AT LEAST six Pakistani banks have been named in an investigation on the role global banks play in money laundering, which make up to at least $2.5 million. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and Buzzfeed News carried out an investigation and found that at least 29 suspicious transactions worth about $2.5 million related to Pakistani banks, that may have been used for money laundering...

ICE in the Arctic Ocean melted to its second lowest level on record this summer, triggered by global warming along with natural forces, US scientists reported on Monday. The extent of ice-covered ocean at the North Pole and extending further south to Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Russia reached its summertime low of 1.4 m..

PRIME Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday voiced strong commitment to further strengthen the ‘special and privileged strategic partnership’ between India and Russia, during a telephonic conversation. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said Modi thanked Putin for his personal commitment to strengthening bilateral ties, and said he looked forward to welcoming him in India for the next India-Russia summit at a mutually convenient date. ..

UNITED States President Donald Trump on Friday brokered another peace deal in the Middle East with Bahrain announcing that it would normalise diplomatic ties with Israel. The announcement by Trump after he hosted a historic call between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain came a month after he had mediated between the United Arab Emirates and Israel to do the same. Leaders of the UAE and Israel are scheduled to sign an agreement in this regard at ..

AT THIS very moment a vast world exists that’s free of the coronavirus, where people can mingle without masks and watch the pandemic unfold from thousands of miles away. That world is Antarctica, the only continent without COVID-19. Now, as nearly 1,000 scientists and others who wintered over on the ice are seeing the Sun for the first time in weeks or months, a global effort wants to make sure incoming colleagues don’t bring the virus with them. From the UK’s Rothera Research Station off the Antarctic ..

FIVE youths from Arunachal Pradesh, who went missing on September 2 and were later found to be in Chinese territory, were handed over to India by the People’s Liberation Army on Saturday amid the ongoing stand-off between the two sides at the Line of Actual Control in Eastern Ladakh area. ..

A REPUBLICAN campaign video that includes visuals from the two historic rallies of President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the last one year -- “Howdy, Modi!” and “Namaste Trump” -- is making waves in the US ahead of the November 3 Presidential election, particularly among Indian-Americans whose votes may be the deciding factor in some of the battleground states. Titled “4 More Years”, the 107-second video ..

TO BOOST mutual confidence and cooperation, a bilateral maritime exercise between the Indian Navy and the Russian Navy got underway in the Bay of Bengal on Friday. The exercise is taking place amid dispute over border issues between the two countries. “The exercise is aimed at enhancing interoperability, improving understanding and imbibing best practices between the two navies,” Indian Navy spokesperson Commander Vivek Madhwal told IANS. He also said the exercise will help further boost mutual confidence ..

ONE of the most powerful storms to ever hit the US, hurricane Laura has made landfall in Louisiana, bringing catastrophic storm surge, extreme winds and flash flooding that killed at least six people and left a trail of destruction across the State. ..

THE decades-old dream of zipping around in the sky as simply as driving on highways may be becoming less illusory. Japan’s SkyDrive Inc., among the myriads of “flying car” projects around the world, has carried out a successful though modest test flight with one person aboard...

AMAZON Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has become the first person ever whose net worth soared over $200 billion, according to Forbes and Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The net worth of the world’s richest person went up by $4.9 billion after Amazon stock edged up two per cent as of Wednesday afternoon, Forbes reported. Bezos also owns aerospace company Blue Origin, the Washington Post and other private investments...

CHINA has launched first of the four advanced naval warships it is building for Pakistan, amid deepening economic and defence ties between the two all-weather allies. The launching ceremony for the first warship was held at the Hudong Zhonghua Shipyard in Shanghai on Sunday. Pakistan-China defence ties turn a new chapter with the launch of the first ship of Type-054 class frigate, Pakistan’s state-run APP news agency reported...

TEDROS Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), said that the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic could be over within two years. Addressing a virtual press briefing from Geneva on Friday, the WHO chief said that the Spanish flu of 1918 had also taken two years to overcome, but current advances in technology could enable the world to halt the COVID-19 pandemic “in a shorter time”, the BBC reported...

THE mutant form of the novel coronavirus reported from Malaysia as being “10 times more infectious” is not a concern for India as it is widely prevalent here and isn’t any more virulent than the strain originating in Wuhan, say scientists...

AUTHORITIES of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime have built a public toilet on the site of a mosque after demolishing it in Xinjiang province and also ordered forcible abortions of pregnant women as part of a campaign against the Uyghur Muslims. As per the reports of Radio Free Asia (RFA), a public toilet has been erected on the site of the demolished Tokul mosque in Suntagh village of Atush city and hospitals have been “forced to abort an..

INDIAN Ambassador to China Vikram Misri on Friday met Major General Ci Guowei, Director of the Office of International Military Cooperation of the Central Military Commission, and briefed him on India’s stance on the borders in eastern Ladakh. ..

RESPONDING with scepticism to Russia’s approval of a COVID-19 vaccine, several scientists around the world, including in India, suggest it hasn’t been tested properly given the time constraint and there may not be enough evidence to prove its efficacy. Announcing the “breakthrough” on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin vouched for the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, named Sputnik V, and said one of his daughters has already received a shot. While the country hopes to start mass-producing ..

DURING its two-year-long primary mission, NASA’s planet hunter TESS has found 66 new exoplanets, or worlds beyond our solar system, as well as nearly 2,100 candidates astronomers are working to confirm, the US space agency has said. TESS, short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, scanned about 75 per cent of the starry sky during its primary mission that ended on July 4, NASA said on Tuesday. “TESS is producing a torrent of high-quality observations providing valuable data across a wide range ..

AFTER the violent June 15 Galwan Valley clashes, India has shown the confidence of standing solo against China in any future border dispute despite the United States’ offer of forming a Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad alliance against Beijing, a European-based think tank said. Since the clashes in Eastern Ladakh, several negotiations between India and China have taken place...

IN ANOTHER huge blow to Indian IT professionals eyeing the US job market, President Donald Trump has signed an executive order asking federal agencies to hire Americans and preventing them from contracting or subcontracting foreign workers, mainly those with H-1B visas. ..

ANALYSIS of sediment found in a central Texas cave in the US shows volcanic eruptions responsible for the cooling of the Earth around 13,000 years ago, say researchers. Some researchers believed the event - which cooled the Earth by about 3 degrees Centigrade, a huge amount - was caused by an extraterrestrial impact with the Earth, such as a meteor collision. But the current study, published in the journal ‘Science Advances’, shows the evidence left in layers of sediment in Hall’s Cave was almost ..

US BIOTECHNOLOGY company Moderna’s experimental vaccine to prevent COVID-19 induced robust immune responses and rapidly controlled the novel coronavirus in the upper and lower airways of monkeys exposed to SARS-CoV-2, according to a study...

AN additional 6.7 million children under the age of five across the world could suffer from wasting this year due to the socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UNICEF warned on Tuesday. According to the UNICEF, in India, there are still around 20 million children under five years of age who are suffering from wasting. According to the Global Hunger Index 2019, wasting among children in India rose from 16.5 per cent in 2008-2012 to 20.8 per cent in 2014-2018...

THE first batch of eleven members of the minuscule Sikh community from Afghanistan, who have been facing persecution at the hands of Pakistan backed Taliban, arrived in India at 1:20 pm on Sunday in a special flight facilitated by the Government of India...

OVER the years China has remodelled its tactics to wipe out the Muslim Uyghur community. In recent years, the Beijing Government has begun using technology to conduct its own kind of genocide. By putting Xinjiang under a grid management system, China is now able to control every aspect of Uyghur’s life -- religious, familial, cultural and social, the ‘Foreign Policy’ reported. Under the grid management system, the cities and villages are split into squares of about 500 people wherein each square ..

EMIRATIS brimmed with joy and pride as the UAE made history on Monday by successfully launching its spacecraft “Al Amal” towards Mars from a Japanese launch centre, marking the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission. Al Amal, or Hope Probe, weighing 1.3 tonnes was launched from the H-2A rocket from Japan’s remot..

FOUR persons have been arrested in Pakistan’s northwest Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province for vandalising a rare statue of Gautam Buddha discovered during excavation at an agriculture farm, police said on Saturday. The statue that was discovered in tehsil Takhtbai of Mardan district was destroyed on the orders of a local Maulvi (prayer leader), local residents said. Four suspects have been arrested and an FIR under the antiquity act has been filed, police said..

INDIA is emerging as a big competitor to China and New Delhi’s corporate tax rate cuts makes it attractive for investors, according to US President Donald Trump’s top economic advisor. Addressing reporters at the White House on Thursday, Larry Kudlow, head of the National Economic Council, said: “People are losing trust in China and India becomes a big competitor. And if I’m not mistaken India has slashed its corporate tax rate. ..

THE time has come for the world to push back against the challenge posed by the Chinese Communist Party, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said as he contended that the US “slept on this threat for too long.” Pompeo also said the Chinese Government was aware of human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus before they shared this information with the world. “Countries not only in Southeast Asia but in Asia more broadly, in Europe, have come to understand the threat that the Chinese Communist Party ..

MARS is about to be invaded by planet Earth — big time. Three countries — the United States, China and the United Arab Emirates — are sending unmanned spacecraft to the red planet in quick succession beginning this week, in the most sweeping effort yet to seek signs of ancient microscopic life while scouting out the place for future astronauts...

TAKING a cue from recent studies that examine COVID-19 transmission by and among children, researchers say that children infrequently transmit COVID-19 to each other or to adults and schools can and should reopen in the fall while adhering to social distancing guidelines. The authors of the commentary published in the journal Pediatrics based their conclusions on a new study published in the current issue of Pediatrics and four other recent studies on kids and COVID-19 tran..

THE death toll from three days of heavy rain and flooding in southern Japan rose to 40 on Monday, including 14 who drowned at a riverside nursing home, as rescuers searched for 10 missing people and rain threatened wider areas of the main island of Kyushu, officials said...

AN estimated 13 UK universities, educating around 5 per cent of students in the country, would not be able to survive the coronavirus pandemic lockdown without a Government bailout support, a new report claimed. The Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimates that long-term losses for the UK’s higher education sector could come in anywhere between 3 billion pounds and 19 billion pounds, with the biggest losses stemming from a fall in international student enrolments – including those from India who ..

AMID global concerns that China delayed giving information regarding the novel coronavirus outbreak, a team of WHO (World Health Organisation) will visit the country next week to investigate the origins of the virus and its spread to human beings. The visit will take place more than six months after the WHO’s Country Office in China picked up a statement from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission on cases of ‘viral pneumonia’. ..

DEMOCRATIC presidential candidate and former US Vice-President Joe Biden has said that if he wins the November elections, strengthening America’s strategic relationship with its natural partner India will be a “high priority” for his administration. Biden is challenging incumbent President Donald Trump, a Republican, in the November 3 US presidential election. “India needs to be a partner in the region for our safety’s sake and quite..