DUBAI: An Emirati-owned firm suspended operations at a gas complex in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region on Monday after a drone strike that killed four people last week. The Khor Mor complex, owned by Dana Gas, was hit several times in recent years, but Friday’s attack was the first deadly incident. Four workers died and eight others were wounded when the drone struck …

WASHINGTON: Even as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was basking in American adulation, “an officer in India’s intelligence service was relaying final instructions to a hired hit team to kill one of Modi’s most vocal critics in the United States,” The Washington Post reported on Monday, painting a damning picture of New Delhi’s operations on foreign soil and the complicity of its top leadership in …

New York: Columbia University’s president said on Monday that talks with pro-Palestinian protesters over the dismantling of an encampment on the Ivy League campus had failed and urged them to voluntarily disperse or face suspension from school. President Nemat Minouche Shafik said days of talks between student organisers and academic leaders had failed to break a stalemate over the encampment …

MAI MAHIU: Forty-six people died when a makeshift dam burst its banks in Kenya’s Rift Valley in the early hours of Monday, as torrential rains and floods battered the country. Scores of people have been killed over the March-May wet season in Kenya as heavier than usual rainfall pounds East Africa, compounded by the El Nino weather pattern. Residents said …

DHAKA: A Bangladeshi court ordered a nationwide shutdown of schools on Monday due to an ongoing heat wave, one day after the government sent millions of children back to class despite searing temperatures. Extensive scientific research has found climate change is causing heat waves to become longer, more frequent and more intense. Average temperatures in Dhaka over the past week …

A gunman stormed a mosque in western Afghanistan and killed six people, a government spokesman said on Tuesday, with local residents claiming the Shia community had been targeted. Interior ministry spokesman Abdul Mateen Qani said that “an unknown armed person shot at civilian worshippers in a mosque” in Herat province’s Guzara district on Monday at around 9:00pm (1630 GMT). “Six …

GENEVA: The Taliban faced criticism over their human rights record at a UN meeting on Monday, with Washington accusing them of systematically depriving women and girls of their human rights. However, in an awkward first for the UN Human Rights Council, the concerned country’s current rulers were not present because they are not recognised by the global body. Afghanistan was …

Columbia University, the epicentre of pro-Palestinian protests that have upended college campuses across the United States, began suspending student demonstrators on Monday after they defied an ultimatum to disperse. The move follows almost two weeks of protests against Israel’s military offensive in Gaza that have swept through higher education institutions from coast to coast, after around 100 protesters were first arrested at Columbia …

ISLAMABAD: Riyadh told Islamabad on Monday that Saudi agriculture companies were looking at Pakistan with great interest and expressed the hope that both countries would benefit from joint ventures for improving the value chain of agriculture economy. This transpired at Prime Min­ister Shehbaz Sharif’s meeting with Faisal Al-Ibrahim, Minister of Economy and Planning, and Eng Abdulrahman Abdulmohsen Al-Fadley, Minister of …

ISLAMABAD: Islamabad Traffic Police has decided to issue driving licences to all citizens without any discrimination regarding their residential address and provide such permits to the elderly residents at their doorstep. During the inauguration of the Islamabad Traffic Police Facilitation on Wheels and Islamabad Traffic Police Education on Wheels on Monday, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said that the police would …