Category: World

Saudi Arabia is considering barring overseas pilgrims from the annual haj for the second year running as COVID-19 cases rise globally and worries grow about the emergence of new variants, two sources familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

Such a move would restrict the pilgrimage to Mecca, a once in a lifetime duty for every able-bodied Muslim who can afford it, to Saudi nationals and residents of the kingdom who were vaccinated or have recovered from COVID-19 at least months prior to attending.

While discussions about a possible ban have taken place, there has been no final decision on whether to pursue it, they said.

Before the pandemic enforced social distancing globally, some 2.5 million pilgrims used to visit the holiest sites of Islam in Mecca and Medina for the week-long haj, and the lesser, year-round umrah pilgrimage, which altogether earned the kingdom about $12 billion a year, according to official data.

As part of economic reform plans pursued by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom was hoping to raise the number of umrah and haj pilgrims to 15 million and 5 million respectively by 2020, and aimed to double the umrah number again to 30 million by 2030. It aims to earn 50 billion riyals ($13.32 billion) of revenues from the haj alone by 2030.

Two sources familiar with the matter said authorities have suspended earlier plans to host pilgrims from overseas, and will only allow domestic pilgrims who have been vaccinated or have recovered from COVID-19 at least six months before the pilgrimage.

Restrictions will be applied on the age of participants as well, one of the sources said.

A second source said the plans were initially to allow some numbers of vaccinated pilgrims from abroad, but confusion over types of vaccines, their efficacy and the emergence of new variants has pushed officials to reconsider.

The government media office did not respond to a request for comment.

Saudi Arabia, which stakes its reputation on its guardianship of Islam’s holiest sites in Mecca and Medina, barred foreigners from the haj last year due to the pandemic for the first time in the kingdom’s modern history, allowing it only to a limited number of Saudi citizens and residents.

COVID-19 infections are still rising in 35 countries globally. There have been at least 153,508,000 reported infections and 3,351,000 reported deaths caused by the new coronavirus so far.

India leads the world in the daily average number of new deaths reported, accounting for one in every four deaths reported worldwide each day.

Crowds of millions of pilgrims from around the world could be a hotbed for virus transmission, and in the past some worshippers have returned to their countries with respiratory and other diseases.

In February, the government suspended entry to the kingdom from 20 countries, with the exception of diplomats, Saudi citizens, medical practitioners and their families, to help curb the spread of the new coronavirus.

The ban, which is still in place to date, includes people arriving from the United Arab Emirates, Germany, the United States, Britain, South Africa, France, Egypt, Lebanon, India and Pakistan.

Arab News

Al-Qaeda has vowed to “wage war on all fronts” against the US unless it retreats from the entire Muslim world.

Speaking just days ahead of the 10-year anniversary of the assassination of the group’s former leader Osama bin Laden, two of its operatives told CNN that it is planning a comeback in Afghanistan as the US withdraws. “The Americans are now defeated,” said Al-Qaeda.

The militant group, now led by Ayman Zawahiri, has largely been eclipsed by Daesh in recent years in terms of attacks carried out and media exposure.

The presence of US forces in the Middle East has long been seized upon by militant groups — including Al-Qaeda, Daesh and Hezbollah — as a rallying cry for their causes.

Earlier in April, US President Joe Biden announced that he would withdraw troops from Afghanistan, effectively ending America’s longest-ever war.

“Bin Laden is dead and Al-Qaeda is degraded in Afghanistan. And it’s time to end the forever war,” he said.

As part of the withdrawal, the Taliban and the US have agreed in talks that the group will cut ties with Al-Qaeda.

While its direct physical presence has declined since the death of Bin Laden on May 2, 2011, Zawahiri has overseen a diversification of its role in global jihadism.

“Under Zawahiri’s stewardship, Al-Qaeda has become increasingly decentralised, with authority resting primarily in the hands of Al-Qaeda’s affiliate leaders,” according to a recent report from the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) think tank.

The US has placed a $25 million bounty for Zawahiri, who features on its most-wanted-terrorist list.

With inputs from Arab News

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Kashmir Today staff and is published from a syndicated feed.).

ANI

Colorado: A new assessment in the medical journal Lancet has found “consistent, strong evidence” that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, is predominantly transmitted through the air.

Therefore, public health measures that fail to treat the virus as predominantly airborne leave people unprotected and allow the virus to spread, according to six experts from the UK, USA and Canada, including Jose-Luis Jimenez, a chemist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and the University of Colorado Boulder.

“The evidence supporting airborne transmission is overwhelming, and evidence supporting large droplet transmission is almost non-existent,” Jimenez said. “It is urgent that the World Health Organization and other public health agencies adapt their description of transmission to the scientific evidence so that the focus of mitigation is put on reducing airborne transmission.”

The team of experts, led by the University of Oxford’s Trish Greenhalgh, reviewed published research and identified 10 lines of evidence to support the predominance of the airborne route.

At the top of their list: Super-spreader events such as the Skagit Choir outbreak, in which 53 people became infected from a single infected case. Studies have confirmed these events cannot be adequately explained by close contact or touching shared surfaces or objects.

Moreover, transmission rates of SARS-CoV-2 are much higher indoors than outdoors, and transmission is greatly reduced by indoor ventilation.

The team highlighted research estimating that silent (asymptomatic or presymptomatic) transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from people who are not coughing or sneezing accounts for at least 40 per cent of all transmission. This silent transmission is a key way COVID-19 has spread around the world, “supporting a predominantly airborne mode of transmission,” according to the assessment. The researchers also cited work demonstrating long-range transmission of the virus between people in adjacent rooms in hotels; people who were never in each other’s presence.

By contrast, the team found little to no evidence that the virus spreads easily via large droplets, which fall quickly through the air and contaminate surfaces.

“We were able to identify and interpret highly complex and specialist papers on the dynamics of fluid flows and the isolation of live virus,” lead author Greenhalgh said. “While some individual papers were assessed as weak, overall the evidence base for airborne transmission is extensive and robust. There should be no further delay in implementing measures around the world to protect against such transmission.”

The new work has serious implications for public health measures designed to mitigate the pandemic. First, “droplet measures” such as handwashing and surface cleaning, while not unimportant, should be given less emphasis than airborne measures, which deal with inhalation of infectious particles suspended in the air.

If an infectious virus is primarily airborne, someone can potentially be infected when they inhale aerosols produced when an infected person exhales, speaks, shouts, sings, or sneezes. So airborne control measures include ventilation, air filtration, reducing crowding and the amount of time people spend indoors, wearing masks whenever indoors (even if not within 6 feet or 2 meters of others), attention to mask quality and fit, and higher-grade PPE for healthcare and other staff when working in contact with potentially infectious people.

“It is quite surprising that anyone is still questioning whether the airborne transmission is the predominant transmission pathway for this virus or not,” said co-author Professor Kimberly Prather, an aerosol scientist from the University of California San Diego. “Only by including inhalation of aerosols at both close and long range can we explain the many indoor outbreaks that have occurred around the globe. Once we acknowledge this virus is airborne, we know how to fix it. There are many examples of places that have fared much better by acknowledging this virus is airborne from the start. The world needs to follow their lead as soon as possible.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Kashmir Today staff and is published from a syndicated feed.).

DUBAI: Dubai authorities said Tuesday that those involved in a naked photo shoot on a high-rise balcony in the city will be deported, after the footage went viral and prompted a crackdown in the Gulf Arab Sheikhdom.

Footage showed more than a dozen women posing naked on a balcony in Dubai

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Dubai’s Attorney General Issam Issa al-Humaidan said that the public prosecution has completed investigations and those behind the photo shoot will be sent back to their countries.

At least 11 Ukrainian women and a Russian were arrested over the widely shared video on charges of public debauchery and spreading pornography.
The move to deport the foreigners is highly unusual for the legal system in Dubai, an absolutely ruled sheikhdom.

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Typically, such cases go to trial or are otherwise adjudicated before deportation.

Dubai police announced earlier this week they had arrested a group of people on debauchery charges over a widely shared video showing naked women posing in broad daylight on a balcony overlooking the city’s upscale Marina neighbourhood.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry confirmed Tuesday that 11 of the detained women were Ukrainian, while a Russian diplomat in Dubai said the photographer who filmed and took photos of the naked women held Russian citizenship.

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The nude photo shoot scandal comes just days before Ramadan, the holiest month of the Muslim calendar, and as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky lands in nearby Doha, Qatar, for an official state visit.

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Over the years, Dubai increasingly has promoted itself as a popular destination for Russians on holiday.
Signs in Cyrillic are a common sight at the city’s major malls.

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Dubai is a top destination for the world’s Instagram influencers and models, who fill their social media feeds with slick bikini-clad selfies from the coastal emirate’s luxury hotels and artificial islands.
But the city’s brand as a glitzy foreign tourist destination has at times provoked controversy and collided with the sheikhdom’s strict rules governing public behavior and expression, which are based on Islamic law, or Shariah.

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Dubai police declined to identify those detained.
More than a dozen women appeared in the video and the nationalities of the others arrested were not immediately known.

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The generally pro-Kremlin tabloid Life identified the Russian man arrested as the head of an information technology firm in Russia’s Ivanovo region, though his firm denied he had anything to do with the photo shoot.
The Associated Press was not able to determine if those arrested had legal representation or reach a lawyer for them.

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Stanislav Voskresensky, the governor of Ivanovo, asked the Russian Foreign Ministry and Russia’s ambassador to the UAE to offer the Russian man their support.
“We don’t abandon our own,” Voskresensky wrote on social media.

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It’s not the first time that foreign social media influencers, amateur and pro, have drawn unwanted scrutiny in the United Arab Emirates.
Earlier this year, as Dubai promoted itself as a major pandemic-friendly party haven for travelers fleeing tough lockdowns elsewhere, European reality TV show stars came under fire for flaunting their poolside Dubai vacations on social media and for bringing the coronavirus back home.

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Denmark and the United Kingdom later banned flights to the UAE as virus cases surged in the federation of seven sheikhdoms.
Although the UAE has recently made legal changes to attract foreign tourists and investors, allowing unmarried couples to share hotel rooms and residents to drink alcohol without a license, the Gulf Arab country’s justice system retains harsh penalties for violations of the public decency law.
Nudity and other “lewd behavior,” carry penalties of up to six months in prison and a fine of 5,000 dirhams (USD 1,360).

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The sharing of pornographic material is also punishable with prison time and hefty fines.
The country’s majority state-owned telecom companies block access to pornographic websites.
Foreigners, who make up some 90 per cent of the UAE’s population of over 9 million, have landed in jail for their comments and videos online, as well as for offenses considered tame in the West, like kissing in public.
Dubai police often turn a blind eye to foreigners misbehaving — until they don’t.

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By PTI

NEW DELHI: As Pakistan prime minister, Nawaz Sharif made unilateral concessions to his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi and even weakened Islamabad’s principled position on Jammu and Kashmir, thinking that he would extract something in return but that did not happen, a former Pakistani diplomat said on Tuesday.

Pakistan’s former high commissioner to India Abdul Basit, in an online interview to Karan Thapar of The Wire, severely criticised Sharif on his policy towards India and said Islamabad’s reading of Prime Minister Modi was “off the mark”.

Following an invitation, Sharif had attended Modi inauguration as prime minister in 2014, signalling his intent to improve ties with India.

On his part, Modi had made a surprise stopover at Lahore in December 2015.

However, a series of terror attacks on India by Pakistan-based terror groups in 2016 brought the ties under severe strain.

Basit, referring to a meeting between Sharif had with Modi when he visited India in 2014, said the Pakistani leader kept silent on Kashmir and did not utter a single word on it when the Indian prime minister raised the issue of terrorism and Mumbai terror attack trial.

“He (Sharif) thought that by making such concessions he would eventually be able to get concessions from prime minister Modi. But that was not the case in my view. Because the way Islamabad was reading PM Modi in my assessment was off the mark,” Basit said.

He said Sharif wanted to maintain good relations with Modi but did so unilaterally without anything in return.

Asked on what ground, he accused Sharif of ‘pandering to India unilaterally and unconditionally’ in his new book, Basit said: “I watched our leader very very closely and worked with him very closely on Pakistan-India relations. I make these assumptions based on what I have seen.”

Basit was Pakistan’s envoy to India from 2014-2017, the first three years of the Modi government.

When asked whether Pakistan’s concessions to India meant its interests were compromised as Modi did not offer anything in return, the former high commissioner said, “That is correct and (it) weakened our principled position on Jammu and Kashmir in particular.”

The former envoy also said that the joint statement of December 2015 and the Ufa joint statement were poorly negotiated by Pakistan and they made concessions to India.

Basit said Sharif had an emotional attachment to India and Indians which, at times went beyond his stature as the prime minister.

He said Sharif would meet almost any Indian who wanted to see him and added he was “out to oblige everyone”.

Basit also criticised Sharif’s foreign affairs advisors, Sartaj Aziz and Tariq Fatemi saying they were too keen on extending concessions to India rather than standing up for Pakistan’s interests.

To a question on his criticism of the high-ranking officials, the former envoy said “The way we handled our interaction with India subsequently and it was not because of the prime minister himself.

I think the entire team, I do not know whether that kind of instructions they had from the prime minister.

“But since he (Sharif) was at the helm, I would say that he was kind of convinced that he would eventually extract some concessions from India which he failed to do unfortunately.”

Basit also indicated how he was repeatedly ignored on important India-Pakistan matters.

New Delhi- India desires cordial relations with Pakistan but an atmosphere of trust, devoid of terror and hostility, is “imperative” for it, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a letter to his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan.

Modi wrote the letter to Khan to extend greetings to the people of that country on the occasion of Pakistan Day.

“As a neighbouring country, India desires cordial relations with the people of Pakistan. For this, an environment of trust, devoid of terror and hostility, is imperative,” he said.

Government sources said it is a routine letter sent every year.

Modi also conveyed his best wishes to Khan and the people of Pakistan in dealing with the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.

There have been indications of positive movement in ties between India and Pakistan.

Last month, the Indian and Pakistani armies recommitted themselves to the 2003 ceasefire on the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir.

On Monday, a delegation of Pakistani officials arrived in India for a meeting of the permanent Indus commission. It is the first such dialogue in over two-and-a-half years.

Last week, Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla said India desires good neighbourly ties with Pakistan and is committed to addressing issues, if any, bilaterally but added that any meaningful dialogue can only be held in a conducive atmosphere.

He said the onus is on Islamabad to create such an atmosphere.

The relations between the two countries nosedived after India withdrew special status of Jammu and Kashmir and bifurcated the state into two union territories in 2019.

Pakistan Day is celebrated to mark the Lahore Resolution on March 23 1940 when the All-India Muslim League demanded a separate nation for the Muslims of India.

It is learnt that a separate message was sent by President Ram Nath Kovind to his Pakistani counterpart Arif Alvi.

Shahzad Ahmad, who had over a million followers, had tried to commit suicide in the recent past but was saved.

A Pakistani TikTok star from Peshawar city has committed suicide after a female fan rejected his marriage proposal, a media report said.

Twenty-year-old Shahzad Ahmad, who had over a million followers on the Chinese video-sharing app, had tried to commit suicide in the recent past but was saved, a report said.

“He was in love with a girl but her father turned down his marriage proposal repeatedly after which Shahzad was really depressed and he committed suicide,” the victim’s brother Sajjad said in a complaint he had filed.

One of Shahzad’s friend told local media: “Two years ago, he was approached by a girl who claimed to be a fan. This relation developed into a friendship soon but the girl was just a 16-year-old studying in school.

“He immediately proposed her but his proposal was turned down on the basis of the girl’s age.”

Pakistan has once again banned TikTok, this time for allegedly peddling vulgarity and spreading objectionable content on its platform.

The country banned the ByteDance-owned platform in October 2020 for a brief 10-day period for hosting “immoral” and “indecent” videos.

“In respectful compliance to the orders of the Peshawar High Court (PHC), PTA has issued directions to the service providers to immediately block access to the TikTok App.

During the hearing of a case, the PHC has ordered for the blocking of App,” the Pakistan telecommunication Authority (PTA) said in a tweet late on Thursday.
According to a report, Peshawar High Court Chief Justice Qaiser Rashid Khan accused TikTok of hosting content “unacceptable for Pakistani society.”

Khan said the platform engaged in “peddling vulgarity” and ordered the ban take effect immediately during a hearing on Thursday.

TikTok said in a statement that it “is built upon the foundation of creative expression, with strong safeguards in place to keep inappropriate content off the platform.”

The app has been installed over 40 million times in Pakistan.

Indo-Asian News Service

LAHORE: Pakistan’s deposed prime minister Nawaz Sharif has accused the country’s powerful military establishment of threatening his daughter Maryam Nawaz, warning that if anything happens to her Prime Minister Imran Khan and the three top generals would be responsible for it.

Maryam Nawaz | File Photo

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In a video message from London, the PML-N supremo said that they (military establishment) have threatened to ‘smash’ Maryam if she does not stop against them (the military).
“You have stooped so low. First you broke open the Karachi hotel room door where Maryam was staying. Now you are threatening her that if she does not stop, she will be smashed.
If anything happens to her Prime Minister Imran Khan, Army chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, ISI head Lt. Gen. Faiz Hameed and Gen. Irfan Malik will be responsible,” 71-year-old Sharif said in the video which he posted on his Twitter account on Thursday.
Sharif has been in London since November 2019.
The Khan government had allowed him to leave the country after the Lahore High Court granted him bail for four weeks on medical grounds.
He was serving a seven-year imprisonment in Lahore’s Kot Lakhpat jail in Al-Azizia Mills corruption case.
Taunting the military for requesting politicians not to drag it in politics, Sharif said: “You (generals) rigged 2018 polls to impose inept Imran Khan on the nation and after the defeat in the Senate you helped your selected (PM Khan) to get vote of confidence and it is no more a secret”.
Addressing the generals, Sharif said: “What you have done is a grave crime and you will be answerable to your deeds.”
Meanwhile, Maryam, a senior functionary of the PML-N party said in a tweet that she had not only been threatened but those issuing the threat had also used abusive language.
Earlier, Maryam, 47, named the intelligence agencies being used to pressure PML-N senators to vote for the government candidate in the senate chairman election being held on Friday.
Since September last year Sharif had started taking on the Pakistan Army and ISI chiefs for their alleged interference in politics and installing their ‘puppet’ government of Khan by “stealing” the 2018 polls. —PTI

An earlier real world study had showed effectiveness at preventing symptomatic disease at 94% and asymptomatic illness at 92%.

Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE said that real-world data from Israel suggests that their COVID-19 vaccine is 94% effective in preventing asymptomatic infections, meaning the vaccine could significantly reduce transmission.

The companies also said the latest analysis of the Israeli data shows the vaccine was 97% effective in preventing symptomatic disease, severe disease and death. That is basically in line with the 95% efficacy Pfizer and BioNTech reported from the vaccine’s late-stage clinical trial in December.

The analysis also shows real-world evidence of the vaccine’s effectiveness against a highly infectious variant of COVID-19 first discovered in Britain, known as B.1.1.7. More than 80% of the tested specimens when the analysis was conucted were variant B.1.1.7.

There was only a limited number of infections in Israel caused by the so-called South African variant – known as B.1.351 – so they were not able to evaluate vaccine effectiveness against this variant.

Israel is leading the world in its vaccination roll out, due in part to an agreement to share data with Pfizer and BioNTech. As of Wednesday, around 55% of its 9 million population had been given at least one dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, according to Health Ministry data, and 43% have received both doses.

According to the analysis, unvaccinated individuals were 44 times more likely to develop symptomatic COVID-19 and 29 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than those who had received the vaccine.

The data, collected between Jan. 17 and March 6, has not yet been peer reviewed.

Israel’s Health Ministry previously found the Pfizer vaccine developed with Germany’s BioNTech reduces infection, including in asymptomatic cases, by 89.4% and in syptomatic cases by 93.7%. That was in data collected between Jan. 17 and Feb. 6 .

Washington: The United States will directly raise with China the issue of genocide against Uighur Muslims, the Biden Administration said on Thursday.

It added that a range of global issues is expected to part of the conversation of the Quad’s leadership summit.

“Addressing the genocide against Uighur Muslims is something that will be a topic of discussion with the Chinese directly next week but certainly this conversation (Quad summit) tomorrow… I have invited National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to come and give you a readout of that meeting.

“I know there’s a lot of interest in the Quad summit tomorrow, but we expect the conversation to be about a range of global issues,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters at her daily news conference.

The Quad summit, she reiterated, is not focused on China. “Of course, China is a topic on the minds of many leaders and countries, but we expect they will talk about the climate crisis, about economic cooperation, about addressing COVID, a range of issues and discussions and you know certainly the position of the United States is that what is happening is genocide and we will look for opportunities to work with other partners on putting additional pressure on the Chinese, but we also raise it directly, and it will be a topic of discussion next week,” she said.

Days after the Quad summit, US Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor are scheduled to meet their Chinese counterparts in Anchorage, Alaska on March 18.

“This meeting next week, we felt it was important to have it on US soil, we certainly anticipate that National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Tony Blinken will be discussing both the challenges we’ve had, and not holding back on issues and concerns we have with the behaviour of Chinese leadership, whether it’s on Taiwan or recent, you know, efforts to push back democracy in Hong Kong or on concerns we have about the economic relationship,” Psaki said in response to another question.

“So they will certainly raise those issues and the lack of transparency as it relates to COVID, human rights abuses as well. But they’ll also talk about areas of opportunity and ways we can work together. They will not be holding back in the conversation. But they wanted to, you know, it’s an important moment next week to engage directly and in person. I know they’re looking forward to it. We’ll have a robust readout, I’m sure, when that meeting concludes,” Psaki said.

At a separate news conference, State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters that the US will engage China from a position of strength. “There will be some difficult conversations, I would expect. We will certainly not pull any punches in discussing our areas of disagreement,” he said.
“But as Secretary (of State Tony) Blinken has said, our relationship with Beijing is a multifaceted one. It is fundamentally competitive. It is adversarial, in some ways. And there also are potential areas for collaboration. And so I suspect all of those elements will come up during these discussions on March 18,” he said.

The United States, he said, expects Beijing to demonstrate seriousness regarding its own often stated desire to change the tone of the bilateral relationship.

“This will be a difficult conversation. We’ll be frank and explain how Beijing’s actions and behaviour challenge the security, the prosperity, the values of not only the United States, but also our partners and allies,” he said.

“Now, on the flip side of that coin, we also will explore avenues that, for cooperation, that are in our interest. When Secretary Blinken first spoke with Director Young, when Secretary–when President Biden first spoke with President Xi, they made very clear that there will be areas for collaboration, or at least there will be the potential for areas of collaboration. But there has to be one common denominator, when it is in our national interests,” he said.

“Of course, climate change, I think, is one of those that we can tangibly point to is undeniably in our own national interests for the world’s largest and the world’s second largest emitters to be able to work productively and constructively together when it comes to climate change. But the point remains that we’re not looking to engage in talks for the sake of talks, Price said.

The US is looking for Beijing to demonstrate that seriousness of purpose, to demonstrate that it seeks to live up to its own oft stated desire to change the tone of the bilateral relationship.
The relationship between US and China, he said is multifaceted. “It is primarily and fundamentally a relationship that is predicated on competition. Our goal, when it comes to our relationship with Beijing, our approach to Beijing is to compete and ultimately to out compete with Beijing, in the areas that are competitive. We have talked about them, the economic realms, the security realms are primarily competitive,” he said.

“There are, of course, areas in this relationship that are adversarial. And there are areas for potential collaboration. So I wouldn’t want to attach one label to it, because it truly is multifaceted. We are going to discuss those more difficult areas with the Chinese,” he said.

He said there was every expectation that when it comes to more difficult issues — Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, pressure on Taiwan, broader human rights abuses, the South China Sea, the Mekong, economic pressure arbitrary detentions, the origins of COVID-19 — they would come up. (PTI)