KABUL: Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities will meet international envoys in Qatar on Sunday for talks presented by the United Nations as a key step in an engagement process, but condemned by rights groups for sidelining Afghan women. The Taliban government has not been officially recognised by any state and the international community has wrestled with its approach to Afghanistan’s new rulers. When the UN, some 25 envoys including from the United States and a Taliban delegation meet in Doha on June 30 and July 1, the agenda will include economic issues and counter-narcotics. But the exclusion of civil society groups including women’s rights…
Author: Hasnain Abid Khanzada
STOCKTON: British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said on Friday he was hurt and angry that a supporter of Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK party had been recorded making a racial slur about him, saying it was too important for him not to speak out. Sunak, Britain’s first ethnic-minority prime minister, was responding to comments broadcast by Channel 4 News, by a man named Andrew Parker calling Sunak a “… Paki” — a British racial slur for people of South Asian descent. Sunak, currently campaigning for the July 4 national election that his Conservative Party is tipped to lose after 14 years in power,…
WASHINGTON: Prosecutors overstepped in charging January 6 rioters with obstruction for trying to prevent certification of the 2020 presidential election, the US Supreme Court said on Friday in a case that could see dozens of convictions overturned. The matter was brought to the court in the case of a former police officer Joseph Fischer, a supporter of former president Donald Trump who entered the Capitol in Washington with hundreds of others on January 6 2021. Writing the opinion for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said prosecutors’ interpretation of the law would “criminalise a broad swath of prosaic conduct, exposing activists and…
A fired-up Joe Biden came out swinging on Friday as he tried to make up for a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, insisting he was the right man to win November’s US presidential election. Biden’s appearance at a campaign rally in the battleground state of North Carolina came amid rumblings in his alarmed Democratic Party about replacing the 81-year-old as their nominee — and shortly before the nation’s most influential newspaper urged him to step aside. “I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used…
At least 30 people died in protests in Kenya this week sparked by a government drive to substantially raise taxes in the East African country, Human Rights Watch said on Saturday. “Kenyan security forces shot directly into crowds of protesters on (Tuesday) June 25, 2024, including protesters who were fleeing,” the NGO said in a statement. “Although there is no confirmation on the exact number of people killed in Nairobi and other towns, Human Rights Watch found that at least 30 people had been killed on that day based on witness accounts, publicly available information, hospital and mortuary records in Nairobi…
LONDON: The heatwave in Saudi Arabia blamed for the deaths of 1,300 people on the Haj pilgrimage this month was made worse by climate change, a team of European scientists said on Friday. Temperatures along the route from June 16 to 18 reached 47C at times and exceeded 51.8C at Makkah’s Great Mosque. The heat would have been approximately 2.5C (4.5 Fahrenheit) cooler without the influence of human-caused climate change, according to a weather attribution analysis by ClimaMeter, which conducts rapid assessments of the role of climate change in particular weather events. The scientists used satellite observations from the last four decades…
RAWALPINDI: New Town police have booked an official on the charge of selling 33 mobile phones and other valuables seized from people arrested in May 9 incidents. The case was registered with New Town police on the directives of special judge Anti-Terrorism Court #1 Judge Malik Ijaz Asif in the wake of an inquiry report submitted by the police. The accused misappropriated the articles recovered from the place of arrest of alleged May 9 vandals and shifted them to the police station and then sold them in the open market. According to the FIR, Sadaqat Ahmed was found to have sold mobile phones…
ISLAMABAD: An alleged major blunder made by the Capital Development Authority (CDA) and the federal government decades ago of making a selective change in the master plan of the city deprived residents of Islamabad of a railways network and centralised transportation centre. According to the city’s master plan prepared in 1960, sector I-8 was reserved for the main railway station where trains covering distance from GT Road Rawat, via Expressway were supposed to stop over in this sector and then moved to another proposed station in sector I-11 before moving outside of the city. Similarly, CDA officials Dawn spoke to said that…
Iran will hold a run-off presidential election on July 5 after neither of the top candidates secured more than 50 per cent of votes in Friday’s polls, the interior ministry said on Saturday. The vote to replace Ebrahim Raisi after his [death][13] in a helicopter crash came down to a tight race between the sole moderate in a field of four candidates and the supreme leader’s hardline protege. With more than 24 million votes counted moderate lawmaker Massoud Pezeshkian led with over 10 million votes ahead of hardline diplomat Saeed Jalili with over 9.4 million votes, according to provisional results…
ISLAMABAD: Tensions gripped the National Assembly on Friday as the House passed the budget for the next fiscal year with some amendments. The motion, introduced by Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb, was preceded by fiery speeches from the opposition, who described the budget as unrealistic, anti-people, anti-industry, and anti-agriculture. Opposition lawmakers, particularly from the PTI, criticised the budget, asserting that it was now an open secret that the document was dictated by the IMF. They accused the government of coming to power through electoral fraud and claimed it had no right to add to the miseries of the people. Leader of the Opposition…
