Damascus : At least 200 people were killed and hundreds wounded in Homs in the most brutal government crackdown till date in the 11-month old uprising in Syria, activists have said. Two main opposition groups, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees claimed that the death toll was over 200 [...]

Washington : U.S. defense secretary Leon E. Panetta said U.S. forces would end their combat mission in Afghanistan by mid-2013, taking on an “advise and assist” role (NYT) to Afghan security forces. All U.S. troops are expected to be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Panetta made the announcement en route to Brussels [...]

London:  Indian-origin Avtar Singh Kolar and his wife Carole Kolar were battered to death in a lump hammer attack in their Birmingham home earlier this month for just two mobile phones and two watches, a media report today said. Suspect Rimvydas Liorancas, 37, who was found dead in his prison cell on Saturday, is believed [...]

Cairo  : A 42-year-old French tourist was killed by robbers at a currency exchange shop in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Xinhua reported.  The masked gunmen robbed the shop and exchanged fire with the security forces. Two others, a German tourist and an Egyptian citizen, were injured. The French man was shot [...]

 Washington:  Solar radiation from a massive sun storm – the largest in nearly a decade – collided with the Earth’s atmosphere on Tuesday, prompting an airline to reroute flights and sky watchers to seek out spectacular light displays. US carrier Delta Air Lines said it had adjusted flight routes for transpolar journeys between Asia [...]

Beijing  :  About 30 Tibetans injured after Chinese police fired into a crowd of protesters in a restive southwestern region were seeking shelter Tuesday in a monastery while military forces surrounded the building, a Tibetan monk said. Chinese authorities said Monday’s unrest was caused by a “mob” and that overseas advocacy groups were twisting the [...]

Top Canadian freestyle skier Sarah Burke, an early gold medal favorite ahead of the 2014 Olympics, died at a Utah hospital on Thursday from injuries she suffered in a training fall. She was 29. Burke, one of the top half-pipe athletes in the world and an ambassador for freestyle skiing who lobbied hard for the [...]

Moscow : At least three crew members of a South Korean fishing boat are thought to have died when their vessel caught fire in Antarctica Wednesday, officials said.  There were Russian, Chinese, Indonesian, Vietnamese and South Korean nationals among the 40 crew members. “Three crew members are still missing and are believed to have died [...]

Houston : They look like ordinary baby rhesus macaques, but Hex, Roku and Chimero are the world’s first chimeric monkeys, each with cells from the genomes of as many as six rhesus monkeys. Until now research on so-called chimeric animals, or those that have cells with different genomes, has been limited to mice; a recent [...]

Mascow: “Sathymeva Jayate”, says Indian Constitution and Law. It was a resounding victory for India in Siberian Russia on Wednesday, Dec 28, whom a local petitioner’s contention against Indian scripture, the Song of God (Bhagavad Gita) was disallowed, and the demand made y a Russian group in Siberia that Gita was disallowed, and the demand [...]