ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has approached the United Nations (UN) Secretary General, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the European Union (EU) to seek immediate release of Kashmiri human rights activist and political leader Asiya Andrabi who remains incarcerated in Indian infamous Tihar Jalil.
At his weekly news briefing on Thursday, FO Spokesperson Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri said that the Indian authorities have put Andrabi on trial on trumped up charges, deliberately accelerated the tribal and set aside due process, reflecting malicious intent with clear indications of looming judicial murder.
The spokesperson said that India’s blatant attempts to portray the legitimate struggle of Kashmiris as terrorism and to prosecute its leaders through concocted cases is a clear violation of the UN Charter, UN Security Council and UN General Assembly resolutions and international human rights law.
Meanwhile, at the United Nations, Pakistan has urged to develop common strategies and plans to find just solutions for complex and protracted challenges, including the conflicts of Kashmir and Palestine.
According to a statement, a Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the world body, Mohammad Aamir Khan told the UN Security Council that foreign occupation, intervention and aggression have led to untold suffering for millions in the Muslim world. He said that peoples of Jammu and Kashmir and Palestine, continue to struggle for their inalienable right to self-determination and the end of foreign occupation.
Amir also asked the OIC to play an important role to apprise the international community of the legitimate concerns of the Muslim world, including the resurgence of Islamophobia.
ROME, Jan 7 (Reuters) – Italy plans to spend more than 222 billion euros ($272 billion) from various European Union funds to revive its coronavirus-battered economy, a draft government document seen by Reuters showed on Thursday.
Rome is entitled to more than 200 billion euros from a European emergency programme designed to help those EU nations hardest hit by the coronavirus.
The 222 billion euro scheme includes resources from the emergency fund and other European programmes, including an agricultural fund, the document showed.
The plan still needs to be approved by the cabinet which will likely meet before the end of this week, according to government sources.
Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte is facing internal opposition from former premier Matteo Renzi, whose centrist Italia Viva party polls at no more than around 3% but is crucial for the government’s survival.
Italia Viva has criticized Conte’s first proposals on how to spend the funds and has repeatedly threatened to withdraw its support if the government did not agree to put more money into critical sectors such as healthcare and infrastructure.
Renzi is also upset about the government’s reluctance to ask for a loan from the euro zone’s bailout fund (ESM), which he says could help provide more funds to the country’s coronavirus-hit hospitals.
Based on the new draft document, the government plans to increase its healthcare investments to 18 billion euros and allocate 4 billion euros to broadband and other high-tech communication infrastructures, including 5G networks.
The Treasury estimates in the draft that the investment programmes can boost GDP growth by 3 percentage points by 2026.
Before Italy was hit by a second wave of the pandemic, the government estimated in September that GDP would rebound 6% in 2021, following a contraction of 9% in 2020.
$1 = 0.8150 euros Reporting by Giuseppe Fonte; Editing by Angelo Amante and Alexandra Hudson
Leave.EU has left the UK, as Brexit forced the Eurosceptic campaign group to choose between its name and its country.
According to domain name registration records, the organisation, founded by businessman and activist Arron Banks, picked the former. The website is now registered in the name of Sean Power, the chief executive of the Ireland-based professional services company BSG.
When asked, however, Power, who is based in Waterford, insisted that he had no involvement with the organisation. When informed that his name and contact details were present on the registration, he said he would be “looking into the matter”.
Leave.EU has had some time to consider its move. The organisation is named after its web address, but .EU domain names can only be held by businesses or individuals based in the EU or wider European Economic Area.
As the Brexit transition period drew to an end in 2019, the British owners of .EU domain names – of which there were estimated to be about 340,000 – started to express alarm that no deal had been made, meaning that they would have to give up their websites when Britain left the EU.
Initially, Leave.EU suggested it was fine with that outcome. “If we leave with no deal our job is done,” Leave.EU’s communications chief, Andy Wigmore, told the Guardian in 2019. “No need for Leave.EU any more. Cheers all round, I’m sure!”
But in July that year, the EU threw a lifeline to organisations, confirming that UK-based owners of .EU domains could continue to operate – provided the actual registration was transferred to an EU citizen.
For companies which did not take that step, it is not too late to follow Leave.EU’s lead. According to UK government advice: “On 1 January 2021, any UK registrant who cannot meet the eligibility criteria will have their .eu domain names withdrawn. A withdrawn domain name no longer functions … and can no longer support any active services (such as websites or email).
“Withdrawn domain names will not be available to any other entity for a further 12 months. On 1 January 2022, all the withdrawn domain names will be revoked and made available for registration by other entities.”
But a grace period, lasting until 31 March this year, allows registrants to transfer suspended domain names to an EU-based owner, or any person with EU citizenship.
LONDON, Jan 7 (Reuters) – More than 50 British retailers, including Tesco and Marks & Spencer, face potential tariffs for re-exporting goods to the European Union, their trade body said on Thursday, amid warnings this could make Britain less competitive.
Britain clinched a Brexit trade deal with the EU on Dec. 24 that was billed as preserving its zero-tariff and zero-quota access to the bloc’s single market of 450 million consumers.
But it has since emerged that goods or commodities that are sourced from outside, and even inside, of the trading bloc that are brought into the UK, and then re-exported to the EU attract a tariff under so called rules of origin.
“We appreciate that the rules of origin in the Trade and Co-operation Agreement were designed to be facilitative on trade in goods, but we need a solution which genuinely reflects the needs of UK-EU supply and distribution chains for goods,” said William Bain of the British Retail Consortium (BRC).
The BRC, which represents more than 170 major retailers including the big supermarkets, is working with members on short-term options and is seeking dialogue with the government and the EU on longer-term solutions to mitigate the effects of the new tariffs.
“Tariff free does not feel like tariff free when you read the fine print (of the deal),” said Marks & Spencer (M&S) CEO Steve Rowe.
“For big businesses there will be time consuming workarounds but for a lot of others this means paying tariffs or rebasing into the EU.”
The issues are complex.
There are varying limits on the percentage of a product that can come from outside the EU but still qualify as a non-tariff product under the free trade agreement.
For example, in dairy it is 20% by weight, for white chocolate it is 40% by weight.
There are also rules around “transformation”, covering what is required to turn something that contains say three products from countries outside the FTA into one UK product. For example, stoning dates from Israel is not permissible, but smoking or pickling products is.
“This makes unravelling the genome sequence look simple,” said M&S chairman Archie Norman, who fears the issue will damage overall UK competitiveness.
Tesco, Britain’s biggest retailer, said it was in talks with the UK and Irish governments about the issue and was working to find a satisfactory resolution as quickly as possible. (Reporting by James Davey. Editing by Jane Merriman)
BRUSSELS. KAZINFORM – The EU welcomed the abolishment of the death penalty in Kazakhstan in a statement released on January 7, Kazinform has learnt from the official website of the European Union.
«On 2 January 2021, Kazakhstan announced its ratification of the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, becoming the 88th party. This Protocol aims at making irreversible the abolition of the death penalty, already enshrined in Constitution of Kazakhstan in 2007.
The death penalty is an inhuman and cruel punishment, which fails to deter criminal behaviour.
The EU welcomes this important step by Kazakhstan, which is in line with the world trend to abandon the most inhuman punishment,» the statement reads.
<p id="1duct0">Snowbirds are missing all the fun! While cold weather refugees in Arizona and Florida pick sand out from between their toes, Minnesotans are playing in powder, enjoying 20s and 30s and light winds, with nary a storm in sight.</p>
<p id="7Itwjc">As a rule our coldest days tend to be sunny, and having blue sky overhead is a coping skill for many of us. Character-building attributes may be put to the test in 2 weeks, when the first blistering shot of arctic air reaches Minnesota. The last 7-10 days of January may be Nanook, with a streak of subzero nights, even a daytime highs below zero as well with dangerous wind chills. It's too early for details but battery-draining air may envelope Minnesota and much of the USA by the last week of January.</p>
<p id="y3E1vz">Today's short-term forecast challenge is clouds and fog. Unusually light winds (for January) favor ice fog every night. A weak sun may be unable to burn away clouds into the weekend.</p>
<p id="ueMUOt">Mild weather lingers into next week - then the bubble bursts, as we welcome a shot of polar air.</p>
<p id="MdE6Br"><strong>Forecast Wildcard: Fog</strong>. With winds about as light as I can recall in early January any fog and low stratus clouds that form overnight may be impossible to burn away later this week, keeping daytime temperatures cooler than they would be otherwise, with a strong inversion trapping chillier air near the ground. Even with the inversion I expect temperatures a few degrees above average.</p>
<p id="nFlnVj"><strong>Numbing End to January?</strong> Models (especially NOAA's GFS guidance) are consistent in bringing much colder air into Minnesota and much of the eastern USA within 2 weeks or so. GFS may be overdoing the cold (high of -29F on January 22?) but the trends are undeniable; subzero weather is coming.</p>
<p id="xG5koD"><strong>Cold Enough</strong>. Record-breaking cold? Too early to tell, but there's now little doubt that we will be shivering through roughly the last 8-10 days of January. How long this cold phase hangs on into February is very much up in the air.</p>
<p id="DlBRrH"><strong>The Polar Vortex is Splitting in Two, Which May Lead to Weeks of Wild Winter Weather. </strong>Especially on the East Coast and New England, I might add. Capital Weather Gang has a good explainer: "<em>A dramatic spike in temperatures is occurring at high altitudes above the North Pole, where the air is thin and typically frigid. Known as a sudden stratospheric warming event, experts say it's likely to have potentially significant repercussions for winter weather across the Northern Hemisphere for weeks to possibly months. This unusually strong event may have profound influences on the weather in the United States and Europe, possibly increasing the potential for paralyzing snowstorms and punishing blasts of Arctic air, with the odds of the most severe cold outbreaks highest in Northern Europe.</em>.."</p>
<p id="227FEw"><strong>New in 2021: Atlantic Hurricane Outlook and Potential Impact</strong>. <a href="https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2021/01/05/new-in-2021-atlantic-hurricane-outlook-and-potential-impact/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Air%20Force%20DNR%201.5.20&utm_term=Editorial%20-%20Air%20Force%20-%20Daily%20News%20Roundup" rel="nofollow">Military Times</a> has a post with an interesting analysis: "...<em>Klotzbach's team will release a more detailed forecast in April that includes a projected number of storms, but their initial look says the Guard may stay busy in 2021. "One of the big reasons why we think the odds favor an above average season at this point is that we currently have a moderate La Niña event [in the eastern Pacific]," explained Klotzbach in a phone interview. La Niña means cooler Pacific water temperatures, which in turn reduces upper-level winds that "basically tear apart" Atlantic storms. But even if a season has more storms and stronger storms, he said, "We can't say where the storms are going to go…it's all about location, location, location</em>..."</p>
<p id="b1zdlE"><strong>Amazing Earth: Satellite Images from 2020.</strong> <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/amazing-earth-satellite-images-from-2020/" rel="nofollow">NASA</a> has a link to some pretty incredible imagery; here's an excerpt of their post: "<em>In the vastness of the universe, the life-bringing beauty of our home planet shines bright. During this tumultuous year, our satellites captured some pockets of peace, while documenting data and striking visuals of unprecedented natural disasters. As 2020 comes to a close, we're diving into some of the devastation, wonders, and anomalies this year had to offer. NASA's fleet of Earth-observing satellites and instruments on the </em><a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html" rel="nofollow"><em>International Space Station</em></a><em> unravel the complexities of the blue marble from a cosmic vantage point. These robotic scientists orbit our globe constantly, monitoring and notating changes, providing crucial information to researchers here on the ground. Take a glance at 2020 through the lens of NASA satellites</em>..."</p>
<p id="1A7pBp"><strong>Electric Cars Hit Record 54% of Sales in Norway as VW Overtakes Tesla</strong>. <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/05/business/norway-electric-cars-vw-tesla/index.html?utm_term=16099321384190bbbeab5f301&utm_source=cnn_Five+Things+for+Wednesday%2C+January+6%2C+2021&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1609932138420&bt_ee=e5qK5QmL93fkSfgEs9Oy6639xc1Kk%2BiioeYKlBGrh2MfbK%2FjssJEFNXKId6iCLXY&bt_ts=1609932138420" rel="nofollow"><em>CNN.com</em></a><em> has the story: "</em><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/31/tech/apple-car-patents/index.html" rel="nofollow"><em>Battery electric vehicles</em></a><em> accounted for more than half of all cars sold in Norway last year, putting the country way out in front in efforts to kill off the internal combustion engine. And Tesla (</em><a href="https://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=TSLA&source=story_quote_link" rel="nofollow"><em>TSLA</em></a><em>) lost its sales crown to the </em><a href="https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/08/business/electric-cars-audi-volkswagen-tesla/" rel="nofollow"><em>Volkswagen Group</em></a><em>. Norway is using huge tax incentives to help ensure that every new passenger car and van sold in the country by the end of 2025 is a zero-emission vehicle. Record electric vehicle sales in 2020 means the country is now ahead of schedule, according to Oyvind Solberg Thorsen, CEO of the Norwegian Road Federation (OFV)</em>..."</p>
<p id="EvjubS"><strong>A Monster Wind Turbine is Upending an Industry</strong>. A renewable energy arms race? A story at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/business/GE-wind-turbine.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage" rel="nofollow">The New York Times</a> (paywall) caught my eye: "<em>Twirling above a strip of land at the mouth of Rotterdam's harbor is a wind turbine so large it is difficult to photograph. The turning diameter of its rotor is longer than two American football fields end to end. Later models will be taller than any building on the mainland of Western Europe. Packed with sensors gathering data on wind speeds, electricity output and stresses on its components, the giant whirling machine in the Netherlands is a test model for a new series of giant offshore wind turbines planned by General Electric. When assembled in arrays, the wind machines have the potential to power cities, supplanting the emissions-spewing coal- or natural gas-fired plants that form the backbones of many electric systems today.</em>.."</p>
<p id="z80CV3"><strong>Japanese Researchers Hope to Launch Satellite Made of Wood</strong>. At first I thought this was an Onion headline, and then I realized that it's real. <a href="https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/wood-satellites?rebelltitem=3#rebelltitem3" rel="nofollow">Big Think</a> explains the rationale: "<em>NASA is currently tracking over </em><a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debris.html" rel="nofollow"><em>500,000 pieces</em></a><em> of satellite debris circling the Earth. These bits of mostly aluminum junk whip around the planet as fast as 17,500 mph and constitute a floating minefield that active and manned space vehicles have to find their way through without being struck, or worse, punctured. And those are just the bits large enough to be tracked—those bigger than a marble. There are many more too small to keep an eye on. And the situation is getting worse, with projects such as SpaceX's estimated </em><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-starlink-internet-satellites-percent-failure-rate-space-debris-risk-2020-10" rel="nofollow"><em>42,000 satellites</em></a><em> or Amazon's </em><a href="https://www.space.com/amazon-kuiper-satellite-constellation-fcc-approval.html" rel="nofollow"><em>Kuiper project</em></a><em>. The wood satellites being developed won't do much to solve that problem. However, they will help out with another one: what happens to space debris when its orbit decays and it falls back to Earth? We've been lucky so far</em>..."</p>
<p id="k5EmXf"><strong>20 Things That Went Strangely, Wonderfully Right in 2020</strong>. <a href="https://FORTUNE.com" rel="nofollow">FORTUNE.com</a> has an interesting list of things to be thankful for last year; here's a clip: "...<em><strong>13. It happened: the octogenarian sex symbol.</strong> In the plague year, there seemed to be nothing that slowed Dr. Anthony Fauci down—not the pressure of being the public face in the war on COVID-19, not being caught in the political crossfire, and apparently not turning 80, which the good doctor did on Christmas Eve. </em><a href="https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/report/kff-health-tracking-poll-september-2020/" rel="nofollow"><em>A September poll</em></a><em> by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 68% of Americans have "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of faith in Dr. Fauci to provide reliable information about the coronavirus—making him a rare entity in the pandemic era: somebody trusted by the vast majority of the country. But it was "</em><a href="https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/dr-fauci-dr-birx-cold-open/4280665" rel="nofollow"><em>Saturday Night Live</em></a><em>" that captured the fullness of Fauciphilia in its Dec. 12 "cold open.</em>.."</p>
<p id="ViGapx"><strong>When You Live in Svalbard, Norway and Forget to Close the Window to the Home Office</strong>. Image courtesy of <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Wellthatsucks/comments/kqybz1/when_you_live_in_svalbard_norway_and_forgot_to/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf" rel="nofollow">Wellthatsucks and Reddit</a>. Wow.</p>
<p id="NRIEC7">THURSDAY: Cloudy and chilly. Winds: SE 3-8. High: 25</p>
<p id="WmhJj6">FRIDAY: Damp with clouds and fog. Winds: NW 3-8. Wake-up: 18. High: 23</p>
<p id="5d2P3b"><strong>SATURDAY</strong>: Mostly cloudy, still quiet. Winds: NW 5-10. Wake-up: 16. High: 24</p>
<p id="QqJzoO"><strong>SUNDAY</strong>: More clouds than sun. Winds: NW 5-10. Wake-up: 17. High: 27</p>
<p id="gRc0my">MONDAY: More sunshine, a bit milder. Winds: SW 8-13. Wake-up: 20. High: near 30</p>
<p id="0umNuj">TUESDAY: Mix of clouds and sunshine. Winds: SW 8-13. Wake-up: 21. High: 32</p>
<p id="gh4Cka">WEDNESDAY: Intervals of sun, PM thaw. Winds: W 8-13. Wake-up: 20. High: 34</p>
<p id="qOQz6z"><strong>Climate Stories...</strong></p>
<p id="p4bqlq"><strong>Researchers Say Food Prices Don't Reflect Environmental Costs. </strong><a href="https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/food-price-greenhouse-gas?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1" rel="nofollow">Big Think</a> has the story; here's an excerpt: "<em>Using life-cycle assessment (LCA) tools, the researchers determined when emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane occurred in the food production process. The effects of land use, including deforestation, related to food production were also incorporated. The results were striking. Meat and dairy products are incredibly undervalued according to this measure. Pricing in the climate damage caused by their production would raise their prices by 146 percent and 91 percent, respectively. The prices of organic plant products would also rise, but by a mere 6 percent. Organic foods, in general, saw lower price increases than conventionally produced food products</em>..."</p>
<p id="Xqfgcd"><strong>Venus Was Once More Earth-like, but Climate Change Made it Uninhabitable. </strong>A post at <a href="https://astronomy.com/news/2021/01/venus-was-once-more-earth-like-but-climate-change-made-it-uninhabitable" rel="nofollow">astronomy.com</a> explains: "<em>Venus is a very strange place, totally uninhabitable, except perhaps in the clouds some 60 kilometres up where</em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-020-1174-4" rel="nofollow"><em>the recent discovery of phosphine may suggest floating microbial life</em></a><em>. But the surface is totally inhospitable. However, Venus once likely had an Earth-like climate. According to recent climate modelling, for much of its history</em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/2016GL069790" rel="nofollow"><em>Venus had surface temperatures similar to present day Earth</em></a><em>. It likely also had oceans, rain, perhaps snow, maybe continents and plate tectonics, and even more speculatively, perhaps even surface life. Less than one billion years ago, the climate dramatically changed due to a runaway greenhouse effect. It can be speculated that an intensive period of volcanism pumped enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to cause this great climate change event that</em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JE006276" rel="nofollow"><em>evaporated the oceans and caused the end of the water cycle</em></a><em>.</em>.."</p>
<p id="CUXZHN"><strong>2020 Was a Year of Climate Extremes. What Can We Expect in 2021?</strong> My (very strong) hunch is that 2020 will go down in the books as the warmest year on record, warmer than 2016. We shall see. Here's an excerpt from <a href="https://TIME.com" rel="nofollow">TIME.com</a>: "...<em>A record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season landed a double blow of two </em><a href="https://time.com/5913006/hurricane-iota-climate-aid/" rel="nofollow"><em>hugely destructive storms in Central America</em></a><em>. Long-running droughts have destroyed agricultural output and helped to push millions into hunger in </em><a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-zimbabwe-water-climatechange-farming/hit-by-worsening-drought-zimbabwe-taps-funding-for-water-wise-farming-idUSKCN25D0MR" rel="nofollow"><em>Zimbabwe </em></a><em>and </em><a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/11/1078662#:~:text=27%20November%202020,(WFP)%20reported%20on%20Friday." rel="nofollow"><em>Madagascar</em></a><em>. A super-cyclone unleashed massive floods on </em><a href="https://time.com/5846539/india-locust-pandemic/" rel="nofollow"><em>India</em></a><em> and Bangladesh. And overall, 2020 may end up </em><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/2020-likely-end-hottest-year-record-rcna199" rel="nofollow"><em>the hottest year on record</em></a><em>—despite a La Niña event, the ocean-atmospheric phenomenon which normally temporarily </em><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/interactive-much-el-nino-affect-global-temperature" rel="nofollow"><em>cools things</em></a><em> down. Though it's historically been difficult to say if single weather events were directly caused by </em><a href="https://time.com/5920387/paris-agreement-laurence-tubiana/" rel="nofollow"><em>climate change</em></a><em>, scientists have proven that many of the events that took place in 2020 would have been far less likely, or even impossible, without changes to the climate that are being driven by the warming of the Earth</em>..."</p>
<p id="eNH6VZ"><strong>Study: Warming Already Baked-in Will Blow Past Climate Goals.</strong> <a href="https://apnews.com/article/climate-climate-change-pollution-3f226aed9c58e36c69e7342b104d48bf?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=AP%20Morning%20Wire&utm_term=Morning%20Wire%20Subscribers" rel="nofollow">Associated Press</a> reports: "<em>The amount of baked-in global warming, from carbon pollution already in the air, is enough to blow past international agreed upon goals to limit climate change, a new study finds. But it's not game over because, while that amount of warming may be inevitable, it can be delayed for centuries if the world quickly stops emitting extra greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, the study's authors say. For decades, scientists have talked about so-called "committed warming" or the increase in future temperature based on past carbon dioxide emissions that stay in the atmosphere for well over a century. It's like the distance a speeding car travels after the brakes are applied</em>..."</p>
<p id="2wee8f"><strong>Biden Plan Looks for Buy-in From Farmers Who Are Often Skeptical About Global Warming. </strong><a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04012021/biden-climate-plan-agriculture-farmers-tom-vilsack/" rel="nofollow">InsideClimate News</a> has the post; here's the intro: "<em>When the incoming Biden administration released its policy roadmap in November, it was clear that tackling climate change would be a top priority and agriculture will be a key part of a broad, cross-agency effort.The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the administration said, "has not historically received the sustained political attention of other agencies that play a role in climate policy." But it would become "a linchpin of the next Administration's climate strategy." The incoming administration's clear focus on climate change was remarkable. That it would enlist the country's farms and farmers—who are largely skeptical of climate change—in the battle was even more so.</em>.."</p>
BRUSSELS — For European Union nations, Joe Biden’s Jan. … of Portugal, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency, said Thursday … Washington though would please the EU no end — rejoining the Paris … .”
To smooth the way, the EU has already invited President-elect …
According to the Syrian state news agency, SANA, the attack was carried out from over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. It targeted several military sites in south of Damascus.
This is the third such attack in a fortnight.
Listen to Nathan Morley’s report
The SANA report added that Syrian air defences intercepted most of the incoming missiles.
Residents say the sound of anti-air weapons could be heard over Damascus for over an hour, with television pictures showing a multi-storey building ablaze.
There was no comment from Israel.
UN officials condemn car bombings
In a separate development, the killing of civilians in separate car bomb attacks in northern Syria over the weekend has been condemned by top UN humanitarian officials for the country.
“This year, civilians in Syria will have endured ten years of crisis. These two attacks so early in the new year serve as a tragic reminder of the price civilians across the country continue to pay,” a UN spokesman said.
