MANILA: Philippine troops have killed a high-value but little-known Filipino militant who acted as a key link of the militant Islamic State group to local jihadists and helped set up a series of deadly suicide attacks in the south that have alarmed the region, military officials said on Saturday. Talha Jumsah, who used the nom de guerre Abu Talha, was killed …

BEIJING: The United States is the world’s biggest source of instability and its politicians are going around the world baselessly smearing China, the Chinese government’s top diplomat said on Saturday in a stinging attack at a G20 meeting in Japan. Relations between the world’s two largest economies have nose-dived amid a bitter trade war — which they are trying to …

The US State Department on Saturday called on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to suspend the accounts of Iranian government leaders until Tehran re-establishes internet coverage throughout the riot-torn country. The government imposed a near-total Internet blackout more than a week ago amid violent protests. “It is a deeply hypocritical regime,” Brian Hook, special US representative for Iran, said in an …

Hong Kong’s people turned out in force on Sunday to cast ballots in local council elections that the city’s pro-democracy movement hopes will add pressure on the Beijing-backed government to heed their demands. Queues several hundred meters long snaked out of polling stations in the early hours of a vote for 18 district councils in which high turnout is expected …

Two Iraqi protesters were shot dead overnight in the southern city of Nasiriyah, where anti-government demonstrators shut down schools and blockaded bridges, a medical source told AFP on Sunday. At least 47 other people were wounded in clashes with security forces as protesters burned car tyres on roads and outside many public offices in the city, some 300 kilometres (200 miles) south …

The United Nations has called for rape — which it has termed “an intolerate cost to society” — to be made universally illegal, noting that “most perpetrators of rape go unreported or unpunished”. A statement by UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women reported that currently “more than half of …

WASHINGTON: The head of a US congressional panel has asked the Trump administration to persuade India to allow US diplomats to visit and review the situation in occupied Kashmir. Congressman Brad Sherman, who made this request in a letter to the US State Department, heads a House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia. Last month, the panel held a hearing on …

ISLAMABAD: A woman has been arrested in the murder of a military official, and more than a dozen other suspects have also been apprehended. Police officials told Dawn the woman was with the victim when he was murdered. She was a friend of the victim and had known him for three or four years. Police said she was produced in the court …

KARACHI: A 40-year-old man committed suicide by jumping off the fourth floor of his apartment building in Shadman Town on Saturday allegedly after hammering his eight-year-old daughter to death and leaving his wife and 10-year-old son badly injured, police said. The chilling episode in the densely populated locality was reported early in the morning and remained a mystery even after …

ISLAMABAD: To counter the opposition’s campaign that the government of Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf (PTI) has failed to deliver, Prime Minister Imran Khan recently directed all ministries and divisions to highlight their success stories. In this regard, the Ministry of National Health Services (NHS) has prepared a list of its achievements to show that it has completed a number of projects and …