DHAKA: Italian prime minister Enrico Letta on Tuesday urged an EU summit this week to adopt an action plan to deal with the ‘immigration emergency’ after two shipwrecks that killed over 400 people.Europe ‘cannot sit there and watch’ these tragedies, Letta told the Italian

DHAKA: The recent shutdown of the US government has taken a stinging toll on the image of the Republican Party, according to a poll published on Tuesday.The Washington Post-ABC News survey showed the public’s opinion of the party has sunk to an all-time low, with nearly two-thirds

DHAKA: US state secretary John Kerry said it was hard to see how Iran could play a constructive role in planned peace talks in Geneva without backing plans for a transitional government in Syria.Speaking in Paris after talks with Qatari foreign minister Khaled al-Attiyah, Kerry said Iran

DHAKA: Syrian president Bashar al-Assad said there was no date set for a long-delayed international conference aimed at ending the country`s civil war.‘There is no date so far ... And current factors do not help in holding it,’ Assad told Al Mayadeen television, reports The Jerusalem

DHAKA: Arab and Western foreign ministers are to meet Syrian opposition officials in London in an effort to persuade them to attend planned peace talks.A key group in Syria`s main opposition alliance is threatening to boycott the talks, expected next month in Geneva.The Syrian National

DHAKA: US drone strikes killed a Pakistani grandmother and 18 civilian labourers last year, Amnesty International said on Tuesday, shedding new light on a major source of tension in US-Pakistani relations.Islamabad publicly opposes drone attacks, saying they kill too many civilians in

DHAKA: A Chinese court said it will announce its verdict on an appeal filed by fallen politician Bo Xilai on Friday. Bo who is a former member of the Communist Party`s political bureau was recently given life imprisonment for corruption and embezzlement.Bo has challenged the verdict

DHAKA: Some 78 people have been killed and scores wounded in an attack on villages in South Sudan`s Jonglei state, the local MP has told the BBC.The attackers were believed to be members of David Yau Yau`s rebel group, said MP Deng Dau.Jonglei is badly affected by ethnic rivalries and

DHAKA: American spies secretly listened in to 70.3 million private phone calls in France over less than one month, it emerged today.The astonishing figure gives an indication of just how easy it is for the US to monitor people’s activities across Europe and has caused outrage in

DHAKA: New Jersey`s first-ever same-sex marriages were celebrated Monday with cheers and laughter as a flurry of excited, beaming couples married minutes after midnight.Republican Governor Chris Christie, who had appealed against the judicial decision to allow the weddings, later that

DHAKA: Plans to decontaminate six towns and villages close to Japan`s Fukushima nuclear plant have to be delayed by up to three more years, officials say.The clean-up of the exclusion zone around the crippled plant was initially due to be completed by next March.More than 90,000 people

DHAKA: NATO agreed on Monday to a Libyan request to advise it on strengthening its security forces, lending support to a country where powerful militias have stoked fears of a slide into anarchy.Libyan prime minister Ali Zeidan asked NATO for technical advice and help with training in May

DHAKA: Saudi Arabia’s Gulf Arab allies and Egypt have applauded its decision to reject a UN Security Council seat in protest at the world body’s failure to act on Syria, whose leader is backed by Russia and Shia Iran.Saudi Arabia turned down a coveted two-year term on the council on

DHAKA: Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Monday urged European Union and world leaders to pile pressure on her country`s government to complete its reform process.The Nobel peace laureate told a small group of journalists that the country’s democratic future as well as an

DHAKA: An explosion has ripped through a bus in the southern Russian city of Volgograd, killing at least four people and injuring seven.The cause of the blast is not yet known, Russian officials say, reports the BBC.Cities further south, in Russia’s North Caucasus, have seen attacks by

DHAKA: Saudi Arabia’s rights record came under fire at the United Nations on Monday, with critics accusing the kingdom of jailing activists without due process and abusing the basic rights of Saudi women and foreign workers.At the UN Human Rights Council, Britain called for abolition of

DHAKA: The number of Syrian refugees in Turkey has exceeded 600,000 and more than 400,000 of them are living outside the refugee camps set up mainly in Turkish border cities.Turkey’s disaster management agency said on Monday, reports Today’s Zaman.‘We conducted a study before the

DHAKA: UN-Arab League special envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi is scheduled to pay a visit to Tehran in the coming days.An Iranian deputy foreign minister announced on Sunday, Tehran Times prints this report on Monday.Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, the deputy foreign minister for Arab and

DHAKA: Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh met Russian president Vladimir Putin on Monday amid signs that the two giants had failed to reach a breakthrough on a long-delayed nuclear power deal.Singh is using one of his last major foreign trips as prime minister before 2014 general

DHAKA: Saudi Arabia has an average of three cases of divorce every hour, official figures indicate.The total divorce cases recorded in 2012 were more than 30,000, an average of 82 a day and 3.4 an hour, according to a study published in local daily Al Eqtisadiya on Monday, reports