PARIS: Images from Mars reveal how water helped shape the Red Planet’s landscape billions of years ago, and provide clues that will guide the search for evidence of ancient life, a study said on Thursday. In February, Nasa’s Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater, where scientists suspected a long-gone river once fed a lake, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta …

STOCKHOLM: Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah on Thursday won the Nobel Literature Prize for his writings on post-colonialism and the trauma of the refugee experience. Gurnah, who grew up on the island of Zanzibar but arrived in England as a refugee at the end of the 1960s, is the fifth African to win the Nobel Literature Prize. The Swedish Academy said …

LONDON: English Premier League club Newcastle United was sold to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund on Thursday after a protracted takeover and legal fight involving concerns about piracy and rights abuses in the kingdom. The 300-million-pound ($409 million) takeover by the Saudi Public Investment Fund initially collapsed last year over concerns about how much control the kingdoms leadership would have …

MILAN: Ferran Torres put Spain into the Nations League final with a brace in a 2-1 win that ended European champions Italy’s world record unbeaten run at 37 matches in front of their own fans at the San Siro stadium. Italy, trailing by two goals at the break, had to play the entire second half with 10 men after captain …

ISLAMABAD: Three weeks after calling off their tour of Pakistan due to security concerns, New Zealand are willing to reschedule the series and Pakistan Cricket Board chairman Ramiz Raja said on Thursday that there will be more information regarding that in a weeks’ time. Ramiz was briefing the Senate Standing Committee on Inter-Provincial Coordination, which met here with Senator Mian …

LONDON: England all-rounder Ben Stokes could miss the Ashes series in Australia after undergoing another operation on his injured finger, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) announced on Thursday. The 30-year-old has not played since July, when it was announced he was taking a break to focus on his mental wellbeing and to rest his left index finger. “Ben …

LAHORE: Southern Punjab really mean business in the second leg of the Nation T20 Cup in Lahore where they are back in the semi-final race. Barely 18 hours after chalking up their first win in the competition luck has at last started to side with them as they sealed the Punjab derby against the superior Central side on Thursday. While …

A blast tore through a mosque in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Kunduz on Friday, a Taliban official said, causing multiple deaths. “This afternoon, an explosion took place in a mosque of our Shia compatriots … as a result of which a number of our compatriots were martyred and wounded,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said on Twitter, adding that a special …

KARACHI: The Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) welcomed the diminishing trend in global energy prices on Thursday as its benchmark index closed at 44,586 points, up 212.81 points or 0.48 per cent, from a day ago. According to Topline Securities, the stock market opened on a positive note as Russia announced its willingness to stabilise the global energy market by exporting …

BOSTON: Russia accounted for most state-sponsored hacking detected by Microsoft over the past year, with a 58pc share, mostly targeting government agencies and think tanks in the United States, followed by Ukraine, Britain and European Nato members, the company said. The devastating effectiveness of the long-undetected SolarWinds hack it mainly breached information technology businesses including Microsoft also boosted Russian state-backed …