British singer Zayn Malik’s surprised fans with a song in his new album Nobody Is Listening which touches back to his Pakistani roots. The Dusk Till Dawn hit maker, who broke away from boyband One Direction five years ago, featured a song in his album called Tightrope. He paid homage to his desi roots as it included qawwali-inspired tunes as well as some Urdu lyrics …

LONDON: A member of parliament from the Labour party this week made a moving speech in Westminster Hall, where parliament witnessed a discussion on the situation in occupied Kashmir. “I’m sure that at some stage we have caught ourselves moaning about lockdown, but for the people of Kashmir, it’s not something new. And unlike Kashmir, lockdown is not about safety, …

GENEVA: Global health experts gather on Thursday to tackle new strains of the coronavirus blamed for a fresh surge in infections after China recorded its first Covid-19 death in eight months. The World Health Organisation (WHO) emergency committee session comes with their colleagues seeking the origins of the virus on a long-delayed mission to the pandemic ground zero in Wuhan. …

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan on Thursday proposed greater cooperation with Azerbai­jan in trade and energy sectors. He was talking to Azerbai­jan’s Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov, who called on him. Mr Bayramov was on a two-day visit to Pakistan during which he also attended a trilateral meeting with his Pakistani and Turkish counterparts. “The prime minister exp­r­essed satisfaction at the …

WASHINGTON: Search and advertising giant Google has closed its deal to buy fitness tracking company Fitbit, the companies said on Thursday, even as the US Justice Department said it was continuing its probe of the $2.1 billion transaction. The Justice Department, which sued Alphabet’s Google in October for allegedly violating antitrust law in its search and search advertising businesses, said …

BERLIN: Germany has too many loopholes in its coronavirus lockdown rules, the head of the country’s disease control agency said as figures published on Thursday showed the highest number of daily deaths since the start of the pandemic. The Robert Koch Institute said 1,244 deaths from Covid were confirmed in one day up to Thursday, taking the total number to …

ASHKABAD: Afghanistan and Turkmenistan inaugurated new transport, power and communications links on Thursday as President Ashraf Ghani and Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov participated via teleconference in opening ceremonies for a new branch of the railway connecting the two countries, a new power transmission line and a fibre optic line. A 500 kilovolt, 153-kilometre power transmission line connecting Kerki, Turkmenistan, to Sheberghan, Afghanistan, …

COX’S BAZAR: Fire tore through a Rohingya refugee camp on Thursday, destroying more than 550 shanty homes, but while 3,500 people were left homeless there were no serious casualties. The blaze started when most people in the sprawling Nayapara camp were asleep. Tens of thousands of members of the Muslim minority who fled a military crackdown in neighbouring Myanmar in …

A pigeon that Australia declared a biosecurity risk may get a reprieve after a US bird organisation declared its identifying leg band was fake. The band suggested the bird found in a Melbourne backyard on Dec 26 was a racing pigeon that had left the US state of Oregon, 13,000 kilometres away, two months earlier. On that basis, Australian authorities on Thursday …

ISLAMABAD: The country recorded the highest number of Covid-19 cases in a single day on Thursday in January as 3,097 new cases and 46 deaths were reported. The positivity ratio, which remained at around 5 per cent for the last few weeks, also saw a jump and went up to 7.45 per cent. Earlier, 3,179 cases were reported on Dec …