International

WASHINGTON: Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi planned to visit New York and Washington next week, but the Omicron virus forced him to postpone the trip, official sources in the US capital told Dawn. Sources in New York said that the virus has also affected President UN General Assembly (UNGA) Abdulla Shahid and senior members of the UN Secretary General’s staff, including …

NEW DELHI: Election rallies were cancelled in India’s heartland on Thursday as authorities fret over a sudden Covid surge, driven by the Omicron variant, which has seen confirmed infections nearly triple in two days. Teeming crowds have thronged campaign events for next month’s poll in Uttar Pradesh — the country’s most populous state with over 200 million people and a …

NEW DELHI: An 84-year-old man in India claims to have taken 11 Covid vaccine doses saying it has made him healthier, Times of India reported on Thursday. It said Brahmdeo Mandal, a resident of Orai village in Bihar, believes he has got rid of several ailments after taking the multiple jabs. The matter came to light on Tuesday when Brahmdeo visited another vaccination …

TOKYO: The Japanese capital of Tokyo shivered under an unusually prolonged snowfall on Thursday, with heavy snow warnings issued for the city and surrounding areas for the first time in four years. Tokyo often sees snow once or twice a winter, but substantial accumulations are rare. Thursday’s fall was brought about by a combination of a low pressure system and …

RAWALPINDI: Chief of the Army Staff Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa on Thursday underscored the importance of peace and reconciliation initiatives in Afghanistan. During a meeting with Deputy Chief of Turkish General Staff General Selcuk Bayraktaroglu at the General Headquarters, Gen Bajwa stressed the need for global convergence and sincere efforts to avert a looming humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan, says a …

SEOUL: North Korea has successfully tested a hypersonic missile, state media reported on Thursday, in the first major weapons test by the nuclear-armed nation this year. This was the second reported test of what Pyongyang claimed were hypersonic gliding missiles, as it pursues the sophisticated technology despite international sanctions and condemnation. Hypersonic missiles move far faster and are more agile …

LONDON: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Thursday hit out at anti-vaccine campaigners’ “mumbo jumbo” and “nonsense” in his toughest attack yet on those opposed to Covid-19 jabs. “I want to say to the anti-vax campaigners, the people who are putting this mumbo jumbo on social media: they are completely wrong,” Johnson told journalists. “You haven’t heard me say that …

WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden on Thursday savaged Donald Trump’s “lies” and attempt to overturn the 2020 election, vowing on the first anniversary of the January 6 Capitol riot that he would let no one put a “dagger at the throat of democracy.” After largely ignoring Trump for a year, Biden took off the gloves, describing the Republican as a cheat whose ego …

Pfizer Inc expects the latest results from a clinical trial for kids under the age of 5 of the COVID-19 vaccine it developed with Germany’s BioNTech SE by April, a top company scientist said on Wednesday. “The study has been amended to give a third dose to everybody who’s less than five at least eight weeks after their last vaccination,” …

SEOUL: North Korea fired what appeared to be a ballistic missile into the sea on Wednesday, South Korea and Japan said, in the first such launch by Pyongyang this year. In the decade since Kim Jong Un took power North Korea has made rapid progress in its military technology, at the risk of international sanctions. The nuclear-armed nation’s first apparent …