Pakistan to honour Saudi crown prince after $20bn deals

Agencies
February 18, 2019

Islamabad, Feb 18: Pakistan will confer its highest civilian honour on the Saudi crown prince on Monday, a day after he signed investment deals worth $20 billion on the first stop of an Asian tour clouded by his alleged role in the grisly murder of a dissident journalist.

President Arif Alvi will award Mohammad bin Salman the Nishan-e-Pakistan (Order of Pakistan), the foreign office said in a statement, before the crown prince leaves the country for his next stop, Islamabad's arch-rival India.

Pakistan is facing a serious balance of payments crisis and hopes the huge deals signed over the two-day visit -- seven separate agreements and memorandums of understanding -- will boost its struggling economy.

The tour coincides with a spike in regional tensions: India and Saudi Arabia's arch-rival Iran -- both bordering Pakistan -- have accused Islamabad of backing militant groups which have carried out bloody suicide attacks on their soil in recent days.

Hours ahead of the crown prince's arrival Sunday, Pakistan dismissed Delhi's accusations as "well-rehearsed tactics from (the) Indian playbook after such incidents in the past".

The crown prince, widely known as "MBS", got a warm welcome in Pakistan, including a 21-gun salute and an honour guard.

He is staging the visit just five months after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a fierce critic, at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul ignited a diplomatic crisis.

The Saudis, after initially denying any knowledge of Khashoggi's disappearance, finally acknowledged that a team killed him inside the consulate, but described it as a rogue operation that did not involve the crown prince.

Turkey said Friday it has not yet revealed all the information it has uncovered in the case, which launched a global wave of revulsion and tarnished the crown prince's reputation.

Analysts have said the tour is part of a Gulf pivot to rising Asia as a growing oil market, but also a timely demonstration to the West that MBS is not an international pariah.

The crown prince's tour is expected to finish with two days in China on Thursday and Friday.

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Agencies
January 15,2020

Chandigarh, Jan 15: A man, who has killed two women over infidelity over the last 10 years was arrested from a news channel studio in Chandigarh when he confessed to these crimes during a live programme, police said.

In the television programme on News18, the 31-year-old accused, Maninder Singh, who is a cab driver, confessed killing his live-in partner, a 27-year-old nurse Sarabjit Kaur at a Chandigarh hotel on New Year's Eve.

Singh, a former murder convict and currently out on bail, also confessed about his crime committed in Karnal in 2010.

"I killed her (Sarabjit Kaur) because she was having an affair with her sister-in-law's brother," Maninder told the news channel.

Confessing his previous crime, Maninder said he had killed Renu in Karnal. "She was also having an affair with a man from Uttar Pradesh," he said.

Singh was arrested while the programme was still on air as police rushed into the studio.

Haryana Police had arrested him for killing the woman in 2010. He was convicted by a trial court, but he later got bail from the Punjab and Haryana High Court.

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News Network
March 10,2020

Tehran, Mar 10: Twenty-seven people have died from methanol poisoning in Iran after rumours that drinking alcohol can help cure the novel coronavirus infection, state news agency IRNA reported on Monday. The outbreak of the virus in Islamic republic is one of the deadliest outside of China, where the disease originated.

Twenty have died in the southwestern province of Khuzestan and seven in the northern region of Alborz after consuming bootleg alcohol, IRNA said.

Drinking alcohol is banned in Iran for everyone except some non-Muslim religious minorities. Local media regularly report on lethal cases of poisoning caused by bootleg liquor.

A spokesman for Jundishapur medical university in Ahvaz, the capital of Khuzestan, said 218 people had been hospitalised there after being poisoned.

The poisonings were caused by "rumours that drinking alcohol can be effective in treating coronavirus," Ali Ehsanpour said.

The deputy prosecutor of Alborz, Mohammad Aghayari, told IRNA the dead had drunk methanol after being "misled by content online, thinking they were fighting coronavirus and curing it." If ingested in large quantities, methanol can cause blindness, liver damage and death.

Iran has been scrambling to contain the spread of the COVID-19 illness which has hit all of the country's 31 provinces, killing 237 people and infecting 7,161.

According to IRNA, 16 out of 69 confirmed cases have died of coronavirus infection in Khuzestan as of Sunday.

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News Network
June 25,2020

Ottawa, Jun 25: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took his son out for ice cream on Wednesday in his first family outing since Canada started easing out of its pandemic lockdown.

It was also Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day in Quebec province.

Wearing masks, the Canadian leader and his six-year-old son Hadrien were cheered at Chocolats Favoris in Gatineau, Quebec.

According to a pool report, Trudeau said the shop tapped into a federal emergency wage subsidy and business loan in order to weather the pandemic, and "avoid being frozen out of the frozen treat market."

Hadrien is said to have bounced with excitement, settling on a vanilla cone with a cookie topping while dad bought a vanilla cone dipped in chocolate for himself.

Father and son then headed out to the patio, where they doffed their masks to eat their cones.

Canada's provinces and territories declared states of emergency mid-March, closing schools and non-essential businesses in response to the pandemic.

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