TOBA TEK SINGH: Toba Sadar police on Saturday booked a reporter and a cameraman of a private TV channel for “illegally” recording and broadcasting on social media the interviews of the three in-custody suspects in the murder and rape case of a girl, Maria. The prime suspect, Faisal, his brother and their father Abdul Sattar, have been arrested and are in police …

ISLAMABAD: Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC) Chairman Mohammad Hamid Raza on Saturday approached the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to seek postponement of April 9 elections being held to fill the seats of Senate chairman and deputy chairman. A petition filed through senior counsel Hamid Khan in this regard said that election should be held to a date after polls in …

WASHINGTON: Repre­sen­­tative Nancy Pelosi, former House speaker and a key ally of Joe Biden, signed a letter on Friday from dozens of congressional Democrats to the president and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, urging a halt to weapons transfers to Israel. Support from Pelosi, a veteran member of Biden’s Democratic Party, for stopping the transfer of weapons to Israel showed …

MOSCOW: A Nasa astronaut, a Russian cosmonaut and Belarus’s first ever space traveller on Saturday returned to Earth safely after a fortnight aboard the International Space Station, Russia’s Roscosmos agency reported. “Today, at 10:17am Moscow time (0717 GMT), the descent vehicle of Sozuz MS-24 manned spacecraft landed near the Kazakh city of Zhezkazgan,” Roscosmos reported. “The (vessel’s) deorbit and its …

PARIS: Sometime between now and September, a massive explosion 3,000 light years from Earth will flare up in the night sky, giving amateur astronomers a once-in-a-lifetime chance to witness this space oddity. The binary star system in the constellation Corona Borealis — “northern crown” — is normally too dim to see with the naked eye. But every 80 years or …

THE HAGUE: Climate activist Greta Thunberg was detained twice by Dutch police on Saturday after she and a group of marchers blocked a main road in The Hague to protest against fossil fuel subsidies. Earlier, Thunberg joined hundreds of protesters on a walk from The Hague’s city centre to the nearby A12 arterial highway that connects the seat of the …

QUITO: Ecuadoran authorities stormed the Mexican embassy in Quito on Friday to arrest former vice president Jorge Glas, who had been granted political asylum there, prompting Mexico to sever diplomatic ties after the “violation of international law”. Images showed police special forces massed outside the embassy and at least one of them scaling its walls, which were already surrounded by …

NEW DELHI: An Indian academic detained for almost six years without trial has been granted bail by the Supreme Court, highlighting the country’s use of harsh anti-terror laws decried by rights activists. Shoma Sen, 66, a former professor of English at Nagpur University, was arrested in 2018. She was one of 16 activists and academics held for allegedly inciting violence …

DAMASCUS: Seven children were killed in southern Syria’s Daraa province on Saturday when an “explosive device” detonated, state media reported. “Seven children” were killed “and two other people were injured, one of them a woman, when an explosive device planted by terrorists” went off in the city of Sanamayn, state news agency SANA reported, quoting a police source. The Syrian Observatory for …

GENEVA: The World Health Organisation said on Saturday that Gaza’s largest hospital had been reduced to ashes by Israel’s latest siege, leaving an “empty shell” with many bodies. Israeli forces pulled out of Al Shifa hospital in Gaza City on Monday after a two-week military operation, during which it said it had battled Palestinian militants inside what was once the …