International

ISLAMABAD: Saudi Ambassador Nawaf bin Saeed Al-Maliki on Monday called on Prime Minister Imran Khan amidst what appear to be frayed bilateral ties due to Riyadh’s refusal to roll over its loan. “The exchange of views focused on bilateral cooperation and the Covid-19 situation,” the Prime Minister Office said in a statement on the meeting. “The resolve to further strengthen …

Pakistan on Monday joined a slew of countries who have closed their borders to Britain over fears of a highly infectious new coronavirus strain, heightening global panic and causing travel chaos. A meeting of the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) placed a temporary restriction on inbound travellers from the UK (direct or indirect) to Pakistan that will come into …

LONDON: Two people were found guilty on Monday of manslaughter and people smuggling over the gruesome discovery of 39 dead Vietnamese migrants in the back of a lorry in England last year. The bodies of the men and women were found inside a sealed container near London in October 2019 after suffocating in sweltering temperatures. Lorry driver Eamonn Harrison, 24, …

KABUL: Gunmen murdered an Afghan journalist in the eastern city of Ghazni on Monday, the third reporter to be killed in the last two months in the violence-plagued country. Rahmatullah Nekzad was shot dead with a silenced pistol by unknown gunmen near his home while he was travelling to a nearby mosque, Ghazni province police spokesman Ahmad Khan Seerat said. …

BEIJING: China’s CanSino Biologics Inc has recruited over 20,000 participants for late-stage human trials overseas for its coronavirus vaccine, a health official said on Monday. The candidate, known as Ad5-nCoV or Convidecia, which CanSinoBIO is jointly developing with a research institute backed by the Chinese military, is among the five vaccines China has moved into Phase 3 clinical trials to …

NEW DELHI: Tens of thousands of Indian farmers, protesting over agricultural laws that they say threaten their livelihoods, have vowed to carry on their around-the-clock sit-ins despite cold weather that has already led to some deaths among them. Farmers from the northern states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh and the desert state of Rajasthan have camped on key national …

Four doctors who worked at an Afghan prison with hundreds of Taliban inmates were among five people killed on Tuesday when a bomb attached to their car exploded, police said. The blast happened in a southern district of the city when the doctors were travelling to the Pul-e-Charkhi prison where they worked, Kabul police spokesman Ferdaws Faramarz said. Four doctors …

BERLIN: Countries trying to keep alive the 2015 deal on Iran’s nuclear programme agreed on Monday to positively address the possibility of a US return to the accord under the Biden administration. Germany’s foreign minister urged Iran not to waste what he called a final window of opportunity. Monday’s virtual meeting of parties to the agreement the first at the …

SYDNEY: Sydney was isolated from the rest of Australia on Sunday after all of the country’s states and territories imposed travel restrictions on its residents as a coronavirus cluster in the city grew to around 70. The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) sent a stern ‘do not come to us’ message to Sydney, the country’s most populous city of more than …

ISLAMABAD: Describing the EU DisinfoLab’s revelations about an Indian network involved in a fake news campaign as “enormously damaging”, a European Union-based human rights activist has called for institution of a lawsuit against the Indian government to prevent recurrence of such propaganda. “This should have consequences for Indian government that has the final responsibility. The Indian government should be held accountable for …