NEWSPAPER WORLD

President Donald Trump announced that he’s pausing tariffs on Mexico and Canada after speaking to leaders of both countries on Monday — just hours before the sweeping actions were set to go into effect.   The proposed tariffs, which Trump announced Saturday, consisted of a 25% duty on all imports from Mexico and most from Canada (there was a carve-out for a 10% tariff on energy products), and a new 10% tariff on Chinese goods. Trump said earlier Monday that he’d be speaking with China soon.  Trump paused the tariffs on America’s neighbors after Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made commitments, some of which they’d already made, to bolster security at their respective borders with the United States. “I just spoke with President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico.  It was a very friendly conversation wherein she agreed to immediately supply 10,000 Mexican Soldiers on the Border separating Mexico and the United States,” Trump w...

Eighteen paramilitaries were killed and three others seriously wounded in an attack in Pakistan's southwest Balochistan province, police and local officials told AFP on Saturday. A vehicle "carrying unarmed Frontier Corps paramilitaries" near the town of Mangochar "came under gunfire from 70 to 80 armed assailants who had blocked the road", a police official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity. The overnight attack killed 17 of the passengers and a paramilitary who came to their aid, he said, confirming reports from local sources.  Three other paramilitaries were seriously wounded and two escaped unharmed, he said. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack so far. Security forces have been battling sectarian, ethnic and separatist violence for decades in impoverished but mineral-rich Balochistan, which borders Afghanistan and Iran. There has been an increase in attacks in the volatile province in recent months, with six people killed in ...

Cancer is responsible for 11.9 percent of deaths in Bangladesh each year, according to a new population-based cancer registry by the Department of Public Health and Informatics (DPHI) of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University (BSMMU). With 38 different types of cancer prevalent in the country, lung cancer (11.4percent), laryngeal cancer (8.5 percent), and stomach cancer (5.7 percent) are the leading causes of the deaths, the study reveals. The study reports a cancer prevalence of 106 cases per 100,000 people, with 118 cases per 100,000 among males and 96 cases per 100,000 among females. These findings were shared today at a dissemination programme at BSMMU's Super Specialised Hospital in the capital. The event, titled "Cancer Burden in Bangladesh: Evidence from a Population-based Cancer Registry," was organised by BSMMU. Md Khalequzzaman, associate professor of the Department of Public Health and Informatics at BSMMU and principal investigator of the study, pr...

Chief adviser Dr Muhammad Yunus has said students who led the uprising in July will form a party and they are already organising people across the country. He made the statement in an interview with Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times, on the sideline of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos in Switzerland. The UK-based daily published a transcript of the interview on Thursday. Below is a significant portion of the interview, presented for Prothom Alo readers. Gideon Rachman: Can I just press you a little bit on the elections thing? It was interesting because we were talking to Syrians. They have the same issue. Do they have elections? And some people said, in theory it’s great to have elections quickly. But actually in the Syrian case, big mistake. Don’t do it too fast. It can just split the country if you do it too quickly. Muhammad Yunus: This is a good time because always I’m protecting the unity of the nation. I do...

More than 20 Americans are missing in action on the front lines in Ukraine, with a spike in casualties over the past six months as foreigners fill urgent gaps in the country’s embattled defenses, according to a CNN investigation. The bodies of at least five American volunteers who signed up to the Ukrainian military could not be retrieved from the battlefield after being killed in action in the past six months, CNN found. Two of these were repatriated from Russian-occupied territory on Friday to Ukrainian soil after lengthy negotiations. The stark testimony of their surviving colleagues, and the growing toll, portrays the obscure yet important role of American frontline fighters in a war President Donald Trump has called “ridiculous” and has pushed Russian President Vladimir Putin to end diplomatically. The relatives of the missing Americans have told CNN of the distressing lack of closure in not being able to bury their sons, of the legal limbo of not being able to officially ...

US President Donald Trump has ordered the construction of a migrant detention facility in Guantanamo Bay which he said would hold as many as 30,000 people. He said the facility at the US Navy base in Cuba, which would be separate from its high-security military prison, would house "the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people". Guantanamo Bay has long been used to house immigrants, a practice that has been criticised by some human rights groups. Later on Wednesday, Trump's "border tsar" Tom Homan said the existing facility there would be expanded and run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He said the migrants could be transported there directly after being intercepted at sea by the US Coast Guard, and that the "highest" detention standards would be applied. It is unclear how much the facility will cost or when it would be completed. Cuba's government swiftly condemned the plan, accusing the US of torture an...

  US President Donald Trump has said India "will do what's right" on the deportation of  illegal migrants following a phone call with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The leaders spoke on Monday, their first conversation since Trump's inauguration last  week. They discussed immigration, security issues and trade in what the White House  described as a "productive call". Trump told reporters after the call that Modi was likely to visit the United States  "sometime in February". Since taking office on 20 January, Trump has announced a number of  immigration-related executive orders, paving the way for a widespread effort to crack  down on undocumented migrants in the US. According to the Pew Research Center, there are an estimated 725,000 undocumented  Indian immigrants in the US as of 2024. Last week, India's foreign ministry said Delhi would take in Indians overstaying  "anywhere in the world" as long as their documents were shared and n...