DHAKA: Vietnamese police on Sunday raised the death toll from a blast at a fireworks factory to 24 blaming other explosives also stored at the site for the accident which also left many injured.‘At least 24 people were killed - we have identified 16 bodies,’ Phu Tho policeman Pham

DHAKA: US state secretary John Kerry said on Thursday that Washington’s suspension of military hardware deliveries to Egypt was ‘not a withdrawal’ of US friendship and could be lifted ‘based on performance’.‘By no means is this a withdrawal from our relationship or a severing

DHAKA: A second team of international inspectors arrived in Damascus on Thursday to help supervise the destruction of Syria’s chemical arsenal under the terms of a UN resolution.Three UN vehicles carrying inspectors earlier departed from their Damascus hotel en route to an undisclosed

DHAKA: Police say a bomb exploded has outside a police station in a crowded market in southwest Pakistan, killing at least five people.Police official Mohammed Mohsin says the blast on Thursday in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province, also wounded at least 20 people.The bomb also

DHAKA: Iraq’s justice ministry says authorities have executed 42 people, including a woman, over the past two days.They were all convicted on terrorism-related charges.Thursday’s announcement shows Baghdad’s determination to carry out capital punishment despite international appeals

DHAKA: An Afghan official says preparations are underway for a meeting of elders next month that will advise the president on whether to sign a long-troubled security deal with the United States.Afghanistan interior ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqi said on Thursday that security services

DHAKA: Twenty pilgrims were killed while 40 others were injured when an overloaded mini truck carrying them fell in a gorge in Manguwal village in the district early Thursday.‘The pilgrims were returning from Chintpurni shrine in Himachal Pradesh and were headed to Begowal falling in

DHAKA: Libyan prime minister Ali Zeidan arrived at government headquarters in Tripoli on Thursday shortly after he was freed from the captivity of militiamen who had held him for several hours.Several government ministers and members of the General National Congress, Libya’s highest

DHAKA: Japan’s efforts to scour areas around Fukushima have been insufficient, pressure group Greenpeace said on Thursday, as the government considers letting some residents return to homes near the crippled nuclear plant.The environmental group said tests it had carried out inside the

DHAKA: Myanmar won a new diplomatic prize on Thursday for its dramatic political reforms, taking the helm of Southeast Asia’s regional bloc despite warnings from some critics that the move was premature.The one-time international pariah was formally awarded the rotating chair of the

DHAKA: Malala Yousafzai, Pakistan’s teenage activist, on Thursday was awarded the European Parliament’s prestigious Sakharov human rights prize.‘Today, we decided to let the world know that our hope for a better future stands in young people like Malala Yousafzai,’ said the

DHAKA: Canadian author Alice Munro has won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature.Making the announcement, Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, called her a ‘master of the contemporary short story’, reports the BBC.Her books include Dear Life and Dance of the Happy

DHAKA: A suicide bomber drove a truck packed with explosives into the playground of a primary school in northern Iraq and blew himself up, killing 14 students and their headmaster on Sunday.Iraq police and medical sources said, reports Today’s Zaman.The attack followed a suicide bombing

DHAKA: Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called on Sunday for new proposals from the major powers in talks on its nuclear programme that are due to resume on October 15.Zarif said that the previous offer, made by the so-called P5+1 group at two meetings in Kazakhstan in

DHAKA: Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad has conceded making mistakes and says no side in his country’s civil war is entirely free of blame, according to an interview to be published Sunday by German magazine Der Spiegel.The respected Hamburg-based weekly reported that Assad

DHAKA: Disarmament experts from international watchdog OPCW have begun destroying Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.A monitoring official has told the BBC.The operation is being carried out by a team from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.The mission was

DHAKA: Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe said on Sunday he would seek talks with leaders of China and South Korea at a regional economic summit in Indonesia despite strained ties.‘I want to seize on an opportune time to exchange views’ with them, he told reporters before leaving for

DHAKA: Even as the president came to western Myanmar to urge an end to sectarian violence, security forces could not prevent Buddhist mobs from torching the homes of minority Muslims or hacking them to death, at times, unwittingly, even encouraging them.That has raised questions about the

DHAKA: Six people including two policemen were shot dead in a fierce gunbattle between Thai security forces and militants, authorities said on Sunday, after a raid in the insurgency-plagued south of the country.The clash broke out after a combined army, police and paramilitary group tried

DHAKA: China`s maritime authorities issued red alerts on Sunday, representing the highest warning for storm tides and waves as Typhoon Fitow approached land, the country`s state news agency, Xinhua, said.Fitow battered the remote southern Japanese island of Okinawa late Saturday, with