International

At least 40 people were killed after a glacial lake burst its banks and triggered flash floods this week in the Indian Himalayas, government officials told Reuters on Friday as rescuers searched for dozens missing for a second day. The Lhonak Lake in the mountainous northeastern state of Sikkim overflowed on Wednesday after a cloudburst triggered torrential rains and an ...

An attack Thursday on a Syrian military academy killed 112 people, a war monitor said, with state media blaming “terrorist organisations” for the drone strike in government-held Homs. Separately, Turkish air raids in the country’s Kurdish-held northeast killed at least 11 people, according to Kurdish forces, after Ankara had threatened retaliation for a bomb attack. In the central city of ...

The Indian army said on Wednesday that 23 soldiers were missing after a powerful flash flood caused by intense rainfall tore through a valley in the mountainous northeast Sikkim state. “Due to sudden cloud burst over Lhonak Lake in North Sikkim, a flash flood occurred in the Teesta River… 23 personnel have been reported missing and some vehicles are reported ...

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to a team of scientists who created a ground-breaking technique using lasers to understand the extremely rapid movements of electrons that were previously thought impossible to follow, reports CNN. Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier “demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to ...

Indonesian President Joko Widodo inaugurated Southeast Asia’s first high-speed railway on Monday as it was set to begin commercial operations, a key project under China’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative that will drastically reduce the travel time between two key cities. The project has been beset with delays and increasing costs, and some observers doubt its commercial benefits. But Widodo ...

Katalin Kariko of Hungary and Drew Weissman of the United States won the Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday for work on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology that paved the way for Covid-19 vaccines. The pair, who had been tipped as favourites, were honoured for “for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19,” ...

The US government has avoided a federal shutdown after both House and Senate agreed on a short-term funding deal. A bill that keeps the government funded until 17 November- but includes no new aid for Ukraine – was approved in the Senate by 88 votes to nine. President Joe Biden signed it into law minutes before the midnight deadline. The ...

Opposition candidate Mohamed Muiz won the Maldives presidential runoff on Saturday, securing more than 53 per cent of the vote, local media reported. The election has turned into a virtual referendum on which regional power – India or China – will have the biggest influence in the Indian Ocean archipelago nation. Mihaaru News reported that incumbent President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih ...

At least 52 people were killed and more than 50 injured on Friday in a suicide attack on a religious gathering to mark the birthday of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Pakistan’s restive Balochistan province. No group has claimed responsibility for the blast, which comes amid a surge in attacks claimed by militant groups in the west of Pakistan, raising the ...

At least 34 people died in Benin near Nigeria’s border on Saturday when a contraband fuel depot exploded into flames, sending up a black cloud of smoke into the sky and leaving dozens of charred bodies at the site, a government official and residents said. The blaze erupted at a warehouse for smuggled fuel in the southern Benin town of ...