Three UN employees were reportedly kidnapped in Abyan province in southern Yemen, a local security official said on Saturday.

“Unidentified gunmen abducted Akem Sofiol, the director of the United Nations Office for Security and Safety in Aden, on Friday evening,” Adel al-Awsji, the security chief of Lauder directorate in Abyan province, told Anadolu Agency.

He said the office’s general coordinator, Mohamed al-Maliki, and security coordinator Mazen Bawazeer were also kidnapped.

The security official said the gunmen in the Suwayda area stopped the car the UN employees were in as they were heading to Aden to assess the needs of the locals there and took them to an unknown destination.

A manhunt has been launched for the kidnappers.

There was no comment from the UN or Yemeni authorities on the report and no group has yet claimed responsibility for the kidnapping./aa

India on Saturday denounced “motivated comments” as the hijab row, which it called “internal issue,” drew international criticism.

The External Affairs Ministry said in a statement that the dress code issue in some educational institutions in the southern Karnataka state is under judicial examination.

“Our constitutional framework and mechanisms, as well as our democratic ethos and polity, are the context in which issues are considered and resolved. … Motivated comments on our internal issues are not welcome,” said ministry spokesman Arindam Bagchi.

The Indian statement came a day after a US government official voiced support for the Muslim girls who were barred from attending classes for wearing hijab.

“The hijab ban violates religious freedom, and stigmatize and marginalize women and girls,” US Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom Rashad Hussain said on Twitter on Friday.

“Religious freedom includes the ability to choose one’s religious attire. The Indian state of Karnataka should not determine permissibility of religious clothing,” he added.

The Karnataka high court on Thursday blocked students from wearing religious garments until it makes a final ruling on the matter.

A three-judge panel was hearing the case to decide if schools and colleges can order students not to wear the hijab in classrooms.

The case will be heard again on Monday.

A group of Muslim women filed petitions against the order of the government banning the hijab on college premises. The row over hijab erupted after a college in Karnataka told students to take off their headscarves inside the classroom.

Those protesting the move cited the Constitution that allows Indians to wear clothes of their choice and display religious symbols.

According to the Constitution, every citizen has the right to practice, profess and propagate religion. The right can be curtailed only on grounds of public order, morality, and health./aa

Three Yemeni children were killed in an explosion caused by a projectile in the central province of Marib, according to a local observatory.

The Yemeni Landmine Monitor said the three siblings were killed when the projectile exploded in the town of Harib in Marib on Friday.

No details were provided about the group behind the attack and there was no comment from the Yemeni authorities.

On Wednesday, the observatory said that 36 people had been killed as a result of landmine and bomb explosions across Yemen last month.

At least one million mines have been planted across war-torn Yemen, according to previous statements by Yemeni officials.

Iranian-aligned Houthi rebels have for months stepped up attacks to take control of oil-rich Marib province, one of the most important strongholds of the legitimate government and home to the headquarters of Yemen’s Defense Ministry.

Yemen has been engulfed by violence and instability since 2014, when Houthi rebels captured much of the country, including the capital, Sanaa.

A Saudi-led coalition aimed at reinstating the Yemeni government has worsened the situation, causing one of the world’s worst man-made humanitarian crises, with nearly 80%, or about 30 million people, needing humanitarian assistance and protection and more than 13 million in danger of starvation, according to UN estimates./aa

A number of PKK terrorists have infiltrated the Iraqi city of Kirkuk and are disguised as merchants, the Iraqi Turkmen Front (ITF) political movement told Anadolu Agency on Friday. 

ITF spokesman Muhammed Saman said terrorists are hiding in Kirkuk after receiving a major blow Feb. 2 by the Turkish military’s Operation Winter Eagle against terror sites in northern Iraq and parts of northern Syria.

Noting that terrorists began to settle in Kirkuk disguised as merchants and investors with false identities, Saman said they rented workplaces such as wedding halls and cafes.

Stating that the Iraqi intelligence service is aware of the group’s presence in Kirkuk, Saman said Iraq could not intervene in this development due to the political crisis that the country witnesses.  

Turkmen minority in danger

Citing that the PKK has rapidly increased its presence in Kirkuk, Saman underlined that Turkmen officials and politicians are in danger.

"According to Iraqi Intelligence, members of the PKK terrorist organization collect information about the Turkmen officials’ homes and workplaces addresses, as well as road routes,” he said. “If the Turkish Armed Forces increase their operations, the terrorists will target Turkmen officials, whom they track."

Saman said terrorists who previously smuggled weapons and drugs and conducted human trafficking on the Iraq-Syria border are now smuggling oil in Kirkuk, adding that the group stole oil from the Khabbaz oil field in the west of the city and took it out of Iraq illegally.

Stating that the PKK took over some parts of the Sinjar district of Mosul, exploiting the presence of Daesh/ISIS terror group in Iraq years ago, Saman pointed out that the same terrorists are now cooperating with Daesh/ISIS.  

The PKK now provides support to Daesh/ISIS attacks against security forces near Altun Kupri in Kirkuk from time to time, according to Saman.

The spokesman urged the Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) to play a more serious and positive role in the fight against the PKK terror group in Iraq.

He pointed out that the KRG has political weight in Baghdad and considering its political and economic relations with Turkey, it should engage in a serious fight against terrorists. /aa

Major indices in the US stock market plummeted to close lower on Friday, as they failed to recover from the previous day's losses fueled by inflation climbing to a new record high, and crude oil prices climbed to new highs. 

Consumer prices rose 7.5% year-on-year in January, marking the largest 12-month increase since February 1982, according to the Labor Department. Investors are worried that the Federal Reserve could turn more hawkish and make faster and higher rate hikes this year to tame record inflation.

After falling 1.47% on Thursday, the Dow Jones shed another 503 points, or 1.43%, to close at 34,738.

The S&P 500 was off 85 points, or 1.9%, to end at 4,418. The Nasdaq plummeted 394 points, or 2.78%, to 13,791.

On a weekly basis, the blue-chip Dow dove 1%, while the S&P lost 1.8% and the Nasdaq fell 2.2%.

The VIX volatility index jumped 14.6% to 27.4.

The dollar index rose 0.5% to 96.03, but the yield on 10-year US Treasury notes reversed course to retreat 5.3% to 1.922%.

Precious metals soared with gold adding 2% to $1,863 per ounce, and silver rising 2.02% to $28.66.

The price of the international benchmark Brent crude oil surpassed $95 per barrel amid lack of supply and the ongoing tensions between Russia and Ukraine.

The price of the American benchmark West Texas Intermediate climbed to as high as $94.65 – the highest since Sept. 30, 2014./aa

The price of the international benchmark Brent crude oil surpassed $95 per barrel on Friday amid lack of supply and the ongoing tensions between Russia and Ukraine. 

The Brent crude oil price hit $95.65 a barrel at 3.03 p.m. EDT (2003GMT), according to official figures, marking the highest level since Oct. 1, 2014.

The price of the American benchmark West Texas Intermediate climbed to as high as $94.65 around the same time – highest since Sept. 30, 2014.

Both crude prices were up almost 4% for the day.

The sudden increase in prices came as the US warned that Russian invasion of Ukraine could begin during the Beijing Olympics.

"We are in the window when an invasion could begin at any time should (Russian President) Vladimir Putin decide to order it ... It could begin during the Olympics despite a lot of speculation that it will only happen after the Olympics," President Joe Biden's National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said at a press conference 

British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace also said that Russia could invade Ukraine “at any time.”

Ukraine has also asked Russia to explain activities on its borders within the next 48 hours.

On the market front, the supply-demand imbalance continues to drive up prices.

The global oil market is going through an inadequate supply against high demand as the global economy recovers from the coronavirus pandemic.

Energy comes as the primary reason among most countries' high inflation rate.

Global oil demand has significantly increased since the end of quarantine measures around the world, but oil producing and exporting countries have remained behind the curve in output, causing the supply-demand imbalance./aa

The quality of medical care in Myanmar has diminished as the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbates the country’s healthcare situation, according to a report published on Friday.

“The junta has directly diminished the quality of medical care across the country,” a report in medical journal The Lancet quoted Phil Robertson, deputy director for Asia at Human Rights Watch (HRW), as saying.

“Because some of the most capable doctors and nurses are on the run, either having fled the country or operating underground, and their access to quality supplies and medical facilities is severely limited,” Robertson added.

Myanmar’s military seized power on Feb. 1, 2021 by deposing the civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi over allegations of fraud in the 2020 general elections.

The army arrested leaders and officials of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party and declared a state of emergency, which has been extended until the middle of this year.

Suu Kyi faces a number of cases and was sentenced to six years in jail for charges that include violating coronavirus restrictions and possessing “illegally imported” walkie-talkies.

The military takeover has triggered mass protests in Myanmar, with the junta’s forces having killed more than 1,500 people in a crackdown on dissent, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a local monitoring group.

One of the most dangerous places to be a healthcare worker

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a US-based group working for health workers, said Myanmar has turned into “one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a healthcare worker” since last year’s coup.

According to PHR data released last month, 30 healthcare workers have been killed and 286 arrested in Myanmar since the February 2021 coup, along with 128 attacks on medical facilities.

“The highest number of incidents took place in March 2021, but PHR also reported a gradual escalation from September 2021 to January 2022,” read The Lancet report.

Healthcare workers in the Buddhist-majority country became a leading part of the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) against the military coup, “leaving them at risk of threats, arrest, and violence,” the report said.

The situation has turned bad for both doctors and nurses, who are targeted in night raids “forcing many to move between safe houses in order to remain safe.”

“Doctors in Myanmar have been targeted both for their associations with the CDM and for providing medical care to injured protesters,” the report added.

Robertson, the HRW official, said the military junta “has not eased up the pressure at all against healthcare workers,” forcing them to “hide to avoid arrest and … continue their medical work at underground, makeshift clinics.”

“When the military and police find and arrest medical workers, they are often more at risk of torture and abuse in custody since the authorities are keen to obtain information to unravel the medical workers’ underground networks,” he added.

Robertson said families of medical workers are also subject to surveillance and face intimidation from the junta.

Terrible distress

“The COVID-19 pandemic has created terrible distress and another opportunity for a dysfunctional health system to collapse even further,” said Georgina Phillips, a Melbourne-based emergency physician and honorary professor of emergency medicine at the University of Medicine in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city.

“Nevertheless, the pandemic illustrated the creativity and resilience of health workers, with pop-up clinics, telehealth services, and mobile teams dispatched … to treat people with severe COVID-19 symptoms,” Phillips said.

“In areas close to Myanmar's borders in particular there are several clinics set up and run by health workers that have fled the major cities. But it remains a hugely fragmented system.”/aa

Canadian researchers have for the first time diagnosed a dinosaur with a sore throat and flu-like symptoms, according to media reports Friday.

The dinosaur, named after country and western singer Dolly Parton for reasons that are unexplained, was found in Yellowstone National Park in Montana in 1990, but the diagnosis is new.

“So, it’s cool that you can hold that 150-million-year-old bone from Dolly and you literally know how crummy that dinosaur felt when it was sick,” said Cary Woodruff, a recent graduate from the University of Toronto.

He and a team of researchers studied Dolly remains and found she might have died a premature death at around 20-years-of-age due to the first known case of bird-like lung disease diagnosed in a dinosaur.

“What we had in Dolly was very consistent with respiratory infections that are found in birds,” Woodruff said in an interview with the Canadian Press. “It was very, very similar to a respiratory disease that birds get from breathing in fungal spores.”

The infection migrated to the bones from the lungs, based on CatScan X-ray-like imaging that showed irregular protrusions consisting of unusual bone that could have been formed by infection, Woodruff said.

In Dolly's case, a sore throat was really a sore throat. The skeletal remains paint a picture of a dinosaur that was 60 feet long, weighed 5.5 tons and its neck was "very long," he said, adding that Dolly "would have needed a heck of a lot of lozenges" to soothe the ache.

“If you could hop in that time machine and go back to when Dolly was alive with this infection, you would have very clearly, evidently been able to see that this was a very, very sick animal,” Woodruff said./aa

Amid a drop in infections and high vaccination rates, many countries are now completely lifting the restrictions they put in place to curb the coronavirus outbreak, with some dropping COVID passports, others mask mandates, and others restrictions on entering social areas.

Most European nations have begun easing coronavirus measures after high vaccination rates and the emergence of omicron as a dominant variant with mild symptoms, despite a continued rise in case numbers.

Denmark is leading Europe in the return to normal life, having removed all virus restrictions as of Feb. 1 and declaring that the coronavirus is "no longer a critical threat to society."

The Swedish Public Health Agency also lifted all COVID-19 restrictions as of Feb. 9 and put an end to COVID-19 testing, while Norway is set to remove its COVID measures as of Feb.17.

In Finland, Prime Minister Sanna Marin has also announced that all coronavirus-related restrictions in the country will be relaxed on Feb. 14 and lifted as of March 1.

UK

The British government hopes to end all its remaining COVID-19 restrictions, including self-isolation, by the end of the month.

It had previously been announced that restrictions would be lifted on March 27, with daily cases starting to fall after a peak on Jan. 4.

The British Health Ministry in the UK has stated that "Plan B" measures implemented on Dec. 8, 2021 to deal with the omicron variant were ended thanks to the success of its initiative for booster coronavirus vaccines.

Accordingly, the country has since dropped vaccination passports.

Italy

Italy, which tightened anti-virus rules for the holiday season as omicron cases mounted, has begun relaxing them in different areas.

The Health Ministry finally decided to lift the outdoor face mask mandate as of Feb. 11.

In a decision announced at the beginning of the month, the government began to exempt people who received a third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, or those who recovered from the virus with at least two doses, from all restrictions as of Feb. 7.

Green Pass certificates, which are required for traveling, eating out, and other social activities, will now be valid indefinately for those have gotten a booster shot or recovered from the virus with at least a double dose.

Spain

Spain has relaxed its measures after a decrease in the number of daily cases over the past two weeks.

The government on Thursday ended its outdoor mask mandate in force since Dec. 24, 2021.

Other restrictions specific to each of the country's 17 autonomous administrations, are also gradually being lifted.

Capacity limits on indoor areas, such as concert halls, museums, cinemas, theaters, bars, and restaurants, as well as an obligation to show proof of vaccination, have also largely come to an end.

Austria and Czech Republic

Various measures implemented in Austria will be gradually lifted this month.

As of Feb. 12, shoppers will no longer need to have been vaccinated or recovered from the disease to enter stores or personal care centers. Unvaccinated people will also be allowed to enter restaurants and cafes with a negative test result starting on Feb. 19.

The government, which stopped requiring face masks in primary schools on Feb. 14, plans to end mask-wearing mandates through the entire education system as of March.

The Czech Republic has decided to remove the majority of its measures as of March 1, except for mandatory mask wearing.

This will end participant restrictions number on big events, and, as of Thursday, proof of vaccination or recovery will no longer be needed for entry into indoor areas where cultural events are held, especially restaurants and cafes.

Switzerland

Switzerland is considering to expand its recent easing of pandemic-related rules after scrapping work-from-home requirement on Feb. 3.

The government is working on a proposal to end a home quarantine mandate for those who were in contact with COVID-19 patients. The country is also in the process of making a final decision to lift other bans on Feb. 16.

In this context, measures such as COVID certificates in restaurants and collective events, along with mask wearing on public transport and supermarkets, will be eased in one move or gradually, depending on the risk situation.

Belgium

Belgian authorities on Friday will weigh whether to lower its coronavirus barometer to "code orange" instead of "code red."

The government is expected to discuss measures, such as an whether to extend to the working hours of businesses such as restaurants and cafes, reopen nightclubs, allow crowded concerts, and change restrictions imposed on cinemas and theaters.

US, Canada

The state of New York has lifted mask-wearing requirements indoors on Thursday. However, face masks will still be mandatory in schools, hospitals, buses, and similar areas.

New Jersey, California, Connecticut, Delaware, and Oregon are among the other states that have decided to end compulsory indoor mask wearing for the vaccinated.

Massachusetts will abolish required mask-wearing in schools at the end of the month.

In other states, mask-related obligations are expected to be gradually lifted from March, with the states in question citing falling cases numbers.

In Canada, the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec, and Prince Edward Island will no longer require COVID passports for entry into indoor areas.

Middle East, Africa

The Israeli government has removed its "Green Pass" system, which was used to monitor and limit the spread of the coronavirus in the country, as of Feb. 7, except for "very high risk" situations such as weddings and party.

Removing all countries from its "red" travel list in January, the Israeli administration said a requirement for passengers to submit PCR tests before boarding and after landing will continue until March 7.

In an effort to stem a surge in virus cases, Tunisia took a series of protective restrictions on Jan. 12, including a night-time curfew and the postponement or cancellation of all public gatherings or demonstrations.

The Tunisian Ministry of Religious Affairs announced on Thursday that weekly Friday prayers will once again be performed in mosques as of this week.

Over the last six months, the Iraqi central government has stopped requiring mask wearing outdoors. In indoors areas, such as shopping malls, masks are still required only at the entrance amid a decrease in the number of cases compared to last year.

Asia and the Caucasus

While the quarantine period was halved to a single week in Azerbaijan, while the Georgian government ended the mandatory use of "green passports" -- used in the country as COVID documentation -- on Feb. 1 after they were introduced two months earlier.

In a bid to revive the country's economy in Kazakhstan, COVID-19 quarantine measures are gradually being relaxed. The government lifted restrictions on entering hotels, airports, railway stations and highway rest areas, post offices, banks, covered market places, beauty salons, and spas.

It also extended the working hours of cafes and restaurants.

Following the recent fall in daily case numbers, Uzbekistan resumed in-person education in schools as of Feb. 7./aa