OSLO: A young woman of Pakistani-origin has found a place in the Norwegian cabinet.

 

Hadia Tajik, 29, a Muslim of Pakistani descent, was appointed as Norway’s minister of culture.

LONDON: A new virus belonging to the same family as the Sars virus that killed 800 people in 2002 has been identified in Britain in a man who had recently been in Saudi Arabia, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Sunday.

America's "forgotten war" in Afghanistan, is missing in action again, squeezed out of the campaign narrative as President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney duel for the White House. Americans still die in Afghanistan, 70,000 US troops still serve, civilians are cut down in the crossfire and
top US brass says war strategy is under threat from rising insider attacks on NATO troops by Afghans.But in a race consumed by economics, character attacks and over-hyped gaffes, Arlington National Cemetery's fresh rows of headstones are an afterthought.

Chinese officials and media have expressed concern Washington's renewed interest in slowly democratising Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, could be part of U.S. designs to dilute China's influence there and encircle China with pro-U.S. states.

The attacks, which began in late 2011 and escalated this year, have primarily been "denial of service" campaigns that disrupted the banks' websites and corporate networks by overwhelming them with incoming web traffic, said the sources.

The drawings in the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo risked exacerbating a crisis that has seen the storming of U.S. and other Western embassies, the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and a deadly suicide bombing in Afghanistan.

Riot police were deployed to protect the paper's Paris offices after the issue hit news stands.

New information emerging a week after attackers launched rocket-propelled grenades and mortars and killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, suggests that the protests at the outset were so small and unthreatening as to attract little notice.

Paris: The French government has called for restraint after learning that a satirical weekly plans to publish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad on Wednesday just as an anti-Islam video has ignited Muslim protests around the globe.

The government in Bangladesh has blocked YouTube to prevent people from seeing an anti-Islam video produced in the US ridiculing the Prophet Mohammad. Independent and Somoy television stations said the government blocked the popular video search engine late Monday. On Sunday, the

The Syrian regime plans to deploy chemical weapons against its own people "as a last resort", the former head of Syria's chemical arsenal told a newspaper in an interview published on Wednesday.

Major-General Adnan Sillu said he defected from the Syrian army three months ago after
being party to top-levels talks about the use of chemical weapons on both rebel fighters and civilians.