VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis announced on Sunday that a cold he is suffering from has forced him to skip a Lenten spiritual retreat with senior Vatican officials near Rome for the first time in his papacy. The surprise announcement, which will keep him from attending a gathering he holds dear, marked the first health scare for the 83-year-old pontiff since …

Railway police in India’s Gujrat had to remove the photo of a green train engine from a recently launched app after users pointed out it appeared to be of a Pakistani train. “To make the application more attractive, the app developer had put some pictures of trains. In the process, he inadvertently used a photograph of a Pakistani train. Upon …

JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged on Sunday to annex key parts of the occupied West Bank within “weeks” if re-elected, as he sought to sway voters ahead of the country’s third election in a year. Final polls pointed to another tight race between Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud and the centrist Blue and White party, led by ex-military chief Benny …

WASHINGTON: Under the Afghan peace deal, the United States will start diplomatic engagement with other members of the United Nations Security Council and Afghanistan to remove members of Taliban from the sanctions list with the aim of achieving this objective by May 29. The move will be synchronised with the start of intra-Afghan negotiations, expected in the next 10 days. …

ISTANBUL: Turkey shot down two Syrian warplanes over Idlib on Sunday and struck a military airport well beyond its frontlines in a sharp escalation of its military operations following the death of dozens of Turkish soldiers last week. Ankara has ramped up its attacks, including drone strikes, against the Russian-backed Syrian forces since Thursday, when 33 Turkish soldiers were killed …

KASTANIES FOREST: Greece has blocked nearly 10,000 migrants trying to enter from the border with Turkey over the past 24 hours, a Greek government source said on Sunday. A massive influx of migrants — many of them from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia — swelled along the border over the weekend after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to open its …

Pete Buttigieg, who entered the Democratic presidential race as a relative unknown and positioned himself as the future of the party during an improbable rise to the top tier of a crowded field, ended his White House bid on Sunday. Buttigieg, 38, a former two-term mayor of South Bend, Indiana, an Afghanistan war veteran and the first openly gay candidate …

LAHORE: Participants of a national workers’ convention held here on Sunday demanded introduction of ‘living wages’ instead of ‘minimum wages’ mechanism, keeping in view the proportionate inflation. At the convention organised by the Labour Education Foundation, in collaboration with the Punjab Industrial Relations Institute, Township, they also demanded reserved seats for labour in the national as well as provincial assemblies …

KARACHI: A teenager died in a hit-and-run incident in Defence Housing Authority on Sunday evening, said rescue sources. They added that 17-year-old Huzaifa Akhter was riding a motorbike when a vehicle hit him on Khayaban-i-Ittehad in phase-VI. The driver escaped. The boy sustained critical injuries and was taken to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre, where doctors pronounced him dead on …

RAWALPINDI: Automatic thermal scanners have been installed at the airports of Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar to check passengers arriving from abroad for the symptoms of coronavirus. Medical teams deployed at the airports have so far scanned more than 600,000 passengers arriving by international flights. Initially, a thermal scanner was installed at Islamabad International Airport (IIA) after which Jinnah International …