International

KARACHI: A “scathing note”, a “necessary unravelling”, a “mediocre judgem­ent” — Justice Athar Min­allah’s detailed note issued on Friday on the Supreme Court’s suo motu proceedings on the provincial polls’ delay attra­c­ted all kinds of reactions from people on both sides of the fence and the ones sitting on it. “A mediocre judgement by all standards, technicality supersedes substantial issues,” PTI Senior …

PARIS: Earth had its joint second-warmest March on record with Antarctic sea ice shrinking to its second-lowest extent for that month, the EU’s climate monitoring agency said on Thursday. “The month was jointly the second-warmest March globally,” tied with 2017, 2019 and 2020, the Copernicus Climate Change Service said. The hottest March on record was in 2016. Its report is based on …

Israel’s military hit sites in Lebanon and Gaza early on Friday, in retaliation for rocket attacks it blamed on Hamas, as tensions following police raids this week on the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem threatened to spiral out of control. Israeli authorities said two people were killed during a shooting attack in the occupied West Bank on Friday. Israel’s military said …

Stormy Daniels, the adult film star at the centre of the criminal case against Donald Trump, said she does not think the former president should go to prison if convicted of concealing hush money payments he made to her. “I don’t think that his crimes against me are worthy of incarceration. I feel like the other things that he has done, if …

The World Health Organisation chief pressed China on Thursday to share its information about the origins of Covid-19, saying that until that happened all hypotheses remained on the table, more than three years after the virus first emerged. “Without full access to the information that China has, you cannot say this or that,” said Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in response to …

FASSUTA: A barrage of rockets was fired from Lebanon at Israel on the Jewish Passover holiday on Thursday, in the largest escalation along the fro­ntier since Israel and Hezbollah fought a 34-day war in 2006. The rocket fire came just days after Israeli police drew widespread condemnation and warnings of retaliation from around the region for clashing with Palestinians inside …

Two people died and more than a million were without power on Thursday after an ice storm hit Canada’s two most-populated provinces ahead of a holiday weekend, bringing freezing rain and strong winds that toppled trees and weighed down power lines. Just under a million people did not have power in Quebec and about 110,000 in Ontario as of 4pm …

WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden’s administration on Thursday released a summary of after-action reports on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying “there were no signs that more time, more funds or more Americans” could have fundamentally changed the trajectory. In a 12-page declassified summary of the report sent to Congress, the White House insisted that President Joe Biden’s administration had done everything it …

KABUL: The main spokesman for Afghanis­tan’s Taliban administration will move his office from the capital to the city of Kandahar, the information ministry said, a sign of the growing importance of the region that is home to its supreme leader. The province of Kandahar is the historical birthplace of the Taliban movement. Supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada lives there and rarely …

PARIS: France’s public health watchdog said on Thursday that mass testing of drinking water revealed traces from a banned pesticide in half the samples, showing how potentially harmful chemicals persist in the environment. The National Agency for Food, Environment and Workplace Security (Anses) began a testing regime in 2019 to identify around 200 complex chemical compounds originating from pesticides or …