Infinity Social Updates

Youssef Shtayyeh came home from school on an April afternoon, dropped his bag in the hallway and headed straight back out to join his friends. Minutes later, he was dead — shot by an Israeli soldier, just 100 metres from his home. He was 15. His is not an isolated case. Since Israel launched a major military operation against armed Palestinian groups in the northern West Bank in January 2025, one Palestinian minor has been killed every week on average across the territory, up from one every three weeks in 2021, according to Unicef. Seventy teenagers, mostly aged 15 to 16, have been killed to date, 65 of them by Israeli forces, according to a Unicef report dated May 12. Then came Youssef Kaabnah, 16, killed on May 13. Then Fahd Oweis, 15, two days later. The Israeli military said both had “hurled stones” at soldiers. It is almost certainly what Shtayyeh had been doing too, on April 23, in Nablus — the largest city in the northern West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied by I...

ISLAMABAD: An Islamabad sessions court sentenced Umar Hayat, the main accused in the Sana Yousaf murder case, to death on Monday. Hayat was arrested by the Islamabad Police a day after 17-year-old TikTok influencer Yousaf was shot dead in her house on June 2, 2025. The 23-year-old culprit was arrested from Faisalabad, with Islamabad Inspector General (IG) Syed Ali Nasir Rizvi terming it a case of “repeated rejections”. Judge Afzal Majoka announced the verdict in the case today, handing Hayat a death sentence, in addition to 10 years of imprisonment and Rs2 million fine. On Monday, Hayat — son of a retired government official and a TikToker himself — retracted his earlier confessional statement admitting to Yousaf’s murder. In his statement made under Section 342 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), Hayat maintained he was falsely implicated in the case. He repeatedly declined to answer questions in the absence of his lawyer, later recording his detailed statement with his cou...

Thailand is drastically cutting the length of visa-free stays for tourists from more than 90 countries in an effort to curb crime involving foreign nationals, officials said on Tuesday. Tourism is vital to the Southeast Asian nation’s economy, but foreign arrivals are yet to return to their pre-Covid highs. A recent series of high-profile arrests of foreigners has included cases linked to drug offences, sex trafficking and foreigners operating businesses such as hotels and schools without proper permits. Under Thailand’s current tourism scheme, travellers from more than 90 countries — including Europe’s 29-nation Schengen area, the United States, Israel and several South American countries — are eligible to visit for up to 60 days without a visa. Thailand’s cabinet approved reducing visa-free stays for travellers from those countries on Tuesday, Tourism Minister Surasak Phancharoenworakul told reporters in Bangkok. The new visa-free duration would be decided on a country-by-countr...

ISLAMABAD: Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) emir Hafiz Naeemur Rehman on Monday approached the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) against the petroleum levy, arguing that the government had effectively granted itself unrestricted power to tax citizens through executive notifications without parliamentary oversight. The government had announced a petroleum and carbon levy on June 14, 2025, under an iron-clad commitment with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Last month, the government had cut the levy by Rs80 amid the global oil crisis triggered by the Middle East crisis. However, following the IMF’s condition of restoring an average Rs80 per litre petroleum levy on petrol and high-speed diesel last week, the government passed on a slight reduction in global oil prices to domestic consumers. The petroleum levy on petrol currently stands at Rs117.41 per litre, while the levy on HSD is Rs42.60 per litre. In a petition moved through senior counsel Imran Shafeeq, Rehman sought a declaration from...

India is scrambling to salvage a sinking rupee as surging oil prices linked to the Middle East conflict threaten to disrupt the world’s fastest-growing major economy. The currency has dropped more than 5 per cent since the crisis erupted in February, extending losses from 2025 and making it Asia’s worst-performing major currency in 2026 so far. It hit a record low of over 96 to the dollar on Friday, prompting officials to signal that halting further depreciation is a key macroeconomic priority. India’s central bank has already poured billions of dollars to stabilise the currency, curbed speculative trading and offered a special credit line to oil importers to ease dollar demand. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also urged voluntary austerity measures to rein in dollar-guzzling imports, including cutting down on gold buying and foreign travel for a year. But the pressure persists. “The whole system has been disturbed,” said Dilip Parmar of stockbroker HDFC Securities, citin...

Hamas’s armed wing chief Ezzedine Al-Haddad was killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza the previous day, the Israeli military and Hamas confirmed on Saturday. The Israeli military and intelligence services have waged an extensive campaign targeting the group’s senior political leaders and commanders in Gaza and across the region. On Friday, the Israeli military said it had carried out an airstrike in Gaza targeting Haddad and confirmed his death on Saturday. “The IDF and the ISA announce that yesterday, in a precise strike in the area of the City of Gaza, Ezzedine Al-Haddad was eliminated,” the military said, referring to itself and the Shin Bet domestic security agency. Two Hamas officials also told AFP that Haddad had been killed in an Israeli strike. “Senior commander… Ezzedine Al-Haddad was assassinated in an Israeli strike targeting a residential apartment and a civilian vehicle in Gaza yesterday,” one senior Hamas official said. ...

Soaring diesel prices since the onset of the Iran war are draining already tight US school district budgets, making it more expensive to bus students and run generators in a shock officials say they will not be able to afford for long. School districts from Yakima, Washington to Waco, Texas are tapping emergency funding reserves to keep buses running. In remote Alaska, officials are scrambling to secure enough fuel to keep the lights on, according to Reuters interviews. “It’s more than a straw on the camel’s back, it’s like a haystack,” said Yakima Superintendent Trevor Greene. The stress reflects one of many knock-on impacts of the US-Israeli war on Iran, which has disrupted the flow of around a fifth of the world’s oil supplies. Since the war started in late February, fuel prices have posted one of their most rapid climbs on record. The spike has upended economies around the globe. It has caused enough pain in the US to be a political liability for President Donald Trump ahead...