23-01-2022 WELLINGTON: New Zealand’s (NZ) Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has cancelled her wedding after announcing new COVID restrictions. The entire country is set to be placed under the highest level of COVID restrictions after an outbreak of the Omicron variant. The restrictions include a cap of 100 vaccinated people at …

23-01-2022 SANA’A/ RIYADH: Fighting raged for a third day on Saturday between ISIL (ISIS) and Kurdish forces in Syria after attackers stormed a prison housing members of the armed group in violence that has killed more than 70 people so far. The assault on the Ghwayran prison in the northern …

23-01-2022 LONDON: A British member of parliament says she was fired from a ministerial job in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government partly because her Muslim faith was making colleagues uncomfortable, according to the Sunday Times newspaper. Forty-nine-year-old Nusrat Ghani, who lost her job as a junior transport minister in …

Hyderabad: A bridge jutting into the Hussain Sagar is coming up at PVNR Expressway and is likely to be built by the end of this year. Urban Development Special Chief Secretary Arvind Kumar, replying to a Twitter user’s suggestion on building a V-shaped bridge that is similar to the one in …

22-01-2022 By SJA Jafri KABUL/ KARACHI: As many as 3,96,193 Shia Muslims including young girls, women, children, doctors, journalists, engineers, educationists, religious scholars, policemen, security personals, scientists, philosophers, intellectuals even visitors and foreigners particularly Pakistanis belong with Shia (especially Hazara) community have been murdered and over 2,86,654 Shia Muslims have …

22-01-2022 Bureau Report + BBC UDUPI/ NEW DELHI: A debate over the hijab, a headscarf worn by Muslim women has caused a stand-off at a women’s college in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Six teenage students at a government-run pre-university college, equivalent to a high school have alleged that …

22-01-2022 BRUSSELS: The United States, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) top donor, is resisting proposals to make the agency more independent, four officials involved in the talks said, raising doubts about the Biden administration’s long-term support for the UN agency. The proposal, made by the WHO’s working group on sustainable …

22-01-2022 WASHINGTON/ MOSCOW: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov have held talks in Geneva over the Ukraine crisis. Friday’s high-stakes meeting concluded Blinken’s whistle-stop European tour; he has been seeking commitments among Washington’s allies on how to respond if Moscow presses ahead with a …

22-01-2022 DUBAI/ RIYADH/ SANA’A: The Saudi-led coalition fighting Iran-aligned Houthis in Yemen has denied reports that it bombed a prison in the country’s north, as the United Nations and United States called for a de-escalation of violence in the long-running conflict. A Houthi official and medical charity Doctors Without Borders …

22-01-2022 WASHINGTON: President of the United States of America Joe Biden has nominated the first Muslim-American woman as a federal judge for the first time in the history of the country. According to USA Today, Nusrat Jahan Choudhury is a Bangladeshi American and if her nomination is approved by the …