International

RIYADH: Saudi Arabia on Thursday reimposed social distancing measures at the Grand Mosque in Makkah, after recording the highest number of infections in months. Workers have returned floor markings removed on October 17 to guide people to social distance in and around the Grand Mosque. Saudi authorities said they will reimpose “social distancing requirements between worshippers and pilgrims” at the …

occupied Kashmir overnight, police said on Thursday, rounding off another bloody year in the disputed territory. Police said the six fighters killed in two villages belonged to Jaish-e-Mohammad. A police statement issued on Thursday said one of the four Indian security personnel wounded in the clashes died of bullet injuries in a hospital. Officials say that at least 380 fighters, …

ISLAMABAD: Afghanistan’s former president said he had no choice but to abruptly leave Kabul as the Taliban closed in and denied an agreement was in the works for a peaceful takeover, disputing the accounts of former Afghan and US officials. Former president Ashraf Ghani said in a BBC interview that aired on Thursday that an adviser gave him just minutes to decide to …

The Philippine death toll from Typhoon Rai has crossed the 400 mark, the disaster agency said on Friday, as officials in some hard-hit provinces appealed for more supplies of food, water and shelter materials about two weeks after the storm struck. Rai was the 15th and deadliest typhoon to hit the Southeast Asian nation this year. Reported deaths had reached …

New paediatric Covid-19 hospitalisations have hit a record-high in the United States, as children are increasingly swept up in Omicron’s lightning spread. While experts are concerned, and stress the need to step up vaccination among kids, early indications suggest that the new variant’s rate of severe disease could in fact be lower, and its extreme contagiousness is behind the rapid …

Palestinian journalists have raised the alarm over what they describe as unjust suppression of their content on Facebook, a claim backed by rights groups but rejected by the social media giant. On December 4, Palestine TV correspondent Christine Rinawi posted a video on her Facebook account in which Israeli security forces were seen shooting a Palestinian on the ground, killing him. He …

WASHINGTON: The United States on Wednesday appointed two special envoys for defending women’s rights in Afghanistan’s as the country’s new Taliban rulers further tightened gender restrictions. Rina Amiri, an Afghan-born US scholar and mediation expert who served at the State Department under former president Barack Obama, will take the role of special envoy for Afghan women, girls and human rights. …

JERUSALEM: Israel’s defence minister approved a raft of measures aimed at improving relations with the Palestinians on Wednesday following a rare meeting with Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas in Israel. Defence Minister Benny Gantz met Abbas at his private residence in a Tel Aviv suburb late on Tuesday night. It was the first time Abbas met an Israeli official inside Israel …

SYDNEY: Global Covid-19 infections hit a record high over the past seven-day period, a tally showed on Wednesday, as the new Omicron variant raced out of control, keeping workers at home and overwhelming testing centres. Almost 900,000 cases were detected on average each day around the world between Dec 22 and Dec 28, with myriad countries posting new all-time highs …

SARAJEVO: A Bosnian war crimes prosecutor has indicted nine Bosnian Serbs for the killing of around 100 Muslim Bosniaks, including seven entire families, early in the 1992-95 war, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement on Wednesday. Twenty-six years after the end of its devastating war between Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks in which about 100,000 people had …