Former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen is expected to tell US Congress on Tuesday that the company faces little oversight and liken the social media giant to tobacco companies that for decades denied that smoking damaged health, according to testimony seen by Reuters. “When we realized tobacco companies were hiding the harms it caused, the government took action. When we …

ISLAMABAD: The first quarter of the current fiscal year (1QFY22) posted a rise of more than 100 per cent in trade deficit driven largely by an almost triple increase in the country’s imports compared to exports, the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) said on Monday. The merchandise trade deficit reached $11.664 billion in July-September 2021 from $5.814bn over the corresponding …

TOKYO: Newly elected Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Monday he will dissolve the lower house next week in preparation for Oct 31 elections as he seeks a fresh mandate to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, the sagging economy and security threats from China and North Korea. Kishida was formally elected by parliament earlier on Monday to replace Yoshihide Suga, who …

Girls have returned to some secondary schools in a northern province of Afghanistan, Taliban officials and teachers said on Tuesday, but they remain barred from classrooms in much of the country. Dozens of girls in black, some wearing white headscarves and others with black face veils, sat in chairs waving Taliban flags, in a video posted by Taliban official Suhail …

STOCKHOLM: US scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian on Monday won the Nobel Medicine Prize for discoveries on receptors for temperature and touch. The duo’s research, conducted independently of each other in the late 1990s and 2000s, is being used to develop treatments for a wide range of diseases and conditions, including chronic pain. Julius, who in 2019 won the …

NEW YORK: World leaders were on the defensive on Monday after the release of millions of documents detailing how heads of state use offshore tax havens to stash assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Thirty five current and former leaders are featured in roughly 11.9 million documents leaked from financial services companies that include reports of luxury mansions on …

More than 100 music students and teachers have fled Afghanistan in a nail-biting flight from Kabul following the Taliban’s takeover of the country, their institute’s founder and principal told AFP. Fearing a crackdown on music by the country’s new leaders, a total 101 members of Afghanistan’s top musical institute landed in Doha on Monday evening, Ahmad Sarmast said. The group, about half of them …

u Top US officials will tell their Israeli counterparts on Tuesday that the Biden administration remains committed to diplomacy with Iran, but if necessary would be prepared to pursue “other avenues” to ensure Tehran does not acquire a nuclear weapon, a senior US official said. A visit to Washington by Israel’s national security adviser, Eyal Hulata, will allow the two …

An independent inquiry into alleged sex abuse of minors by French Catholic priests, deacons and other clergy has found some 216,000 victims of paedophilia from 1950 to 2020, a “massive phenomenon” that was covered up for decades by a “veil of silence.” The landmark report, released on Tuesday after two and a half years of investigations, follows widespread outrage over a string …

Facebook blamed a “faulty configuration change” for a nearly six-hour outage on Monday that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. The company, in a blog post published late on Monday, did not specify who executed the configuration change and whether it was planned but said that its systems were back …