International

TARASCON ARIGE: A group of 15 French volunteers on Saturday left a cave where they had stayed for 40 days, in an experiment probing the limits of human adaptability to isolation. Dazzled by the light and with pale faces but otherwise healthy, the group led by French-Swiss explorer Christian Clot emerged at around 10:30am from the Lombrives cave in Ariege, …

TEHRAN: Iran’s civil aviation agency banned all flights to and from India and Pakistan because of the dramatic surge in coronavirus cases in the two nations, state-run IRNA news agency said on Saturday. IRNA said the decision taken by the health ministry took effect on Saturday at midnight. Mohammad Hassan Zibakhsh, spokesman for Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation noted there were no routine flights …

RAMBOUILLET: French investigators were on Saturday questioning three people linked to a Tunisian man who stabbed a police employee to death near Paris in a suspected Islamist attack. The murder at a police station in Rambouillet, a commuter town about 60 kilometres from Paris, revived the trauma of a spate of deadly attacks in recent years. The victim was a …

JAKARTA: Southeast Asian leaders said they had agreed on a plan with Myanmar’s junta chief on Saturday to end the crisis in the violence-hit nation, but he did not explicitly respond to demands to halt the killing of civilian protesters. “It’s beyond our expectation,” Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin told reporters after the leaders’ meeting of the Association of Southeast …

JERUSALEM: Israeli warplanes struck the Gaza Strip early on Saturday after repeated salvos of rocket fire into Israel followed a second night of clashes between Palestinians and police in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem. Thirty-six rockets were launched, the Israeli army said, the most in a single night this year, after Gaza’s Islamist rulers Hamas voiced support for the east Jerusalem protests, …

At least 27 people were killed and 46 injured in a fire on Saturday at a hospital in southeastern Baghdad that had been equipped to house Covid-19 patients, medical sources at three nearby hospitals said. The fire at the Ibn Khatib hospital in the Diyala Bridge area of the Iraqi capital occurred after an accident caused an oxygen tank to …

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s police arrested a top Muslim legislator on Saturday in connection with the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks that killed 279 people, as pressure mounted to speed up the investigation. Detectives took Rishad Bathiudeen, leader of the All Ceylon Makkal Party (ACMP) and a former minister, into custody under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), police spokesman Ajith Rohana said. Bathiudeen …

RAWALPINDI: Saudis living in Pakistan and four other Asian countries have been advised to return home “as soon as possible” since no flights would be available from these countries even if Riyadh decides to resume international flights next month. The four other countries are India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Philippines. According to a notification issued by the General Authority …

WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden told Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Friday that the United States intended to recognise the 1915 killings of Armenians during Ottoman rule as genocide, a potential further blow to the already frayed ties between the two Nato allies. The much-anticipated first phone call between the two leaders took place more than three months after Biden’s Jan …

MOSCOW: Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said on Friday he was ending a 24-day hunger strike he launched to demand medical treatment behind bars, after allies said his life was in danger. The announcement came after Navalny’s personal doctors said on Thursday that he had received treatment at a civilian hospital and urged him to put a stop to his protest. …