ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Saturday offered medical supplies to India that has been struggling to cope with an overwhelming wave of Covid-19 while its leaders expressed solidarity with Indian people. After Prime Minister Imran Khan’s tweet praying for the ‘speedy recovery’ of the Indian people affected by the virus and calling for cooperation in fight against the pandemic, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi …

TARASCON ARIGE: A group of 15 French volunteers on Saturday left a cave where they had stayed for 40 days, in an experiment probing the limits of human adaptability to isolation. Dazzled by the light and with pale faces but otherwise healthy, the group led by French-Swiss explorer Christian Clot emerged at around 10:30am from the Lombrives cave in Ariege, …

TEHRAN: Iran’s civil aviation agency banned all flights to and from India and Pakistan because of the dramatic surge in coronavirus cases in the two nations, state-run IRNA news agency said on Saturday. IRNA said the decision taken by the health ministry took effect on Saturday at midnight. Mohammad Hassan Zibakhsh, spokesman for Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation noted there were no routine flights …

RAMBOUILLET: French investigators were on Saturday questioning three people linked to a Tunisian man who stabbed a police employee to death near Paris in a suspected Islamist attack. The murder at a police station in Rambouillet, a commuter town about 60 kilometres from Paris, revived the trauma of a spate of deadly attacks in recent years. The victim was a …

JAKARTA: Southeast Asian leaders said they had agreed on a plan with Myanmar’s junta chief on Saturday to end the crisis in the violence-hit nation, but he did not explicitly respond to demands to halt the killing of civilian protesters. “It’s beyond our expectation,” Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin told reporters after the leaders’ meeting of the Association of Southeast …

JERUSALEM: Israeli warplanes struck the Gaza Strip early on Saturday after repeated salvos of rocket fire into Israel followed a second night of clashes between Palestinians and police in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem. Thirty-six rockets were launched, the Israeli army said, the most in a single night this year, after Gaza’s Islamist rulers Hamas voiced support for the east Jerusalem protests, …

At least 27 people were killed and 46 injured in a fire on Saturday at a hospital in southeastern Baghdad that had been equipped to house Covid-19 patients, medical sources at three nearby hospitals said. The fire at the Ibn Khatib hospital in the Diyala Bridge area of the Iraqi capital occurred after an accident caused an oxygen tank to …

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s police arrested a top Muslim legislator on Saturday in connection with the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks that killed 279 people, as pressure mounted to speed up the investigation. Detectives took Rishad Bathiudeen, leader of the All Ceylon Makkal Party (ACMP) and a former minister, into custody under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), police spokesman Ajith Rohana said. Bathiudeen …

The Indian government asked social media platform Twitter to take down dozens of tweets, including some by local lawmakers, that were critical of India’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, as cases of Covid-19 again hit a world record. Twitter has withheld some of the tweets after the legal request by the Indian government, a company spokeswoman told Reuters on Saturday. The government …

• High-level sources say backchannel talks are continuing between the intelligence leaderships of two countries • Pakistan’s primary interest at the moment is to ensure that Occupied Kashmir gets back its statehood • The strategic rethink is grounded in the country’s need to prioritise economic matters ISLAMABAD: India appro­ached Pakistan in December 2020 with an offer to reduce tension and …