International

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan experienced a significant increase in methamphetamine seizures bet­ween 2016 and 2018, and quantities of the drug seized increased more than 21 times from about 133kg in 2016 to 2.9 tonnes in 2018, reveals the ‘Global Synthetic Drugs Assessment 2020’. The report published by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on Thursday says the spike in seizures …

NEW DELHI: A fourth round of talks between the Indian government and 40 farmers’ unions over divisive farm laws failed to make headway on Thursday, but a cabinet minister said they would continue discussions on Saturday. In India’s biggest farm unrest in years, tens of thousands of growers are protesting on the outskirts of the capital Delhi against the laws …

VELIKA KLADUSA: Their long journeys already filled with uncertainty and hardship, migrants stranded in Bosnia are now facing one more adversity a cold Balkan winter. As the first snow of the season fell this week, many migrants staying in make-shift tent settlements in western Bosnia have been struggling to stay dry and warm. Cobbled together from pieces of nylon and …

PARIS: Former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing died on Wednesday after suffering from Covid-19. He was 94. In their tributes French and European leaders hailed him as an ambitious reformer and great statesman. Under his single seven-year term from 1974-1981, France made great strides in nuclear power, high-speed train travel and legalised abortion. He placed Paris at the heart of …

NEW YORK: Facebook has decided to revise its hate speech algorithms to prioritise blocking slurs against blacks, Muslims and others that have historically faced discrimination, the Washington Post reported on Thursday. The change is set to alter the social network’s “so-called race-blind” system that has removed anti-white comments and excised innocuous comments by people of colour, the Post said. The reform is at an …

ROME: Iran’s foreign minister on Thursday urged US president-elect Joe Biden to abandon Washington’s “rogue” behaviour and lift crippling sanctions on his country, rejecting talk of renegotiating the 2015 nuclear deal. Mohammad Javad Zarif said that when President Donald Trump left the landmark agreement, the United States had breached a UN Security Council resolution endorsing it. “The US has been …

UNITED NAIONS: Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Thursday decried countries — without naming names — who rejected the facts about the coronavirus pandemic and ignored guidance from the World Health Organisation (WHO). Guterres addressed a special session of the 193-member U.N. General Assembly on the coronavirus, which emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year and spread globally, …

The Israeli government on Thursday urged its citizens to avoid travel to the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, citing threats of Iranian attacks. Iran has been threatening to attack Israeli targets since its chief nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated last Friday near Tehran. It accuses Israel, which has been suspected in previous killings of Iranian nuclear scientists, of being behind …

WASHINGTON: Joe Biden will keep Donald Trump’s trade-war tariffs on China for the time being when he moves into the Oval Office next month, the president-elect has told US media. Rancor and recrimination have defined the relationship between the world’s two biggest economies over the last four years, with Trump slapping import fees on billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese …

MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin ordered a large-scale voluntary vaccination programme against COVID-19 to begin next week across Russia, saying teachers and doctors should be first in line to get the country’s flagship Sputnik V vaccine. Putin gave the order during an online meeting with ministers on Wednesday, a day when Russia, which has the fourth highest number of recorded infections …