Author: News Desk

An Indian hiker has been rescued after spending 48 hours trapped in a crevice on a treacherous slope on a hill in southern Kerala. R Babu, 23, from Malampuzha, fell into the hole on Kurumbachi hill in Palakkad on Monday.   Army officers crawled for four hours to reach him. They gave him water before helping him to the hilltop. Indian Army drone footage showed the moment Mr Babu emerged safely with the aid of a rope as rescue teams cheered him. “In a spectacular action, highly qualified teams of the Indian Army have successfully rescued Mr Babu who slipped…

Expo 2020 Dubai has launched a Dh50 Season Pass Finale for the final 50 days of the world’s fair. In addition to the season pass offer, between February 14 and 18, Expo’s “bring a friend” promotion gives Season Pass or Season Pass Finale holders a free one-day ticket for a guest, which is valid until February 28. From February 10, the only two tickets available to buy at Expo 2020 will be the special-priced Season Pass Finale and a Dh275 Premium Experience one-day The premium ticket offers priority access to select events, access to the Premium Lounge at 2020 Club,…

Pope Francis condemned assisted suicide as an unacceptable deviation from medical ethics on Wednesday as Italy’s parliament resumed talks on a law to regulate it. Speaking at his general audience, Francis praised palliative care aimed at helping terminally ill patients live as comfortably and humanely as possible. “But we have to be careful to not confuse this help with unacceptable deviations that lead to killing,” he said. “We must accompany death, not provoke death or help any kind of suicide.” In 2019, Italy’s Constitutional Court partially decriminalised assisted suicide under certain conditions if local health authorities and an ethics board…

ANTANANARIVO:  The death toll from Cyclone Batsirai in Madagascar rose to 80 from a previously reported 29, the state disaster relief agency said on Wednesday as information continued to filter in from areas of the country that were badly affected. The cyclone slammed into the large Indian Ocean island late on Saturday, knocking down houses and electricity lines as it battered the south-eastern coast until it moved away late on Sunday, leaving 91,000 people with destroyed or damaged homes. The state disaster relief agency said on Wednesday that 60 of the deaths had occurred in the Ikongo district in south-east Madagascar.…

NEW YORK : Stealing cryptocurrencies is relatively easy. The hard part is turning the proceeds into cash. That’s the lesson from the arrest on Tuesday of Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein and his wife Heather Morgan, an artist and rapper also known as Razzlekahn. The pair face charges of conspiring to launder bitcoin stolen from a virtual exchange in 2016. Yet six years later the U.S. Justice Department was still able to seize unspent tokens worth $3.6 billion.

LONDON :  British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Wednesday that laws requiring people in England with COVID-19 to self-isolate could be lifted by the end of the month, bringing an end to all domestic coronavirus restrictions. “Provided the current encouraging trends in the data continue, it is my expectation that we will be able to end the last domestic restrictions — including the legal requirement to self-isolate if you test positive — a full month early,” Johnson told Parliament. People who test positive now have to isolate for five full days. That rule is to expire on March 24.

Washington:  Jane Campion’s gothic western “The Power of the Dog” led nominations to the 94th Academy Awards, where streaming services more than ever before swept over Hollywood’s top honors. In nominations announced Tuesday, Campion’s film landed a leading 12 nominations, including nods for best picture, best director and all of its top actors: Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Campion, a nominee for 1993′s “The Piano,” became the first woman to ever be nominated twice for best director. Last year, Chloé Zhao became just the second woman to ever win the award. Campion’s director of photography, Ari…

Seven Indian soldiers have died after being hit by an avalanche on the Chinese border in the remote north-eastern Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh. They were on a routine foot patrol in the high-altitude Kameng sector along the Line of Actual Control — the disputed border between India and China — when the avalanche struck on Sunday, the Indian Army said. The soldiers were reported missing after the incident on Sunday and rescue attempts were made. But the army said on Tuesday that they had been killed and their bodies had been recovered from the avalanche site. Several emergency teams were flow in to…

Thousands of people took to the streets of cities across Turkey in recent days to protest against electricity prices that shot up by as much as 125 per cent at the start of the year. From the Mediterranean resorts of Fethiye and Marmaris to Agri on the mountainous eastern border, people rebelled against crippling bills that were raised in January. Under the nationwide changes, electricity companies boosted prices by 50 per cent for low-level users, rising to 125 per cent for large-scale business consumers. In the southern city of Mardin, police used tear gas and arrested several protesters on Sunday after the crowd called for the…

When Heidi Nonoo came to Bahrain 31 years ago, the capital was very different to the multicultural, bustling city it is today. Then, a gift shop displaying Jewish wares would have been unthinkable. But now, Ms Nonoo runs Lily B of LP, the country’s first Jewish gift shop. “I never dreamt that there would be Hebrew writing on the wall [in Bahrain],” she says. The shop is named after her mother, Lily, and sells locally-made items like challah bread covers used on shabbat and kippahs traditionally worn by Jewish men, with Hebrew, Arabic and English writing. Lily died in 2019. “We opened…