion…

Russian hacker group Killnet told Reuters that it was continuing a major cyber attack on Lithuania on Tuesday in retaliation for Vilnius’s decision to cease the transit of some goods under European Union sanctions to Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave.

A Moscow court said it had fined video streaming service Twitch, social network Pinterest, holiday rental company Airbnb and United Parcel Service (UPS) on Tuesday for refusing to store Russian citizens’ personal data in Russia. Moscow has clashed with Big Tech over content, censorship, data and local representation in a simmering dispute that has erupted into a full-on battle since Russia sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24. Russia’s communications regulator Roskomnadzor in late May opened administrative cases against Amazon-owned Twitch, Pinterest, Airbnb, UPS and two other foreign companies accused of violating personal data legislation. The Moscow court’s…