Moderate Kurdish candidate Barham Saleh swept to the post of president of Iraq Tuesday evening in a parliamentary vote pitting Kurdish heavyweights against each other for the first time following an ill-fated independence referendum. Saleh routed his main rival Fuad Hussein with 219 votes to 22, dealing a blow to Hussein’s main backer, former Kurdish regional president Massud Barzani who ...

The wife of Malaysian former Prime Minister Najib Razak is being grilled by the anti-graft agency for a third time over a massive graft scandal involving the 1MDB state investment fund. Rosmah Mansor smiled at reporters Wednesday but didn’t speak as she was escorted into the agency’s building. Her presence for a second time in a week at the agency ...

A fire broke out at the Calcutta Medical College and Hospital in central Kolkata on Wednesday, reports NDTV. Nearly 250 patients have been evacuated. Ten fire engines are at the spot. There are no reports of any casualties.   The fire started the pharmacy of the hospital. The fire department was alerted after smoke was spotted from the building that ...

Canada’s Parliament formally stripped Aung San Suu Kyi of her honorary Canadian citizenship on Tuesday for complicity in the atrocities committed against Myanmar’s Rohingya people. The Senate voted unanimously to strip Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s civilian leader, of the symbolic honor bestowed on her in 2007.   The upper house’s move follows a similar unanimous vote in the House of Commons ...

A Spanish nonprofit group said 34 migrants were feared dead after their group waited for more than 36 hours to be rescued from a semi-sunken boat in waters off Morocco. The Moroccan Interior Ministry said Tuesday 11 bodies were recovered and the boat’s teenage skipper had been detained. The migrants continuously pleaded for help from Spanish and Moroccan authorities for ...

Japan’s space agency (Jaxa) is about to send a 10kg lander to the surface of an asteroid. The Hayabusa-2 spacecraft will release the German-French Mascot lander onto the asteroid 162173 Ryugu on Wednesday.   Mascot will then analyse the asteroid’s surface properties, including its mineral composition and magnetic field.   Hayabusa-2 reached the asteroid Ryugu in June this year after ...

China’s Tencent Music has filed a much-anticipated request to list its shares in the US, in what could be one of the biggest US initial public offerings by a Chinese company. Tencent Music’s parent firm is China’s tech giant Tencent Holdings. Other shareholders include Spotify.   It includes digital streaming apps QQ Music, Kugou and karaoke app WeSing.   The ...

Houston, Oct 3 : A human trafficking survivor from Texas sued Facebook this week, alleging the social media platform provides human traffickers an unrestricted way to “stalk, exploit, recruit, groom … and extort children into the sex trade.” The lawsuit was filed Monday in Houston against Facebook, the shuttered classifieds site Backpage.com and the owners of two Houston hotels. The ...

Photo: Guests at the launching ceremony of AfterAccess surveys regarding Bangladesh at a city hotel on Tuesday. Dhaka, Oct 2 : A recently released research report shows that by late 2017 only 13 percent of Bangladeshis aged 15-65 used the Internet and social media. This is despite 45 percent of the same age group owning an Internet-friendly device. The findings ...

Three researchers on Tuesday shared the Nobel Physics Prize for inventions in the field of laser physics which have paved the way for advanced precision instruments used in industry and medicine, the jury said.   Arthur Ashkin of the United States won one half of the prize, while Gerard Mourou of France and Donna Strickland of Canada shared the other ...