International

With his head tilted back and his face mask pulled down, Imam Abdallah Hajjir patiently undergoes a nasal swab outside a Berlin mosque to get tested for the coronavirus. “Negative!” he smiles a few minutes later and heads inside for Friday prayers. The medical team manning a testing station outside the red-bricked “House of Wisdom” mosque is part of a …

Pakistan on Monday viewed the “alarming developments” in occupied Palestinian territories with “serious concern” and condemned Israeli violence during the month of Ramazan, according to a statement from the Foreign Office (FO). “Pakistan views the recent alarming developments in the occupied Palestinian territories with serious concern. “These include harassment of people coming for prayers, arrests of innocent Palestinians and other arbitrary restrictions …

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan will be among the key speakers at the opening of the annual session of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN-Escap) on Monday. Heads of state and government, senior officials and other stakeholders from across the Asia-Pacific region are set to take stock of the socio-economic impact of Covid-19 …

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Saturday offered medical supplies to India that has been struggling to cope with an overwhelming wave of Covid-19 while its leaders expressed solidarity with Indian people. After Prime Minister Imran Khan’s tweet praying for the ‘speedy recovery’ of the Indian people affected by the virus and calling for cooperation in fight against the pandemic, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi …

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 …