World number one Novak Djokovic won a stunning victory on Monday over the Australian government, overturning the cancellation of his visa on Covid-19 health grounds, and ending his detention. It was an extraordinary setback for the government, which has imposed strict restrictions on its borders for the past two years to stop the spread of the coronavirus. In an emergency online court hearing, the judge ordered that the decision to cancel Djokovic’s visa “be quashed”. The judge ordered that the unvaccinated tennis superstar “be released immediately and forthwith from immigration detention”. “Such release must occur no later than 30 minutes after…
Author: Hasnain Abid Khanzada
NEW YORK: Nineteen people, including nine children, died in a fire at a Bronx apartment building on Sunday in one of the worst blazes in New York City in decades. Mayor Eric Adams called the fire’s toll horrific. “This is going to be one of the worst fires that we have witnessed during modern times.” More than sixty people were injured and 13 were in critical condition in hospital. The majority of victims were suffering from severe smoke inhalation, commissioner Daniel Nigro said at a press conference. Firefighters found victims on every floor and were taking them out in cardiac…
COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa asked China to help restructure debt repayments as part of efforts to help the South Asian country weather a worsening financial crisis, his office said in a statement on Sunday. Rajapaksa made the request during a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Colombo on Sunday. Sri Lanka has benefited from billions of dollars in soft loans from China but the island nation is currently in the midst of a foreign exchange crisis placing it on the verge of default, according to analysts. “The president pointed out that it would be a great…
NEW YORK: More than 800,000 non-citizens and so-called Dreamers in New York City will have access to the ballot box and could vote in municipal elections as early as next year after Mayor Eric Adams allowed legislation approved by the City Council a month ago to automatically become law on Sunday. Opponents have vowed to challenge the new law. Unless a judge halts its implementation, New York City is now the most populous city in the United States to grant voting rights to non-citizens. More than a dozen communities across the US already allow non-citizens to cast ballots in local…
JERUSALEM: The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem has accused radical Israeli groups of threatening the presence of Christians in the holy city, in remarks that Israeli officials rejected as baseless. In a column in the Times of London on Saturday, Theophilos III said he believed the aim was to drive the Christian community from Jerusalem’s Old City. Israel captured East Jerusalem, including the Old City, along with the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in a 1967 war. It annexed East Jerusalem after the war in a move that has not won international recognition. “Our presence in Jerusalem is under threat,” the patriarch wrote in…
AL CAMP: Palestinian teenager Amal Nakhleh’s first name means “hope” in Arabic, but his parents are in despair because he is chronically ill and one of the few minors held without charge by Israel. “Since his arrest last year I have only seen him twice, including last week when he told me he wanted to go on hunger strike,” journalist Moammar Nakhleh said of his 17-year-old son. “This scares me because he is already very weak,” from myasthenia, a rare neuromuscular disease, and underwent surgery in 2020 to have a tumour removed from his rib cage, Nakhleh said. Israeli authorities…
COX’S BAZAR: Thousands of people were left homeless after a fire gutted parts of a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh, police said on Sunday. About 850,000 of the persecuted Muslim minority — many of whom escaped a 2017 military crackdown in Myanmar that UN investigators concluded was executed with “genocidal intent” — live in a network of camps in Bangladesh’s border district of Cox’s Bazar. “About 1,200 houses were burnt in the fire,” said Kamran Hossain, a spokesman for the Armed Police Battalion, which heads security in the camp. The fire started at Camp 16 and raced through shelters made…
ABUJA: Nigeria said on Sunday that gunmen killed at least 200 people and displaced thousands more in multiple raids in the northwest over the last week, dealing a heavy blow to authorities struggling to restore order. Herders and farmers in Africa’s most populous country have clashed over access to land in northwest and central Nigeria for years, but some groups have evolved into criminal gangs known as “bandits” who kill, loot and kidnap. The minister of humanitarian affairs Sadiya Umar Farouq called the past week’s attacks in Zamfara state “horrific and tragic,” giving the first official toll after details began…
WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday said Russia had to choose between dialogue and confrontation, ahead of talks in Geneva on soaring tensions over Ukraine. “There’s a path of dialogue and diplomacy to try to resolve some of these differences and avoid a confrontation,” Blinken told CNN’s “State of the Union” show. “The other path is confrontation and massive consequences for Russia if it renews its aggression on Ukraine. We are about to test the proposition about which path President Putin is prepared to take.” Vladimir Putin’s government has reportedly massed tens of thousands of military troops along…
The Golden Globe Awards, Hollywood’s so-called biggest party that regularly drew 18 million television viewers, was reduced to a live-blog Sunday night for its 79th edition. The embattled Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) proceeded with its film awards Sunday night without a telecast, nominees, a red carpet, a host, press or even a livestream. Instead, members of the HFPA and some recipients of the group’s philanthropic grants gathered at the Beverly Hilton Hotel for a 90-minute private event, announcing the names of the film and television winners on the organisation’s social media feeds. Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story won several big awards,…
