International

A woman has been appointed to run a Saudi Arabian bank in a first for women in the country. Saudi businesswoman Lubna Al Olayan will chair a new bank being formed out of a merger between the Saudi British Bank (SABB) and Alawwal Bank.   The move comes amid a liberalisation of women’s roles in a traditionally conservative society.   ...

Indonesia’s National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) confirmed that the death toll in the earthquake and tsunami that struck Indonesia’s Sulawesi islands rose to 1,558 on Friday, reports ANI. A BNPB spokesperson revealed that over 1,000 people might still be missing in the region, as rescue dogs have been utilised to help expedite rescue missions.   Meanwhile, the United Nations allocated ...

Photo: A Kashmiri man cries as the body of a relative is carried on a stretcher outside a local hospital in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Friday, Oct. 5, 2018. Srinagar, Oct 5 : Suspected rebels on Friday shot and killed two activists affiliated with a pro-India Kashmiri political group in the disputed region’s main city, officials said, as authorities prepared ...

A court in India’s capital Delhi has acquitted the host of a popular TV crime series who had been jailed for murdering his wife in 2000. The Delhi High Court judge said there was no evidence that Suhaib Ilyasi, who fronted India’s Most Wanted, had stabbed his wife Anju Ilyasi to death.   Mr Ilyasi was jailed for life in ...

Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad. Photo: Courtesy Oslo, Oct 5 : The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.” The winners were named Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Congolese doctor Mukwege has been a critic of ...

Authorities in South Africa are investigating a collision between two trains that left more than 300 people injured, 32 of them seriously. The crash occurred late Thursday on the outskirts of Johannesburg when one train hit another that was stationary. Rail officials were working on Friday to clear the area.   Commuter rail crashes have been worryingly common in South ...

President Vladimir Putin was expected Friday to sign a deal in India worth more than $5 billion for the S-400 air defence system, despite US warnings of sanctions against countries buying Russian military hardware. Putin, who arrived in New Delhi late Thursday, was also set to discuss with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi further agreements worth some $3 billion for ...

Kurdish rebels on Thursday detonated an explosive device on a road in southeast Turkey, killing at least seven soldiers, a senior official said. Two other soldiers were wounded in the attack. The explosion occurred on a road near the town of Gercus in the majority-Kurdish province of Batman. Numan Kurtulmus, a deputy chairman of Turkey’s ruling party, said the soldiers, ...

Indonesia’s disaster agency says the death toll from the earthquake and tsunami that struck a central island last week has increased slightly to 1,424. National disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho provided the updated figure Thursday at a news conference in Jakarta.   The disasters struck Palu and surrounding districts in Central Sulawesi province last Friday.   Nugroho said other ...

BOISE, Idaho : Leon Lederman, an experimental physicist who won a Nobel Prize in physics for his work on subatomic particles and coined the phrase “God particle,” died Wednesday at 96. Lederman directed the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago from 1978 to 1989. He’s described as a giant in his field who also had a passion for sharing science, ...