KABUL: Afghanistan under the Taliban government is the “most repressive country in the world” for women’s rights, with authorities effectively trap­ping women and girls in their homes, the United Nations said on Wednesday. About 20 women held a rare demonstration in a Kabul street on Wednesday, calling on the international community to protect Afghans. The Taliban government has imposed a …

LONDON: Arif Naqvi, the founder of collapsed private equity firm Abraaj Group, on Wednesday lost his final challenge to an impending extradition to the United States, where he faces charges of fraud. US prosecutors allege that Mr Naqvi masterminded a plot to defraud investors, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as well as the US government-run agency Overseas Private …

LONDON: The British government hit back on Wednesday at critics including the United Nations and football presenter Gary Lineker, after he compared its new plan on illegal immigration to the rhetoric of Nazi-era Germany. The Conservative government intends to outlaw asylum claims by all illegal arrivals and transfer them elsewhere, such as Rwanda, in a bid to stop thousands of …

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan needs to reorient its relations with Afghanistan beyond security perspective to bridge the widening mistrust between the two countries both at the state and people-to-people levels. Pakistan needs to abandon its approach of conditioning the promotion of trade activities between the two neighbours with the resolution of security issues because this scheme would prove counterproductive. These views were …

SINGAPORE: Plastics entering the world’s oceans have surged by an “unprecedented” amount since 2005 and could nearly triple by 2040 if no further action is taken, according to research published on Wednesday. An estimated 171 trillion plastic particles were afloat in the oceans by 2019, according to peer-reviewed research led by the 5 Gyres Institute, a US organisation that campaigns …

UNITED NATIONS: Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have deeply disappointed Muslims across the globe by imposing restrictions on women’s right to education and work, Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari said on Wednesday. Addressing the first-ever UN-bac­k­ed conference on ‘women in Islam,’ the foreign minister said that extremists had distorted the image of a religion that encouraged women to actively participate in all walks …

The Taliban governor of Afghanistan’s Balkh province was killed in a blast at his office on Thursday, police said. “Two people, including Mohammad Dawood Muzammil, the governor of Balkh, have been killed in an explosion this morning,” local police spokesman Asif Waziri told AFP, adding that the blast happened on the second floor of his office, in the provincial capital Mazar-i-Sharif. …

The United States on Wednesday announced the release from the Guantanamo military prison of a Saudi engineer seized over two decades ago as a suspect in the September 11, 2001 Al-Qaeda attacks but never charged. Ghassan Al Sharbi, 48, was detained in Faisalabad, Pakistan with an Al-Qaeda associate in March 2002. He was targeted because he had studied at an aeronautical university in Arizona …

ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court on Wednesday disposed of a suo motu hearing it initiated to consider vires of Section 25(a) of the National Accountability Ordinance (NAO), which empowers National Accountability Bureau (NAB) chairman to approve voluntary return, with the observation that the lacuna in the law had been removed through last year amendments in the accountability law. Headed by Chief …

LAHORE: Over 3,000 used high-pressure gas meters (both industrial and commercial) and other precious material have either been ‘stolen, embezzled or misplaced’ allegedly by various officials in connivance with their seniors as well as the private people. Since the official sources term embezzlement of a large number of meters (total 3,100) worth millions a first-ever major scam in the history …