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15-06-2021 TEHRAN: Ebrahim Raisi’s record of fierce loyalty to Iran’s ruling clerics helps explain why the senior judge is a front-runner in Friday’s presidential election, a contest the authorities have limited almost exclusively to candidates like him. A win for Raisi, 60, an implacable critic of the West whose political …

15-06-2021 BERLIN: Germany continued to buck the global trend for falling birth rates during the coronavirus pandemic, reporting a 10% jump in March to the highest figure since 1998, the Statistics Office said on Tuesday. Germany had already reported a 6% rise in births in February. The number of births …

15-06-2021 Bureau Report + Agencies OTTAWA/ PESHAWAR/ ISLAMABAD: A Canadian man who is accused of deliberately running over five members of a Muslim family from Pakistan with his truck, killing four of them, now faces terrorism charges in addition to counts of first-degree murder and attempted murder, prosecutors said on …

15-06-2021 BRUSSELS: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday he held a “fruitful and sincere” meeting with his US counterpart Joe Biden on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Brussels. “We believe there is no problem that cannot be resolved in Turkey-US relations,” Erdogan added after holding his …

15-06-2021 HAGUE/ MANILA: The outgoing prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has sought authorization from The Hague tribunal to open a full investigation into Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s ongoing war on drugs that killed thousands of people, including innocent children. Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, whose term ends on Tuesday, said a …

15-06-2021 By SJA Jafri + Bureau Report + Agencies CANBERRA/ MELBOURNE: Australia says it will allow a Tamil family of four to leave immigration detention on remote Christmas Island, but instead of allowing those to return to their home in Queensland will place them into “community detention” in the western …

14-06-2021 NAYPYITAW: After five years as the de facto leader of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi finds herself in a familiar place: under house arrest while facing trumped-up charges leveled by a military dictatorship, with her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), on the verge of dissolution. On Monday, …

14-06-2021 BEIJING: A Chinese spacecraft will blast off from the Gobi Desert on a Long March rocket in the coming days, ferrying three men to an orbiting space module for a three-month stay, the first time China has sent humans into space for nearly five years. Shenzhou-12, meaning “Divine Vessel”, …

14-06-202 Bureau Report + Agencies WELLINGTON: New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Monday panned a movie filmmakers are thinking about making about her response to the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks as poorly timed and focused on the wrong subject. The US-backed film “They Are Us” has sparked an intense …

13-06-2021 DAMASCUS: At least 13 people, including two medical staff, have been killed and several wounded in two separate artillery attacks in the northern Syrian town of Afrin controlled by Turkey-backed fighters, activists and an aid group said on Sunday. The first attack struck a residential area, while the second …