International

WILMINGTON: Vowing to get right to work, President-elect Joe Biden shrugged off President Donald Trump’s fierce refusal to accept the election outcome as inconsequential, even as Democrats elsewhere warned that the Republican president’s actions were dangerous. Raising unsupported claims of voter fraud, Trump has blocked the incoming president from receiving intelligence briefings and withheld federal funding intended to help facilitate …

HONG KONG: Hong Kong’s pro-democracy lawmakers said on Wednesday they would all quit in protest at the ousting of four of their colleagues by the city’s pro-Beijing authorities. The four were disqualified in line with a resolution adopted earlier in the day by China’s parliament authorising the local government to expel any politician it deemed a threat to national security. …

LONDON: The United Kingdom on Wednesday became the fifth country in the world to record more than 50,000 coronavirus-related deaths. Figures from the British government showed that 595 more people in the country died within 28 days of testing positive for the virus, the highest daily number since May. The figure took the UK’s total death toll in the pandemic …

YEREVAN: Several thousand demonstrators on Wednesday protested in the Armenian capital as anger mounted over Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s decision to cede swathes of disputed territory to Azerbaijan under a controversial peace deal. Pashinyan announced a Russian-brokered peace agreement with Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh in the early hours of Tuesday, ending weeks of intense fighting that left more than …

India’s federal government will regulate content on video streaming platforms, including global services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Walt Disney’s Hotstar, as part of rules announced this week. India’s ministry of information and broadcasting will oversee streaming video content, which was previously unregulated, a brief government circular said on Tuesday, without providing further details. Earlier this year, more …

KABUL: A bomb-maker who trained Taliban militants before switching allegiance to Al Qaeda has been killed in western Afghanis­tan, the country’s intelligence agency said on Tuesday. The National Directorate of Security said Mohammad Hanif was a close aide to Asim Omar, who headed Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) and was killed in a joint US-Afghan operation in 2019. …

NEW DELHI: Air quality in India’s capital deteriorated to its worst this year on Tuesday, prompting a social media barrage of residents complaining about stinging eyes, sore throat and breathlessness in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. Delhi’s overall air quality index, which measures pollutants including PM2.5 particles, rose to 488, its highest level in a year, according to government …

JERUSALEM: Palestinian veteran negotiator Saeb Erekat died on Tuesday of coronavirus complications at age 65, in a death mourned as a “great loss” for his people and sparking tributes from around the world. Erekat was a long-time architect of plans to end the conflict with Israel through the creation of an independent Palestinian state, a goal he would not live …

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan on Tuesday said coordinated global efforts were needed to combat Covid-19 and tackle adverse impact of climate change, money laundering and Islamophobia. He also stressed the need for cooperation in education, international peace and debt relief. The prime minister presented these proposals while speaking via video link at the 20th meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation …

NEW DELHI: Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. Name a situation in which Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party had more numbers than its allies but it couldn’t lead the government. Bihar looked poised on Tuesday to go down in history as the state that stole the BJP’s thunder twice in Mr Modi’s two tenures. Even …