A Russian military plane crashed in annexed Crimea, killing six crew members and 23 passengers on board, Russian news agencies reported in the early hours of Wednesday, citing the country’s Defence Ministry. The An-26 military transport aircraft was on a scheduled flight over the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, the reports said. The military lost contact with the plane at around 6 pm on Tuesday. Russian news agency Interfax quoted the Defence Ministry as saying that the crash was likely caused by a technical malfunction and that there was no “external interference” with the aircraft. The plane crashed into a cliff, sources at the site told state news agencies Tass and RIA Novosti. The An-26 is a Soviet-designed military transport turboprop aircraft. This story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed, agencies. Mid-day accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability, trustworthiness, reliability and data of the text. Mid-day management/mid-day.com reserves the sole right to alter, delete or remove (without notice) the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever
01 April,2026 12:04 PM IST | Moscow | APThe UAE has barred Iranians from entering or transiting the country as the war rages, three major airlines said on Wednesday. The long-haul carriers Emirates and Etihad, as well as the lower-cost airline FlyDubai, made the announcements on their websites. Entry rules can sometimes be opaque in the autocratic United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven sheikhdoms. But the airlines' websites all displayed the order. It said holders of Golden Visas, 10-year residency permits in the country, could still enter. Authorities offered no official comment. But the change comes as Dubai has already shut down the Iranian Hospital and Iranian Club in the city, two institutions in the city-state dating back to the time of the shah. This story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed, agencies. Mid-day accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability, trustworthiness, reliability and data of the text. Mid-day management/mid-day.com reserves the sole right to alter, delete or remove (without notice) the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever
01 April,2026 10:39 AM IST | Dubai | APUS President Donald Trump plans to sit in on Wednesday's Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship, making him the first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the nation's highest court. The Republican president's official schedule, sent out by the White House, included a stop at the Supreme Court, where justices will hear Trump's appeal of a lower court ruling that struck down his executive order limiting birthright citizenship. The order, which Trump signed on the first day of his second term, declared that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens. It's an about-face from the long-standing view that the Constitution's 14th Amendment and federal law since 1940 confer citizenship to everyone born on American soil, with narrow exceptions. It's not the first time Trump has considered showing up for a high court hearing. Last year, Trump said that he badly wanted to attend a hearing on whether he overstepped federal law with his sweeping tariffs, but he decided against it, saying it would have been a distraction. On Tuesday, however, Trump seemed more sure he'd be in court for Wednesday's hearing while he spoke with reporters in the Oval Office. "I'm going," Trump said, when the upcoming arguments in the birthright citizenship case were mentioned. To a follow-up question clarifying that he planned to go in person, Trump said, "I think so, I do believe." Trump went to the Supreme Court in his first term for the ceremonial swearing-in of the first justice he appointed, Neil Gorsuch. Two other justices he appointed - Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett - also sit on the court. Other presidents have dealt directly with the court, but don't appear to have done so while in office. Richard Nixon argued a case between his time as vice president and president, and William Howard Taft served as chief justice after his presidency. Trump, asked to whom he would be listening most closely, went on a lengthy detour Tuesday describing a court he viewed as mostly partisan, between justices appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents. "I love a few of them," he said. "I don't like some others." The citizenship restrictions are a part of Trump's broader immigration crackdown, but they have not yet taken effect anywhere in the country after being blocked by several courts. A definitive ruling from the Supreme Court is expected by early summer. This story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed, agencies. Mid-day accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability, trustworthiness, reliability and data of the text. Mid-day management/mid-day.com reserves the sole right to alter, delete or remove (without notice) the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever
01 April,2026 10:28 AM IST | Washington | APIsrael said early Wednesday it struck a plant supplying Iran's theocracy with fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, to allegedly use in a chemical weapons programme. Iran acknowledged the strike on Tofigh Daru factory, but insisted it only supplied "hospital drugs" used in medical operations. The strike happened Tuesday, both Israel and Iran said. Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted a picture of the factory in Tehran, writing on X: "The war criminals in Israel are now openly and unashamedly bombing pharmaceutical companies." Hospitals extensively use fentanyl to treat severe pain. But a small amount of the drug can be fatal. Both Israel and the United States have warned in recent years Iran was experimenting with fentanyl in munitions. The US previously pointed to Iranian academic research studying how Russia likely used a fentanyl derivative during the 2002 Moscow theatre hostage seizure by Chechen militants. Israel alleged Tofigh Daru supplied fentanyl to an advanced research institute in Tehran, known by its acronym SPND. The US alleges SPND has conducted research and testing that could be applicable to the development of nuclear explosive devices and other weapons. Meanwhile, a tanker came under attack off the coast of Qatar early Wednesday, authorities said. The British military's United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations centre announced the attack happened, saying a projectile slammed into the side of the ship. It said no environmental damage was done and the tanker's crew was safe. On Tuesday, a fully loaded Kuwaiti oil tanker came under attack off Dubai. Over 20 ships across the Persian Gulf have been attacked by Iran since the war began. This story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed, agencies. Mid-day accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability, trustworthiness, reliability and data of the text. Mid-day management/mid-day.com reserves the sole right to alter, delete or remove (without notice) the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever
01 April,2026 10:17 AM IST | Dubai | APA new study shows that minerals inside asteroid Bennu are organised into three clearly different chemical groupings. These patterns provide important clues about how liquid water once altered the asteroid. As the samples haven’t been exposed to Earth’s atmosphere, they offer a rare, untouched record of how water, minerals, and organic compounds interacted in the early Solar System. The team examined a sample known as OREX-800066-3, collected during NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission and delivered to Earth in September 2023. This story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed, agencies. Mid-day accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability, trustworthiness, reliability and data of the text. Mid-day management/mid-day.com reserves the sole right to alter, delete or remove (without notice) the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever
01 April,2026 08:38 AM IST | Texas | AgenciesIndonesian search teams rescued 21 people from a raft on Tuesday morning, a day after their boat — Nazila 05 — sank in rough seas. Everyone on board was found safely. Officials earlier reported that 27 people were missing, but survivors reported that six people listed on the manifest had cancelled their plans to join the trip. Rescuers found the survivors, who were mostly fishing crew, on a raft about 46 km from the place where the boat sank in the northern waters of Taliabu Island. This story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed, agencies. Mid-day accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability, trustworthiness, reliability and data of the text. Mid-day management/mid-day.com reserves the sole right to alter, delete or remove (without notice) the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever
01 April,2026 08:36 AM IST | Bali | AgenciesScientists in South Korea have identified an ally in the fight against plastic pollution inside the human body. Researchers report that the kimchi-derived lactic acid bacterium — Leuconostoc mesenteroides CBA3656 — can latch onto nanoplastics in the gut, helping carry them out of the body before they spread further. Nanoplastics, which measure less than 1 micrometre (one-thousandth of a millimetre, about 0.00004 inches), are formed as larger plastics break down in the environment. They are widely detected in food and drinking water, and because they are so small, may pass through the intestinal lining and accumulate in organs. This story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed, agencies. Mid-day accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability, trustworthiness, reliability and data of the text. Mid-day management/mid-day.com reserves the sole right to alter, delete or remove (without notice) the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever
01 April,2026 08:33 AM IST | Seoul | AgenciesA wolf attacked and bit a woman in a shopping area in Hamburg before it was pulled out of a lake in Germany’s second-biggest city, authorities said, in what is believed to be the first such attack since wolves returned to the country in 1998. The fire service said that the woman was taken to a Hamburg hospital on Monday evening. This story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed, agencies. Mid-day accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability, trustworthiness, reliability and data of the text. Mid-day management/mid-day.com reserves the sole right to alter, delete or remove (without notice) the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever
01 April,2026 08:28 AM IST | Berlin | AgenciesTop European diplomats visited Ukraine on Tuesday to mark the anniversary of atrocities committed at Bucha near Kyiv by Russia’s forces four years ago. A group of 12 European foreign ministers and several officials, arrived in Kyiv where they were welcomed by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha. Russian troops quickly occupied Bucha after invading Ukraine on February 24, 2022. They stayed for about a month. When Ukrainian troops retook the town, they found more than 400 bodies left by Russia’s cleansing operation. This story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed, agencies. Mid-day accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability, trustworthiness, reliability and data of the text. Mid-day management/mid-day.com reserves the sole right to alter, delete or remove (without notice) the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever
01 April,2026 08:12 AM IST | Kyiv | AgenciesA Russian oil tanker docked in a Cuban port on Tuesday to deliver the first crude shipment to the island since January after Washington gave the crisis-hit country a reprieve from its fuel blockade. The Anatoly Kolodkin, a tanker under US sanctions, entered the port of Matanzas, east of Havana, after sunrise to deliver 730,000 barrels of crude following a three-week journey from Russia. US President Donald Trump's decision to let Russia deliver the oil avoids a confrontation with Moscow and provides temporary relief to a country that has endured blackouts, fuel rationing and dwindling public transportation. "It's great that the country is receiving oil because we need it for the crisis we are facing," Yoanna Rivero, a 49-year-old pharmacy worker who was exercising near the port, told AFP. Felipe Serrano, a 76-year-old security guard, was waiting for the Russian ship to arrive. "This is crucial for us to be able to survive because the country is paralyzed," he said. Analysts, however, said the shipment would give Cuba only a brief respite. "It can offer temporary breathing room, but it does not come close to resolving the scale of the deficit the country is facing," Ricardo Torres, a Cuban economist at American University in Washington, told AFP. "It is clearly not enough," he said, noting that Cuba's power problems are "structural rather than episodic." Cuban Energy and Mining Minister Vicente de la O Levy thanked Russia for the support, saying on X that the "valuable shipment arrives in the middle of the complex energy situation that we are facing." The Russian embassy in Cuba replied to his post that it was "a duty to help our Cuban brothers under these difficult conditions!" Trump, who has mused about "taking" communist-ruled Cuba, said Sunday that he did not object to Russia or others sending oil to the island because Cubans "have to survive." The White House denied that there was any change to US sanctions policy. "We allowed this ship to reach Cuba in order to provide humanitarian needs to the Cuban people. These decisions are being made on a case-by-case basis," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. The Kremlin said the shipment was discussed in advanced with Washington. Driving Cuba 'to the brink' Cuba was cut off from oil supplies in January after US forces ousted its main regional ally, Venezuela's socialist leader Nicolas Maduro, and Trump threatened tariffs on countries that send crude to the country. While Trump has warned that "Cuba is next," President Miguel Diaz-Canel confirmed in March that Cuban and US officials had held talks. Ricardo Herrero, executive director of the Cuba Study Group, a nonpartisan policy group in Washington, said the aim of restricting oil was to force Havana "to make real concessions at the negotiating table." "The strategy here is to drive the system to the brink," Herrero told AFP. "But it's not to precipitate a full-blown societal or humanitarian collapse." "It's all consistent with idea that the US holds all the cards and they'll decide when to hold, when to fold and when they go all in," he said. Two weeks of diesel Cubans have endured seven nationwide blackouts since 2024, including two in March, and fuel prices have soared. The blackouts as well as persistent shortages of food and medicine have fueled public frustration and some rare protests. Jorge Pinon, an expert on Cuba's energy sector at the University of Texas at Austin, said the more urgent need is diesel, which could be used for backup power generators or for transportation systems to keep the economy running. It would take a month to refine the oil and deliver the diesel, which would be enough to cover demand for about two weeks, he said. Herrero said the shipment was just "another donation" by Cuba's Russian ally, but he doubted that Moscow wanted to subsidize the Cuban economy in the long term. "This is not going to help the economy recover," he said. "This is just humanitarian aid." This story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed, agencies. Mid-day accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability, trustworthiness, reliability and data of the text. Mid-day management/mid-day.com reserves the sole right to alter, delete or remove (without notice) the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever.
31 March,2026 11:22 PM IST | Havana | AFPRussian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday that the fate of the nuclear non-proliferation regime is a source of grave concern amid escalating geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. In a message to participants of the Moscow Nonproliferation Conference, Lavrov said the recent military actions by Israel and the United States (US) against Iran, including strikes targetting facilities under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had dealt a serious blow to the authority of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Such actions have also hurt the credibility of diplomacy as a means of resolving disputes, Lavrov said, adding that some countries may increasingly view nuclear weapons as a guarantee of security. He stressed the importance of preserving the pact as a key element of global strategic stability and urged all signatories, particularly nuclear-weapon states, to fulfill their obligations. The foreign minister also noted that the risks of the militarization of outer space are increasing as a result of "destructive actions by the United States and its allies", Xinhua news agency reported. The implementation of the US "Golden Dome" missile defence system, which envisions deploying space-based interceptor strike systems by 2028, poses a significant threat to strategic stability, he said. Last week, a US news website reported that US President Donald Trump has rejected a proposal by Russian President Vladimir Putin to move Iran's enriched uranium to Russia as part of a deal to end the US-Israeli conflict with Iran. Trump turned Putin down in a phone call earlier this week, sources told Axios, an American news website based in Arlington, Virginia. Putin raised several ideas, including the uranium proposal, for ending the war during the phone conversation with Trump on Monday (March 9), said the report. "This is not the first time it was offered. It hasn't been accepted. The US position is we need to see the uranium secured," a US official was quoted as saying. It's not clear whether Iran would accept the proposal now. In the last round of talks before the war, Iran rejected the transfer idea and proposed diluting the uranium inside its own facilities under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, according to the report. Some news reports had also said that the Trump administration is considering sending special operations forces into Iran to secure or seize the country's highly enriched uranium. This story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed, agencies. Mid-day accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability, trustworthiness, reliability and data of the text. Mid-day management/mid-day.com reserves the sole right to alter, delete or remove (without notice) the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever.
31 March,2026 10:13 PM IST | Moscow | IANSADVERTISEMENT
