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RAWALPINDI: Three security personnel were martyred in a suicide attack in North Waziristan, said Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) on Sunday.

According to the military’s media wing, the security personnel were martyred when a suicide bomber blew himself up in the Miran Shah area of North Waziristan.

Three children were also martyred in the explosion, said the ISPR.

The three martyred soldiers were identified as Lance Havaldar Zubair Qadir, Sepoy Asghar and Sepoy Qasim Maqsood.

Those who embraced martyrdom include Anam, 4, Ahsan, 8 and Ahmed Hassan, 11, said the ISPR.

The intelligence agencies have launched an investigation to identify the suicide bomber and trace his handler and facilitators, said the military’s media wing in a statement.

‘Cowardly acts cannot discourage us’

Condemning the suicide attack on the security forces in North Waziristan, Minister for Information and Broadcasting Marriyum Aurangzeb said that miscreants want to destabilize law and order in the country.

In a statement, she said that such cowardly acts cannot discourage us.

The information minister said that the sacrifices of security personnel for restoring law and order in the country will not go in vain. She also extended condolences to the families of the security personnel and children martyred in the blast.

The Panjshir Valley is famed for being a site of resistance by Afghans against Soviet forces in the 1980s and as a base for rebels opposed to Taliban rule during the Islamists’ first stint in power in the late 1990s.

The National Resistance Front (NRF) were the last to hold out against the Taliban’s takeover of the country last year by retreating to the valley.

Headed by the son of late anti-Taliban commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, NRF forces last week announced an offensive against the Taliban — their first since the hardline Islamists seized power in August.

Both sides claim to have killed dozens of each other’s fighters in recent days.

“We could only pick up one or two items of clothing,” Lutfullah Bari said, adding he fled with dozens of families.

Despite activating its “maximum emergency quarantine system” to slow the spread of disease through its unvaccinated population, North Korea is now reporting tens of thousands of new cases daily.

On Friday alone, “over 174,440 persons had fever, at least 81,430 were fully recovered and 21 died in the country”, the official Korean Central News Agency reported.

North Korea confirmed on Thursday that the highly contagious Omicron variant had been detected in the capital Pyongyang, with leader Kim Jong Un ordering nationwide lockdowns.

It was the North’s first official admission of Covid cases and marked the failure of a two-year coronavirus blockade maintained at great economic cost since the start of the pandemic.

From late April to May 13, more than 524,440 people have fallen sick with fever, KCNA said, with 27 deaths in total.

The report did not specify whether the new cases and deaths had tested positive for Covid-19, but experts say the country will be struggling to test and diagnose on this scale.

North Korea has said only that one of the first six deaths it announced had tested positive for Covid-19.

“It’s not a stretch to consider these ‘fever’ cases to all be Covid-19, given the North’s lack of testing capacity,” said Cheong Seong-chang of the Sejong Institute.

“The actual number of Covid cases could be higher than the fever figures due to many asymptomatic cases,” he said, adding that the pace of infection was growing “very fast”.Kim said the outbreak was causing “great upheaval” in North Korea, as he oversaw a second Politburo meeting in three days to discuss the situation.

Kim is putting himself “front and centre” of the country’s Covid response, said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.

“The language he’s used suggests the situation in North Korea is going to get worse before it gets better,” he said.

“Engagers see this rhetoric preparing the way for international assistance, but Kim may be rallying a population on the verge of further sacrifice,” he added.

The meeting of the nation’s top officials discussed medicine distribution and other ways of “minimising the losses in human lives”, KCNA said.

North Korea has a crumbling health system — one of the worst in the world — and no Covid vaccines, antiviral treatment drugs or mass testing capacity, experts say.

But the country will “actively learn” from China’s pandemic management strategy, Kim said, according to KCNA.

China, the world’s only major economy to still maintain a zero-Covid policy, is battling multiple Omicron outbreaks — with some major cities, including financial hub Shanghai, under stay-at-home orders.

North Korea has previously turned down offers of Covid vaccines from China and the World Health Organisation’s Covax scheme, but both Beijing and Seoul issued fresh offers of aid and vaccines this week.

Kim’s comments indicate North Korea “will try getting supplies from China”, said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies.

It also looks likely Pyongyang “will adopt a Chinese-style anti-virus response of regional lockdowns”, Yang added.

So far, Kim said, North Korea’s outbreak was not “an uncontrollable spread among regions” but transmission within areas that had been locked down, KCNA said.

Despite its Covid outbreak, new satellite imagery indicates that North Korea has resumed construction at a long-dormant nuclear reactor.

“I can’t tell you when the reactor will be ready to go, but it is about 10x larger than the existing reactor at Yongbyon,” Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies wrote in a Twitter thread on Saturday.

More than a month of predominantly peaceful protests against the government turned violent this week after supporters of former Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa stormed an anti-government protest camp in the commercial capital Colombo, burning tents and clashing with protesters and police.

The initial violence and reprisals against government figures also left more than 300 injured.

Hit hard by the pandemic, rising oil prices and tax cuts by the populist government, Sri Lanka is in the throes of its worst economic crisis since independence from Great Britain in 1948. Useable foreign reserves have dwindled, and rampant inflation and shortages of fuel have brought thousands onto the streets in protest.

The government lifted the curfew from 6am (0030 GMT) on Saturday until 6pm. A 24-hour curfew imposed on Monday had been lifted for a few hours on Thursday and Friday to allow purchase of essential supplies.

Rajapaksa stepped down after violence flared on Monday, leaving his younger brother Gotabaya Rajapaksa to rule on as president while Wickremesinghe, a five-time prime minister, was appointed to another term late Thursday.

He appointed four ministers from the Rajapaksas’ Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), a decision unlikely to satisfy the protesters demanding the removal of the party from power.

The appointments, announced by the president’s office, include G.L. Pereis, the SLPP chairman who had held the post before resigning on Monday.

 

Russian forces have focused much of their firepower on the Donbas in a “second phase” of their invasion that was announced on April 19, after they failed to reach the capital Kyiv from the north in the early weeks of the war.

But Ukraine has been retaking territory in its northeast, driving the Russians away from the second-largest Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Keeping up pressure on Izium and Russian supply lines will make it harder for Moscow to encircle battle-hardened Ukrainian troops on the eastern front in the Donbas.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy also said complex talks were underway to find a way to evacuate a large number of wounded soldiers from a besieged steel works in the port of Mariupol in return for the release of Russian prisoners of war.

Mariupol, which has suffered the heaviest fighting in nearly three months of war, is now in Russian hands but hundreds of Ukrainian fighters are still holding out at the Azovstal steel works despite weeks of heavy Russian bombardment.

Western military analysts say Russian President Vladimir Putin and his generals failed to anticipate such fierce Ukrainian resistance when they launched the invasion on Feb 24.

As well as losing large numbers of men and much military equipment, Russia has been hit by economic sanctions. The Group of Seven leading Western economies pledged in a statement on Saturday to “further increase economic and political pressure on Russia” and to supply more weapons to Ukraine.

Commenting on the latest developments in eastern Ukraine, regional governor Oleh Sinegubov said in comments aired on social media: “The hottest spot remains the Izium direction.” “Our armed forces have switched to a counteroffensive there. The enemy is retreating on some fronts and this is the result of the character of our armed forces,” he said.

Announcing the first annual national budget since the Taliban took over the war-torn country in August last year, Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Salam Hanafi said the government foresaw spending of 231.4 billion Afghanis and domestic revenue of 186.7 billion.

“The revenues are collections from departments related to customs, ministries and mines,” spokesman for the Finance Ministry Ahmad Wali Haqmal said.

Since the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan, successive Western-backed governments relied mostly on foreign aid.

In August 2021, foreign forces withdrew from Afghanistan, leading to the collapse of the government and a Taliban takeover.

The world is yet to officially recognise the Taliban government. The country is dealing with rising security issues and an economic meltdown, while aid agencies figure out how to help 50 million Afghans without giving the Taliban direct access to funds.

Hanafi said the budget for the current financial year, that runs to next February, had been approved by the council of ministries and confirmed by the Taliban’s supreme leader Haibatullah Akhunzada, and would use local funds only.

Development works would take up 27.9 billion Afghanis, he said, but did not provide a breakdown of spending on areas such as defence.

“We have paid attention to education, technical education, and higher education and our all focus is on how to pave the way education for everyone,” Hanafi said.

Taliban authorities are yet to allow the restarting of older girls’ education across the country after committing to a start date earlier this year.

Thousands of mourners packed Jerusalem’s Old City on Friday for the burial of the 51-year-old Al Jazeera reporter. The Palestinian-American was killed two days earlier during an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank.

Television footage showed pallbearers struggling to stop Abu Akleh’s casket from falling to the ground as baton-wielding police charged towards them, grabbing Palestinian flags.

“The Israel police commissioner in coordination with the minister of public security has instructed that an investigation be conducted into the incident,” the police said in a statement.

They had coordinated funeral arrangements with the journalist’s family but “rioters tried to sabotage the ceremony and harm the police,” it said.

“As with any operational incident, and certainly an incident in which police officers were exposed to violence by rioters and in which force was subsequently used by the police, the Israel Police will be looking into the events that ensued during the funeral,” it added.

The latest condemnation came when Spain’s foreign ministry, in a tweet, called “totally unacceptable” the scenes showing “disproportionate use of violence by the Israeli police” at the funeral.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock expressed deep shock “that the funeral ceremony could not be held in peace and dignity.” The foundation of late South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, said the police “attacking pallbearers” was “chillingly reminiscent of the brutality” during funerals of anti-apartheid activists.While the two sides traded blame, the UN Security Council in a rare, unanimous statement, condemned the killing and called for “an immediate, thorough, transparent, and impartial investigation,” diplomats said.

Qatar-based Al Jazeera said Israel killed its reporter “deliberately” and “in cold blood”.