Fakhrizadeh, killed in an attack outside Tehran, was widely seen by Western intelligence as the mastermind of clandestine Iranian efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Here’s more on the man whose killing is being blamed on Israel.
Prominent Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, killed in an attack outside Tehran, has been widely seen outside the country as a leading figure in the Islamic Republic’s nuclear weapons programme.
The same playbook used by the Assad regime in Syria is being deployed in Armenia to pitch this as an Islam versus Christianity battle – when it is anything but.
Nagorno-Karabakh is on fire yet again as Armenian and Azerbaijani forces clash. This might hardly be newsworthy given the tortured history and almost regular clashes but for the fact that this time Armenia seems to have orchestrated something new.
This time, Armenia has put together a coalition of the isolated and rogue. This time Armenia seems determined to turn what has been a land dispute between ethnic rivals into a holy war.
Clashes erupt periodically in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, and the latest crisis has raised fears of an all-out war.
Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous, heavily-forested, landlocked region in the South Caucasus, is at the heart of a decades-long armed standoff between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
On September 27, 2020, the heaviest clashes since 2016 erupted, prompting fears of an all-out war between two former Soviet republics.
The World Health Organization operates on a two-year budget cycle with a target of $4.8 billion. The annual budget thus is approximately $2,4 billion per year, with further targets for extreme emergencies.
The WHO receives funds in two ways:
By Ismail Dilawar and Faseeh Mangi
Agriculture sector accounts for 20% of Pakistan’s economy
Some provinces diverting resources from virus to fight locusts
Swarms of locusts spreading across Pakistan are emerging as a bigger threat to the economy than the coronavirus pandemic, with the pests threatening farm output, livelihoods and food security.
The locust-invasion now covers an area of 57 million hectares in a country with a total crop area of 23 million hectares, said Falak Naz, director general of crop protection at the Ministry of Food Security and Research. While not all the areas infested now are crop lands, the insects are moving fast, he said.
Agriculture is the second-biggest sector in the economy — contributing about 20% to gross domestic product — and provides a livelihood to half of the nation’s workforce. Faced with devastating losses, authorities are now being forced to divert money set aside to fight the coronavirus to help combat the locust scourge instead.
This reading is best for CSS Current Affairs / CSS International Relations / International Organizations
Based on UN data, an annual study has measured how children’s rights are respected in 182 countries.
The UK is one of the worst countries in the world for respecting children’s rights, an international report has found.
Published this week, The KidsRights Index 2020 ranked the UK 169th out of 182 nations, behind Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Iraq.
Ranked at the top were Iceland, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, and Germany.
Following Turkey’s recent test-firing of the native HGK-84 precision guidance kit, we take you through the top Turkish defence industry achievements in recent years.
On Monday, Turkey’s National Defence Ministry stated that Turkey successfully test-fired a locally-produced precision guidance kit known as the HGK-84.
“The test-firing of our HGK-84 LAB (Precision Guidance Kit-84 Laser Seeker Head) produced by domestic and national facilities were successfully carried out,” announced the national defence ministry.
It is a GPS/INS guidance kit that transforms existing 2,000-pound MK-84 general purpose and penetrator bombs into air-to-ground smart bombs enabling precision-strike capabilities in all-weather conditions.
From the moment Coronavirus swept across the world, killing thousands of people each day and paralysing life for weeks, another kind of outbreak began to emerge: conspiracy theories. They are proving just as contagious as the virus itself.
Many fantastic and unproven claims have been made about COVID-19, such as the virus being produced as a biological weapon in a lab in China, that it is spread by 5G wireless technology, and even that billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates created the disease himself. Some of these conspiracies have had real-life consequences. Dozens of radio towers, assumed to be carrying 5G technology, have been attacked and damaged in Britain and the Netherlands.
The international community’s focus on battling Covid-19 provides the perfect cover for criminal political adventurism.
When France was distracted with a national election and a range of unresolved domestic issues in 1936, Nazi Germany seized it as an opportunity to violate the Treaty of Versailles by remilitarising the Rhineland. This buffer zone had been established in the aftermath of World War I to prevent it from threatening its western neighbours.
History is replete with examples of expansionist states using distraction and diversion as a weapon or element of surprise – as illustrated by Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 when the world’s attention was fixated on the Beijing Olympic Games.
It’s no secret that world leaders often use foreign policy as a means to divert attention from political problems at home, as illustrated by the United States’ assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, which was likely carried out to distract from President Donald Trump’s impeachment hearing.
NEW YORK: Wall Street hedge funds and lawyers have turned an arcane procedure of international treaties into a money machine, at the cost of the world`s poorest people. The latest shakedown is a $5.9 billion award against Pakistan`s government in favour of two global mining companies Antofagasta PLC of Chile and Barrick Gold Corporation of Canada for a project that was never approved by Pakistan and never carried out.
In 1993, a US-incorporated mining company, BHP, entered into a joint venture (JV) with the Balochistan Development Authority (BDA), a public corporation in Pakistan`s impoverished Balochistan province. The JV was set up to prospect for gold and copper, and in the event of favourable discoveries, to seek a mining license. BHP was not optimistic about the project`s prontabihty and dragged its feet on exploration. In the early 2000s, it assigned the prospecting rights to an Australian company, which created Tethyan Copper Company (TCC) for the project.