Tennis world number one Novak Djokovic kept a low profile in his third day in Australian immigration detention on Saturday, as a blame game between Australian authorities over the handling of Covid-19 vaccine exemptions gathered steam. The Serbian superstar, a vocal opponent of vaccine mandates who came to Australia in hopes of winning his 21st Grand Slam at the Australian Open, has been holed up since Thursday in a modest Melbourne hotel after his visa was cancelled due to problems with a medical exemption. Czech player Renata Voracova was also detained and had her visa revoked after issues with her exemption. Djokovic’s…
Author: Hasnain Abid Khanzada
KARACHI: The country received over $3 billion through the Roshan Digital Accounts (RDA) till the end of December 2021, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) reported on Friday. The SBP had launched the RDAs in September 2020 to attract foreign exchange through overseas Pakistanis while it also provided high yields on the Naya Pakistan Certificates (NPCs). According to the SBP, the country received $3.160bn in RDAs till the end of 2021. However, the NPCs attracted the major inflows which amounted to $2.149bn. In dollar terms, the three-, six- and 12-month NPCs offer a profit rate of 5.5 per cent, 6pc…
ISLAMABAD: Federal Minister for Industries and Production Khusro Bakhtyar on Friday said urea was being smuggled to Afghanistan from Sindh and the PPP government was not sharing the data to help trace the movement of urea trucks. Addressing a news conference along with Minister for Energy Hammad Azhar and top management of fertiliser companies, Mr Bakhtyar said that urea movement was being traced using a portal developed by the Ministry of Industries and Production. “This portal also includes provinces and fertiliser manufacturers. Punjab is checking up to 88 per cent movement of urea but there is no significant response from…
KARACHI: Banks recorded the 10-year’s highest deposit growth of 22.7 per cent in the calendar year 2021 mainly due to higher remittances, export proceeds and a sharp depreciation of the rupee. The latest data issued by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) on Friday showed that the deposits of scheduled banks increased by Rs3.887 trillion, or 22.75pc, to Rs20.972tr from January to December 2021. Data showed the deposits were increased by Rs1,574bn in CY19 and by more than double Rs3,203bn in CY20. During the last 10 years, the lowest increase in deposits was noted in CY15 when it grew by…
CHAGAI: The Saindak Copper-Gold Project has generated a profit of $74.71 million by collecting revenue of $550,000 against 16,426 tonnes of blister copper out of 5 million tonnes of concentrating tasks during last year. This was disclosed on Friday by chairman of the Metallurgical Construction Corporation (MCC) Resources Development (Pvt) Limited (MRDL), He Xuping. He said that taking advantage of the rising prices in the international metal market his company carefully organised production and achieved its annual target despite repeated boiler bursts while combating the coronavirus pandemic as well. “Over the past 19 years of operation we have been making…
KARACHI: The federal government on Friday launched the Next Generation Broadband for Sustainable Development (NGBSD) projects in four districts of Sindh. The high-speed broadband projects aims to speed up communication and economic activities and open new avenues of opportunities for hundreds of thousands of people living in the rural areas of Sindh. The NGBSD project was assigned to Jazz Network. It aims to provide high-speed internet in the unserved and underserved areas of four more districts of Sindh. The signing ceremony was attended by Federal Minister for Planning and Development Asad Umar and Federal Minister for Information Technology and Telecommunications…
Poland’s powerful ruling party leader admitted that the country bought Israeli spyware but dismissed claims it was used against the opposition in extracts from an interview published on Friday. Recent allegations about the use of Pegasus software have rocked Poland, drawing comparisons to the Watergate investigation that led to US president Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Pegasus can turn smartphones into pocket spying devices, allowing the user to read the target’s messages, track their location, and even turn on their camera and microphone without their knowledge. “It would be bad if Polish services did not have this type of tool,”…
Covid-19 hospitalisations in the US are poised to hit a new high, according to a Reuters tally, surpassing the record set in January of last year as the highly contagious Omicron variant fuels a surge in infections. Hospitalisations have increased steadily since late December as Omicron quickly overtook Delta as the dominant coronavirus variant in the US, although experts say Omicron will likely prove less deadly than prior iterations. While potentially less severe, health officials have warned that the sheer number of infections caused by Omicron could strain hospital systems, some of which have already shown signs of distress, partly due to…
The Taliban appealed on Friday for emergency humanitarian aid without “political bias”, saying recent snow and flooding had worsened the plight of the Afghan people. Since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in mid-August, the country has plunged into financial chaos, with inflation and unemployment surging. Billions of dollars of the country’s assets have been frozen by the United States, while aid supplies have been heavily disrupted. Global aid agencies have warned that more than half of Afghanistan’s 38 million people are expected to face hunger this winter. In a video appeal, deputy prime minister Abdul Ghani Baradar said the world had…
ALMATY: Kazakhstan’s president on Friday rejected calls for talks with protesters after days of unprecedented unrest, vowing to destroy “armed bandits” and authorising his forces to shoot to kill without warning. In a hardline address to the nation, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev also gave “special thanks” to Russian President Vladimir Putin after a Moscow-led military alliance sent troops to Kazakhstan to help quell the unrest. Security forces had blocked off strategic areas of Almaty — the country’s largest city and epicentre of the recent violence — and were firing into the air if anyone approached, an eyewitness said. Elsewhere the city was…
