The United States must move on from the “trauma” of two decades of war and step up counterterrorism efforts to face growing threats from Afghanistan and Pakistan, a study said on Tuesday. The group, led by former senior US policymakers, made clear it was not advocating a return to America’s longest war which ended when President Joe Biden pulled troops from Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban regained control. But it said that, after the overwhelming focus on counterterrorism following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the pendulum “appears to have swung in the opposite direction” as the United States focuses on competition with…
Author: Hasnain Abid Khanzada
MOUNTAIN VIEW: Google said on Tuesday it would introduce AI-generated answers to online queries made by users in the United States, in one of the biggest updates to its search engine in 25 years. “I’m excited to announce that we will begin launching this fully revamped experience, `AI overviews,’ to everyone in the US this week,” Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said at an event in California. The feature would soon be available in other countries, he added. With the change, many of Google’s search results will feature an AI “overview” at the top of the page before the more…
ROUEN: Gunmen attacked a prison van at a motorway toll in northern France on Tuesday, killing at least two prison officers and freeing a convict who had been jailed last week. President Emmanuel Macron vowed that everything would be done to find those behind the attack and hundreds of members of the security forces were deployed for a manhunt to find the attackers and the inmate who were all still at large. Two prison officers were killed in the attack and two others were receiving urgent medical care, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said. The wounded officers’ lives were in danger,…
BUTOVC: A hovering drone drops linden and pine seeds wrapped in soil onto a barren hillside outside Kosovo’s capital Pristina, part of an effort to reforest thousands of hectares lost to illegal logging and wildfires. Environmentalists say deforestation, also driven by demand for popular wood-fired stoves, is endangering wild animals such as brown bears, lynx, wild goats and roe deer whose populations are diminishing in Kosovo. A study by non-profit organisation Sustainability Leadership Kosova (SLK), the small Balkan country is losing more than 700 hectares of forest yearly. SLK has teamed up with Croatian company Project 02 to drop seeds…
PARIS: Last year’s northern hemisphere summer was the hottest in 2,000 years, according to a new study published on Tuesday. Scientists say 2023 was the hottest year globally since records began in 1850, but the study in the journal Nature indicates human-caused climate change pushed northern summer highs well beyond anything seen in two millennia. “We shouldn’t be surprised,” the study’s lead author Jan Esper said. “For me it’s just the continuation of what we started by releasing greenhouse gases” that cause global warming, said Esper, a professor of climatology at Germany’s Johannes Gutenberg University. Scientists used tree-ring data from…
DOHA: Israel’s military operation in Rafah has set truce negotiations with Hamas “backward”, mediator Qatar said on Tuesday, adding that talks have reached “almost a stalemate”. “Especially in the past few weeks, we have seen some momentum building but unfortunately things didn’t move in the right direction and right now we are on a status of almost a stalemate,” Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani told the Qatar Economic Forum. “Of course, what happened with Rafah has set us backward.” Qatar, which has hosted Hamas’s political office in Doha since 2012, has been engaged _ along with Egypt and…
NEAR HAIFA: Thousands of flag-waving Palestinians marched in northern Israel on Tuesday to commemorate the flight and forced flight of Palestinians during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation, and to demand the right of refugees to return. Many of the about 3,000 people also called for an end to the conflict in Gaza as they took part in the march near the city of Haifa marking the “Nakba”, or “catastrophe”, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven out during the 1948 war that accompanied Israel’s creation. Many held up Palestinian flags and wore keffiyeh head scarves during…
Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed Beijing’s “genuine desire” to help resolve the Ukraine crisis, in an interview with Chinese state media published ahead of a two-day visit to the country. Putin arrives in Beijing on Thursday to meet his “dear friend” Xi Jinping, seeking to win greater support from China for his war effort in Ukraine and isolated economy. The visit, where he will also travel to the northeastern city of Harbin for a trade and investment expo, is Putin’s first trip abroad since his March re-election and his second in just over six months to China. “We commend China’s approaches to resolving the…
KURRAM / SOUTH WAZIRISTAN: Four security personnel were injured in a cross-border attack on checkpoints in Kurram district on Monday, sources said, adding that 12 alleged attackers were reportedly killed in retaliation. The checkpoints in the Teri Mangal area of Kurram, which borders Afghanistan’s Khost, Paktia and Nangarhar provinces, were fired upon from across the border. The attack, launched with heavy weapons late into the night, targeted security installations within a 10km radius, sources claimed. The situation was tense, and the Pak-Afghan border was also closed following the attack. Four of a family killed in South Waziristan explosion South Waziristan…
ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Tuesday invited Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl, a former ally, to again join the ruling alliance. The prime minister offered the JUI-F to join the coalition government when its three leaders, including secretary general Abdul Ghafoor Haideri, called on PM Shehbaz at the Prime Minister’s House. “All political forces should work together to meet challenges confronting the country and to put it on the path of progress,” the prime minister said during the meeting. A source in the ruling party confirmed that the prime minister has extended an olive branch to the JUI-F and invited the party…
