NEPAL Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli will not resign immediately and implement the Supreme Court’s verdict against him by facing Parliament that is due to convene within two weeks, an official representing the embattled Premier said on Wednesday. In a landmark ruling, a five-member constitutional bench led by Chief Justice Cholendra Shumsher on Tuesday annulled the Oli Government’s “unconstitutional” decision to dissolve the 275-member Lower House of Parliament. Court also ordered Government to summon ..

NEPAL’S Supreme Court in a historic verdict on Tuesday reinstated the dissolved House of Representatives, in a setback to embattled Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli who was preparing for snap polls. A five-member Constitutional bench led by Chief Justice Cholendra Shumsher annulled the Government’s decision to dissolve the 275-member Lower House of Parliament, according to a notice issued by the apex court...

MORE than 200 Indian-origin people occupy leadership positions in as many as 15 countries, including the US and the UK, building a legacy for future generations, according to a first-of-its-kind list by a US-based organisation working among the Indian diaspora. The 2021 Indiaspora Government Leaders List, which was released on Monday, had drawn from Government websites and other publicly-available resources to prepare the report to showcase the achievements of the community leaders across different ..

A DAY after seizing control of the country, the military in Myanmar on Tuesday released a majority of the detained regional and State Chief Ministers, but there was no word on Nobel Laureate and State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and President U Win Myint. Confirming the development to Xinhua news agency, a military official said: “There may be a reshuffle among Chief Ministers by appointing qualified ones.”..

THE US economy contracted 3.5 per cent in 2020 amid the raging COVID-19 pandemic, the worst annual decline of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) since 1946, according to data released by the Commerce Department. ..

A NASAL spray which can prevent a coronavirus infection for up to two days is being prepped for mass production by scientists at the University of Birmingham with the hope of having them available over-the-counter in pharmacies in a few months, a UK newspaper report said on Sunday. Dr Richard Moakes, the study’s lead researcher, told ‘The Sunday Telegraph’ that he is confident in the spray’s formula to help unlock society from social distancing restrictions and “get schools going again”...

ASTRONOMERS, with the help of India’s first multi-wavelength space satellite AstroSat, have spotted a massive intriguing globular cluster in the Milky Way galaxy with rare hot UV-bright stars in it, the Department of Science and Technology said on Thursday. These stars whose inner core is almost exposed, making them very hot, exist in the late stages of evolution of a Sun-like star. It is not clear how these stars end their lives as not many of them are detected in these fast-evolving phases, ..

TWIN suicide bombings ripped through a busy market in the Iraqi capital on Thursday, killing at least 32 people and wounding dozens, officials said. The rare suicide bombing attack hit the Bab al-Sharqi commercial area in central Baghdad amid heightened political tensions over planned early elections and a severe economic crisis. Blood smeared the floors of the busy market amid piles of clothes and shoes as survivors took stock of the disarray in the aftermath. No one immediately took responsibility ..

CHINA’S highest-profile entrepreneur, Jack Ma, appeared on Wednesday in an online video, ending a 2 1/2-month absence from public view that prompted speculation about the future of the e-commerce billionaire and his Alibaba Group. In the 50-second video, Ma congratulated teachers supported by his foundation and made no mention of his disappearance or official efforts to tighten control over Alibaba and other Internet companies over the past six months. The video appeared on Chinese business news and ..

IRAN’S military kicked off a ground forces drill on Tuesday along the coast of the Gulf of Oman, state TV reported, the latest in a series of snap exercises that the country is holding amid escalating tensions over its nuclear programme and Washington’s pressure campaign against Tehran. According to the report, commando units and airborne infantry were participating in the annual exercise, along with fighter jets, helicopters and military transport aircraft. Iran’s National Army chief Abdolrahim ..

UK PRIME Minister Boris Johnson has invited his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi for the G7 summit as he confirmed details on Sunday for the high-level meeting to be presided over by Britain in the coastal region of Cornwall between June 11 and 13. Johnson had extended an invitation to Modi during a phone call last year when India was chosen alongside South Korea and Australia as guest countries of the multilateral summit...

THE Indian diaspora, one of the most “vibrant and dynamic”, is the largest in the world, with 18 million people from the country living outside their homeland in 2020, the UN has said. The United Arab Emirates, the US and Saudi Arabia host the largest numbers of migrants from India, it said...

US President-elect Joe Biden has announced a USD 1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package to tackle the economic fallout from the pandemic, including direct financial aid to average Americans, support to businesses and to provide a boost to the national vaccination programme. ..

AS THE wan winter Sun sets over France’s Champagne region, countdown clock kicks in. Labourers stop pruning the vines as the light fades at about 4:30 pm, leaving them 90 minutes to come in from the cold, change out of their work clothes, hop in their cars and zoom home before a 6 pm coronavirus curfew. Forget about any after-work socialising with friends, after-school clubs for children or doing any evening shopping beyond quick trips for essentials. Police on patrol demand valid reasons from ..

AN UPGRADED SpaceX cargo Dragon spacecraft has successfully undocked from the International Space Station (ISS), heading for splashdown on Earth on Thursday morning with key science experiments, including mice. It is the first undocking of a US commercial cargo craft from the International Docking Adapter on the station’s space-facing port of the Harmony module. Previous cargo Dragon spacecraft were attached and removed from the space station using the station’s robotic Canadarm2...

CARBON dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere this year will reach levels 50 per cent higher than before the Industrial Revolution due to human-caused emissions, according to the annual forecast of the UK Met Office. The increase is driven by emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation, but will be slightly smaller than usual due to a temporary strengthening of natural carbon sinks, Xinhua news agency quoted the British national weather service as saying in the forecast released Friday...

THE number of people who have tested positive for the new UK variant of SARS-CoV-2 in the country has climbed to 73, the Union Health Ministry said on Wednesday. These 73 cases include the 58 which were announced by the Ministry till Tuesday. “The total number of cases infected with the new strain of the novel coronavirus first reported in the UK now stands at 73,” the Ministry said...

ACTOR Tanya Roberts, best known for James Bond movie “A View to a Kill” and TV series “That ‘70s Show”, was mistakenly announced as dead late Sunday night, her representative Mike Pingel said a day after he confirmed her demise to multiple outlets. Pingel told ‘The Hollywood Reporter’ that although her partner, Lance O’Brien, originally thought she had died, the hospital called on Monday morning to report she was still alive...

THE World Health Organisation on Sunday welcomed India’s decision giving emergency use authorisation to COVID-19 vaccines, saying it will help “intensify” and “strengthen” its fight against the ongoing pandemic. India’s drugs regulator has approved Oxford COVID-19 vaccine Covishield, manufactured by the Serum Institute, and indigenously developed Covaxin of Bharat Biotech for restricted emergency use in the country. It paves the way for the roll out of at least two vaccines in the country in the coming ..

CHIEF of Army Staff General M M Naravane held extensive talks with his South Korean counterpart General Nam Yeong Shin on ways to boost bilateral military ties, and visited several key installations, including the heavily fortified Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), during his tour of the East Asian nation, officials said on Thursday. The Chief of Army Staff also visited the Headquarters of the South Korean Army at Gyeryong city where he was given a guard of honour, they said. ..

SIXTY-ONE per cent of the new White House appointees are women and 54 per cent are people of colour, President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team has said, asserting that the Biden-Harris administration will prioritise diversity of ideology and background, and foster talent to address the country’s most complex challenges. On Wednesday, President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris surpassed their goal of naming 100 members of their incoming administration. ..

OFFICIALS in Bangladesh sent a second group of Rohingya refugees to an isolated island in the Bay of Bengal on Monday despite calls by human rights groups for a halt to the process. More than 30 buses carrying about 1,500 refugees left their camps in Cox’s Bazar district on the way to the island, a Government official said. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to the media, said that the refugees will stay overnight in a temporary shelter in the south-east..

NEHA loved the hymns that filled her church with music. But she lost the chance to sing them last year when, at the age of 14, she was forcibly converted from Christianity to Islam and married to a 45-year-old man with children twice her age. She tells her story in a voice so low it occasionally fades away. She all but disappears as she wraps a blue scarf tightly around her face and head. Neha’s husband is in jail now facing charges of rape for the underage marriage, but she is in hiding, afraid after ..

THEY resemble small fragments of charcoal, but the soil samples collected from an asteroid and returned to Earth by a Japanese spacecraft were hardly disappointing. The samples Japanese space officials described on Thursday that the big 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) and rock hard samples are not breaking when picked up or poured into another container. Smaller black, sandy granules the spacecraft collected and returned separately were described last week...

A CUSTOMER left a whopping $5,600 tip at a restaurant in the US State of Ohio, which allowed the establishment’s 28-person staff to take home $200 each, a media report said. In a Facebook post, Moussa Salloukh, the owner of Souk Mediterranean Kitchen & Bar in Toledo, said the generosity left staffers cry tears of joy, the ‘Daily Mail’ said in its report published on Monday...

THE Australian Government has announced a plan to save islands in the Great Barrier Reef, located off the coast of Queensland State, from the effects of climate change. According to the report from ‘News Corp Australia’ on Sunday, the Government will spend A..

UNITED States President-elect Joe Biden has told election-weary Americans that it is time to “turn the page”, after the Electoral College affirmed his triumph over President Donald Trump, who has refused to concede and filed a litany of legal challenges to overturn the poll results. The 538-member Electoral College on Monday pushed Biden past the 270-vote threshold to win the bitterly-contested race for the White House. It was one of the crucial steps required for the 78-year-old Democrat to take ..

HOW could scientists race out COVID-19 vaccines so fast without cutting corners? A head start helped -- over a decade of behind-the-scenes research that had new vaccine technology poised for a challenge just as the coronavirus erupted. “The speed is a reflection of years of work that went before,” Dr Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert, told ‘The Associated Press’. “That’s what the public has to understand.” Creating vaccines and having results from rigorous studies less than a ..

JAPAN’S space agency said its helicopter search team has retrieved a capsule, which is carrying asteroid samples that could explain the origin of life, that landed on a remote area in southern Australia as planned on Sunday. “The capsule collection work at the landing site was completed,” the space agency said in a tweet about four hours after the capsule landed. “We practiced a lot for today... It ended safe.” Hayabusa2 had successfully released the small capsule on Saturday and sent it toward Earth ..

THE US on Friday imposed visa restrictions on Chinese officials and individuals engaged in overseas influence operations, the latest punitive measures against China by the outgoing Trump administration. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the restrictions would apply to Chinese Communist Party officials or any individual taking part in propaganda or influence campaigns linked to the United Front Work Department. The Chinese C..

CHINA successfully powered up its “artificial Sun” nuclear fusion reactor for the first time, State media reported on Friday, marking a great advance in the country’s nuclear power research capabilities. The HL-2M Tokamak reactor is China’s largest and most advanced nuclear fusion experimental research device, and scientists hope that the device can potentially unlock a powerful clean energy source. ..

THE UK on Wednesday became the first country to approve the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine against COVID-19, paving the way for mass vaccinations against the deadly novel coronavirus from as early as next week. The British regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s (MHRA), says, the jab, which claims to offer up to 95 per cent protection against COVID-19 illness, is safe for roll out. The UK Government said that the approval follows a “rigorous” analysis of the data, conducted at ..

DOCTOR Gaurav Sharma, one of the youngest and newly-elected MPs in New Zealand, on Wednesday took oath in Sanskrit in the country’s Parliament. Sharma, 33, hailing from Himachal Pradesh’s Hamirpur, was recently elected as the Member of Parliament from the Labour Party for Hamilton West in New Zealand. India’s High Commissioner to New Zealand and Samoa, Muktes..

AMERICAN social media personality and dancer Charli D’Amelio has become the first creator to hit 100 million followers on the Chinese short-video making app TikTok. To date, only two other TikTok creators have reached 50 million folllowers. On TikTok, that makes her more than twice as big as Will Smith, three times as big as The Rock, four times as big as Selena Gomez, and five times as big as Kylie Jenner and Ariana Grande...

LAUNCHING the second phase of RuPay card, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday announced that India will soon be sending Bhutanese satellite to space. “India opened its space sector for private enterprises. It will boost innovation, capacity and skills. ISRO will be sending Bhutan’s satellite next year and work on that is progressing fast,” he said. “Like other Indians I have great love and friendship with Bhutan, when I meet you all its like meeting our own,” Prime Minister told the Bhutanese audience ..

TWO Russian cosmonauts have conducted a six-hour 48-minute spacewalk to prepare the International Space Station for a new module. “The main task of the exit was to prepare the station for the arrival of the Nauka module: for this, the cosmonauts switched the Transit-B antenna of the telemetry system from the Pirs module to Poisk,” Russian space agency Roscosmos said in a tweet...

WITH the COVID-19 pandemic leading to digital transformation at a speed never seen before, software giant Microsoft expects to develop more than 500 million new applications over the next five years. With every business organisation turning into a technology entity during the current pandemic, the world is expected to see the development of more and more applications. The majority of the apps are expected to be developed on low-code platform, said Rajiv Sodhi, Chief Operating Officer, Microsoft India...

AMAZON founder Jeff Bezos announced on Monday in an Instagram post that he will give USD 791 million in grants as part of his Bezos Earth Fund to 16 organisations that are working to protect the environment, CNN reported. “I’ve spent the past several months learning from a group of incredibly smart people who’ve made it their life’s work to fig..

FIFTEEN Asia-Pacific nations, including China, on Sunday signed the world’s biggest trade agreement, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), sans India with hopes that it will help recover from the shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic. The RCEP was signed after eight years of negotiations at the conclusion of annual summit of Southeast Asian leaders and their regional partners, held virtually this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic...

PLEDGING to be the President of all Americans, Joe Biden has sought an immediate end to the “grim era of demonisation” in the deeply-polarised nation, as he and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris celebrated their historic triumph over Donald Trump in a bitter and closely-fought presidential election. “I pledge to be a President who seeks not..

WHATSAPP on Friday said it is rolling out its payments services in India after receiving nod from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). In 2018, the Facebook-owned company had started testing its UPI-based payments service in India, which allows users to utilise the messaging platform to send and receive money. The testing was limited to about a million users as it waited for regulatory approvals to come in. ..

AMID ongoing tensions over the results of the US presidential election, Swedish environment activist Greta Thunberg has mocked US President Donald Trump in his own words in the ultimate social media revenge. ..

DEMOCRATIC presidential candidate Joe Biden on Friday took crucial leads over US President Donald Trump in the key battleground States of Georgia and Pennsylvania, bringing him on the cusp of a historic victory in the closely-fought election. ..

FOREIGN Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla held talks with British Home Secretary Priti Patel in London during which he strongly underlined India’s interest in the expeditious extradition of former Kingfisher Airlines chief Vijay Mallya, who has completed all the legal processes related to extradition from the UK, and fugitive diamond merchant Nirav Modi...

TO attract investment into the country, PM Modi will on Thursday chair the Virtual Global Investor Roundtable (VGIR) 2020, which will be attended by heads of 20 top institutional investors from various parts of the world. VGIR 2020 will focus on discussions around India’s economic and investment outlook, structural reforms and the Government’s vision for making the country a USD 5-trillion economy...

A HINDU temple in Pakistan’s Sindh province was vandalised by an angry mob that also attempted to attack over 300 Hindu families, but were stopped by Muslims from entering the century-old neighbourhood, a media report said on Wednesday...

PRIYANCA Radhakrishnan on Monday became New Zealand’s first-ever Indian-origin minister after Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern brought five new ministers into her executive. Born in India, Radhakrishnan, 41, went to school in Singapore before moving to New Zealand to further her education...

NOVEMBER 2 marks 20 years since the first residents arrived on the International Space Station (ISS). The orbiting habitat has been continuously occupied ever since. Twenty straight years of life in space makes the ISS the ideal “natural laboratory” to understand how societies function beyond Earth. NASA has said the orbiting laboratory has turned into a world-class facility for research which has conducted thousands of investigations from over 100 different countries...

LEGENDARY Scottish star Sean Connery, who became a global sensation as the first James Bond and featured in a string of cult hits in his five-decade-long career, has died. He was 90. According to BBC, the actor passed away overnight in his sleep while in the Bahamas. He had been unwell for quite some time. In the career spanning half a century, the actor featured in many critically-acclaimed and commercial blockbusters such as “The Hunt for Red October”, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”, “Murder ..

A US court has asked Antrix Corporation, the commercial arm of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), to pay compensation of USD 1.2 billion to a Bengaluru-based startup, Devas Multimedia, for cancelling a satellite deal in 2005. As per the agreement in January 2005, Antrix agreed to build, launch and operate two satellites and to make available 70 MHz of S-band spectrum to Devas, which the latter planned to use to offer hybrid satellite and terrestrial communication services throughout India. ..