ISLAMABAD (AFP) – Pakistan on Saturday summoned the U.S. ambassador for an explanation after President Joe Biden described the South Asian country as “one of the most dangerous nations in the world” and questioned its nuclear weapons safety protocols. Biden made the apparently off-the-cuff remark late Thursday while talking about United States foreign policy during a private Democratic Party fundraiser in California, but the White House later published a transcript of his comments, sparking outrage in Pakistan. Washington’s relations with Pakistan have soured since last year. Biden was speaking about his frequent interactions with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, when he said: “Did anybody think we’d be in a situation where China is trying to figure out its role relative to Russia and relative to India and relative to Pakistan? “This is a guy who understands what he wants but has an enormous, enormous array of problems. How do we handle that? How do we handle that relative to what’s going on in Russia? “And what I think is maybe one of the most dangerous nations in the world: Pakistan. Nuclear weapons without any cohesion.” Hours after the transcript of his address was posted, Pakistan summoned the U.S. ambassador Donald Blome to the foreign office in Islamabad.

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PARIS (Arab News) – A French government minister has pledged to confront an increase in clothing associated with Muslim cultures in French schools, which, he says, is counter to French values of secularism. Pap Ndiaye, the minister of education, described the phenomenon as a “wave” encouraged by online religious influencers. France banned religious symbols and clothing in schools in a bid to prevent Muslim girls from wearing veils 18 years ago. However, Ndiaye said influencers, especially on TikTok, were encouraging young girls to flout the ban by turning up to school wearing abayas, incidences of which increased by 40 percent in 2021. “We are going to do what is necessary to limit the harmful influence of these Islamist agitators. The Republic is stronger than TikTok,” Ndiaye said. France is home to a large immigrant community and around 6 million Muslims, many of whom resent the country’s attitude toward religious dress as a product of its foundational secularism. This week, clashes broke out between pupils and police at a school in a Paris suburb for the second time, after the head teacher banned abayas.

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PARIS (AFP) – French refinery and fuel depot workers at five sites owned by oil giant TotalEnergies vowed to continue striking on Saturday, compounding concern over petrol supply ahead of wider protests early next week. Four of France’s seven refineries and one fuel depot were out of action, after strikers rejected a pay offer from the hydrocarbon industry leader. Operations had resumed earlier in the week at two other refineries run by Esso-ExxonMobil, however, after workers struck a bargain with management. The blockages have caused queues outside petrol stations, and worry across all sectors of the economy, from mobile healthcare workers to farmers. President Emmanuel Macron’s government forced some strikers back to work this week to open fuel depots, a move that infuriated unions but has been upheld by courts.

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SYDNEY (Reuters) – Emergency warnings remained in place on Saturday for parts of Australia’s southeast as floods, sparked by days of heavy rain, impacted three states, with hundreds of people having to be rescued from floodwaters. Flood warnings were current for large parts of Victoria State, southern New South Wales and the northern regions of the island state of Tasmania, as an intense weather system earlier this week brought more than a month’s worth of rain to the southeast of the country. Large parts of Australia’s eastern states have been hit by severe flooding since early 2022, with the country now enduring a third consecutive La Nina weather event bringing heavy rains. While floodwaters receded in some areas on Saturday, in others such as the Victorian rural city of Shepparton, northeast of Melbourne, weather forecast suggested the worst was still to come. The nation’s weather forecaster, the Bureau of Meteorology, said major flooding was likely at Shepparton. Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Jonathan How said while heavy rain had cleared, flooding was still widespread.

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UNITED NATIONS (AP) – A record 4.7 million people in Haiti are facing acute hunger, including 19,000 in catastrophic famine conditions for the first time, all in a slum controlled by gangs in the capital, according to a report. The UN World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization said unrelenting crises have trapped Haitians “in a cycle of growing desperation, without access to food, fuel, markets, jobs and public services, bringing the country to a standstill.” The Cite Soleil district of the capital, Port-au-Prince, where violence has increased as armed gangs vie for control, is facing the most urgent need of humanitarian assistance, they said. The report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which is a global partnership of 15 UN agencies and international humanitarian groups, paints a grim picture of escalating hunger in Latin the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, The partnership uses five categories of food security, from Phase 1 in which people have enough to eat to Phase 5 in which households have an extreme lack of food and face famine, starvation, death and destitution. The 19,000 people in Cite Soleil are now in the latter group, the report said. According to the analysis, a record 4.7 million Haitians are in the three worst categories — 2.9 million in “crisis” Phase 3 characterized by gaps in food consumption and acute malnutrition, 1.8 million in “emergency” Phase 4 in which there are large gaps in food consumption, very high acute malnutrition and excess deaths, and 19,000 in “famine” Phase 5.

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WASHINGTON (AFP) – Astronomers have observed the brightest flash of light ever seen, from an event that occurred 2.4 billion light years from Earth and was likely triggered by the formation of a black hole. The burst of gamma-rays -- the most intense form of electromagnetic radiation -- was first detected by orbiting telescopes on October 9, and its afterglow is still being watched by scientists across the world. Astrophysicist Brendan O’Connor told AFP that gamma-ray bursts that last hundreds of seconds, as occurred on Sunday, are thought to be caused by dying massive stars, greater than 30 times bigger than our Sun. The star explodes in a supernova, collapses into a black hole, then matter forms in a disk around the black hole, falls inside, and is spewed out in a jet of energy that travels at 99.99 percent the speed of light.