Category: World

Britain’s competition watchdog said Sunday it will look into the cost of COVID-19 testing for travelers after Health Secretary Sajid Javid complained that high prices for the government-mandated tests were preventing some people from going on vacation. Prices quoted by providers listed on the government website range from 17 pounds ($24) to 250 pounds ($347). Javid said Sunday that he had asked the Competition and Markets Authority to crackdown on “unfair market practices” by test providers.

Three cities, including the strategically important Kunduz, fall to the militant group in a single day.

Tokyo has officially handed off the baton to Paris.

Hundreds of firefighters in Greece, backed by planes, helicopters and reinforcements from other countries, battled massive wildfires that continued burning Sunday, fueled by bone-dry conditions after the country’s worst heat wave in decades. Authorities dedicated the most resources to tackling four major blazes: one, on Greece’s second-largest island of Evia, that has burned for five days, cutting across the island from coast to coast and isolating its northern part; and three in the southern Peloponnese region. A fifth dangerous fire just north of Athens appeared to be on the wane, after burning dozens of homes and businesses in the Greek capital’s northern suburbs, triggering the evacuation of thousands of people and decimating large tracts of forest, including in the Mount Parnitha national park, one of the last forests near Athens.

Pakistani counterterrorism police said they killed three militants in a gun battle early Sunday during a raid on their hideout near the eastern city of Lahore. The raid took place after police received information that the alleged militants belonged to the banned group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, according to a brief statement issued by Punjab province’s Counter Terrorism Department. The banned group is also known as the Pakistani Taliban.

The focus immediately shifts to Beijing as the curtain falls on the Tokyo Olympics, with a growing coronavirus outbreak in China and boycott calls looming large just six months from the start of the Winter Games.

Highly decorated policeman Abba Kyari’s reputation is under scrutiny over alleged fraud.

Indian teachers’ demand for period leave reignites debate over whether it’s a positive step for women.

Lebanese group Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech on Saturday that the investigator of the Beirut port blast was politically biased. On Thursday, Beirut marked the one year anniversary of the blast that flattened large swathes of the city and killed more than 200 people. A judge, Tarek Bittar, is leading the probe into what happened.

An Afghan Air Force pilot was killed by a bomb in a Kabul district on Saturday, officials said, in an attack claimed by the Taliban. The pilot killed on Saturday, Hamidullah Azimi, was travelling when a sticky bomb attached to his vehicle went off, officials said, adding that five civilians were injured in the explosion. Azimi was trained in flying U.S.-made UH60 Black Hawk helicopters, and had been working with the Afghan Air Force for almost four years, Afghan Air Force Commander Abdul Fatah Eshaqzai told Reuters.

Several community groups and churches are holding “No Crime Day” events throughout Saturday.

Police arrested 50 people suspected of ransacking a Hindu temple in a remote town in eastern Pakistan and were searching for another 100 suspects, police said Saturday. The attack on a temple in the town of Bhong in Punjab province Wednesday followed the alleged desecration of a religious school by a young Hindu boy earlier in the week. The unruly mob burned down the temple’s main door and damaged statues.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson does not need to self isolate even though a member of his staff on a recent trip to Scotland tested positive for the coronavirus, his Downing Street office said. Johnson visited a police college in Fife on Wednesday and a wind farm off Aberdeenshire on Thursday. Local media reported a member of Johnson’s staff who accompanied him to the police college and travelled with him on a plane tested positive for coronavirus.

Exclusive: Musician calls out government’s ‘bad decisions’ during pandemic, including failure to close the country’s borders earlier

The man alleged to have wounded 10 people in a knife attack on a Tokyo commuter train late on Friday told police he became incensed when he saw women who “looked happy” and wanted to kill them, Japanese media reported on Saturday. Police arrested the 36-year-old man in another part of Tokyo after he slashed and stabbed people in the attack at about 8:40 pm (1140 GMT) on Friday on a train on the Odakyu Line in the western part of the city, media reported. A police spokesman said they had nothing further to share on the details of case when asked about the media reports on Saturday.

Secretary General Antonio Guterres announced the appointment Friday of Swedish diplomat Hans Grundberg as his special envoy for conflict-torn Yemen. Grundberg, who has served as the European Union’s ambassador to Yemen for almost two years, succeeds Martin Griffiths of Britain who recently took up his new post as U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator.

The United States has slapped visa restrictions on 50 immediate family members of Nicaraguan officials who have been involved in or benefited from President Daniel Ortega’s growing repression, the U.S. State Department said Friday. Over the past two months, Ortega’s government has arrested nearly three dozen opposition figures, including seven potential challengers for the presidency. Nicaragua is scheduled to hold national elections Nov. 7.

The Taliban closed a key border crossing with Pakistan on Friday, saying no one would be allowed through until Islamabad dropped or relaxed its visa requirements for Afghans. The Taliban, wresting control of Afghanistan in the wake of a withdrawal of U.S. and other foreign troops, last month captured the southeast Chaman-Spin Boldak border crossing from Afghan forces. Pakistan initially closed its side of the crossing, landlocked Afghanistan’s second busiest entry point and main commercial artery to the sea, before reopening it last week.

The seven people who died at the nursing home in the Belgian town of Zaventem, near Brussels, were all in their 80s or 90s, and some of them were already in a poor physical condition, said Marc Van Ranst, a virologist at the University of Leuven which conducted tests on the strain found at the nursing home. “It is worrisome,” Van Ranst said, commenting on the fact that the residents died despite being fully vaccinated against COVID-19. So far, scientists do not know if the Colombian variant is more transmissible than other variants, he said.

The Taliban shot and killed the director of Afghanistan’s Government Information Media Center on Friday, the latest killing in a series of attacks on journalists and rights activists in recent months. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told The Associated Press that the groups’ fighters had killed Dawa Khan Menapal, who ran the government’s press operations for the local and foreign media. In a statement Mujahid put out later, he said Menapal “was killed in a special attack of Mujahideen” and was “punished to his deeds.”

Allegations of genocide against the
Uyghurs have prompted calls for a boycott of the 2022 Beijing Games.

A giant flag will be flown from the Eiffel Tower on Sunday that Paris Olympic organizers claim will be the biggest in history. The unfurling is planned during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics when the formal handover goes to the next Summer Games host in 2024. The passing of the hosting baton will be split between the Olympic Stadium in Tokyo and a public party in Paris.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and South Korean Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong have discussed efforts to engage with North Korea, including the prospect of humanitarian aid, their offices said on Friday. While the allies both want North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and end its missile programme, they have at times disagreed on the approach, with South Korean President Moon Jae-in keen to build economic ties between the two Koreas while the United States has long insisted on action on denuclearisation as a first step. South Korea’s foreign ministry, in a statement on the call between Blinken and Chung, said they had agreed to hold detailed discussions on ways to cooperate with North Korea, including humanitarian cooperation, and continue to make efforts to engage with it.

Music festivals are among the events in the UK that will be protected if they are forced to cancel.

In my village, we did everything we could to save ourselves, writes Vahpual, a journalist in Chin state.

Belarusian sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya arrived in Warsaw on Wednesday evening and met with her husband on Thursday, days after refusing national team orders to fly home amid concerns for her safety.Driving the news: The 24-year-old Olympian received a humanitarian visa from Poland after deciding to defect from her home country when she received a phone call from her grandmother telling her not to return, Reuters reported.Stay on top of the latest market trends and economic insights with Axi

The season of Brazilian forest fires has begun, and early data plus severe drought is sparking concern that nationwide destruction in 2021 will stay at the high levels recorded in the past two years, despite efforts to tamp down the blazes. Brazil is home to the world’s largest rainforest and tropical wetlands — the Amazon and Pantanal — which saw dramatic fires in 2019 and 2020, respectively, that caused the greatest annual forest loss since 2015. This year, it’s the Cerrado savanna stretching across Brazil’s center-west region that is suffering more than usual.

From time to time, a body floating down the river separating Ethiopia’s troubled Tigray region from Sudan was a silent reminder of a war conducted in the shadows. The Sudanese fishermen who spotted them, and the refugees from Tigray who helped pull them to shore, found many corpses’ hands bound. “They are from Tigray,” said Garey Youhanis, a Tigrayan who helped bury several bodies found on Sunday.

Black History Month is a time to celebrate the achievements made by Black Americans but it can also be a platform to discuss the historical inequalities faced by Black Americans and how to improve upon them for the future generations.

(AP) — DeAndre Baker, cornerback de los Giants de Nueva York, se entregó el sábado a la policía, tras ser acusado junto con otro jugador de la NFL de robar dinero y otras pertenencias a personas que asistían a una fiesta.Baker enfrenta cuatro cargos de robo a mano armada y otros cuatro de asalto agravado con un arma de fuego.