BerlinL: Germany on Friday will become the first European country to allow babies born with characteristics of both sexes to be registered as neither male nor female. Parents will be allowed to leave the field for gender blank on birth certificates, effectively creating a category for indeterminate sex in the public register. “This will be the first time that the law acknowledges that there are human beings who are neither male nor female, or are both — people who do not fit into the traditional legal categories,” University of Bremen law professor Konstanze Plett told AFP. The change is intended to remove pressure on parents to quickly make a decision about controversial sex assignment surgeries for newborns. But even as ...
October 31, 2013 at 1:02 am | News Desk
Damascus: President Bashar al-Assad insisted in a meeting Wednesday with visiting UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi that Syrians alone will decide on the fate of an initiative for Geneva peace talks. The encounter came a day after the Red Crescent evacuated hundreds of civilians from a besieged town near Damascus, in an operation that saw rare cooperation among the regime, its opponents and the international community. Brahimi has been travelling the Middle East to muster support for proposed peace talks dubbed Geneva II. The Syrian leg of the tour is the most sensitive, as the veteran Algerian diplomat needs to persuade a wary regime and an increasingly divided opposition to attend. During his last visit to Damascus in December, Brahimi...
October 31, 2013 at 1:02 am | News Desk
Paris: Four French hostages who were kidnapped by Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in northern Niger in 2010 have been released, President Francois Hollande said Tuesday. “I have some good news. I just learned from Niger’s president that our four hostages in the Sahel, the Arlit hostages, have been released,” Hollande said on a visit to Bratislava. Frenchmen Thierry Dol, Daniel Larribe, Pierre Legrand and Marc Feret were working for French nuclear giant Areva when they were kidnapped on September 16, 2010, from a uranium compound in Arlit, north-central Niger. Hollande spoke of “three years of trials for the kidnapped men, who were held by unscrupulous captors”, and of “three years of suffering for the fam...
October 30, 2013 at 1:56 am | News Desk
Washington: Samsung extended its lead over Apple in the global smartphone market in the third quarter as Chinese manufacturers also made inroads, a survey showed Tuesday. The worldwide smartphone market saw record sales in the quarter, with growth of 38.8 percent from a year ago and 258.4 million units sold, the IDC survey said. The South Korean electronics giant Samsung widened its lead, shipping 81.2 million smartphones, boosting its market share by nearly half a percentage point to 31.4 percent. Apple sold 33.8 million iPhones in the quarter, but its growth was slower than the overall market, so its share slipped to 13.1 percent from 14.4 percent a year ago. China’s Huawei moved into third place, propelled by 76 percent year-over-y...
October 30, 2013 at 1:20 am | News Desk
Zurich: Following a string of scandals, a Swiss regulator has ordered the ountry’s biggest bank, UBS, to significantly increase the cash it has available to deal with legal and compliance issues. FINMA, the Swiss financial market regulator, had ordered the banking behemoth to temporarily increase by 50 percent the capital it sets aside to deal with operational risks, including unexpected legal cases. The bank, which is in the midst of a massive restructuring after turmoil during the financial crisis, said the order had come after FINMA examined its “recent loss history with the capital underpinning for operational risks.” As a result, UBS said that from the fourth quarter it would increase its so-called Risk Weighted Asset...
October 30, 2013 at 1:06 am | News Desk
Washington: President Barack Obama is considering whether to ban US spy agencies from eavesdropping on allied leaders, a senior official said Tuesday, following outrage in Europe over National Security Agency snooping. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said the step was under consideration, but that no policy decisions had yet been finalized, as Obama awaits results of several already announced reviews into US surveillance practices. The Obama administration was under increasing political heat at home and abroad, as revelations based on leaks from fugitive intelligence analyst Edward Snowden threatened to sour ties with allies and complicate its foreign policy goals. The senior official, howev...
October 30, 2013 at 1:00 am | News Desk
Johannesburg: The mastermind behind a rightwing extremist plot to kill former South African president Nelson Mandela and drive blacks out of the country was sentenced on Tuesday to 35 years in jail. Mike du Toit, the ringleader of a white supremacist militia called Boeremag, was given the heaviest sentence of 35 years along with four other defendants over a botched 2002 plot to overthrow the post-apartheid government, the prosecution said. The judge at the High Court in Pretoria sentenced the rest of the 20 militia members on trial to between 10 and 30 years depending on their degree of involvement in the plot, National Prosecution Authority spokesman Medupe Simasiku told AFP. Judge Eben Jordaan said Mandela would have been killed by a land...
October 30, 2013 at 1:00 am | News Desk
Damascus: Foreign Minister Walid Muallem insisted on Tuesday that only the Syrian people can choose their future, rejecting Western and Arab demands that President Bashar al-Assad step down. Muallem made the remarks to UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who is visiting Damascus to muster support for launching peace talks in Geneva, the official news agency SANA reported. “Syria will attend Geneva II based on the exclusive right of the Syrian people to choose their political future, to choose their leaders and to reject all forms of external intervention,” Muallem said. “The dialogue will take place between Syrians,” he added, rejecting regional and international interference in any dialogue. He also said that all ...
October 30, 2013 at 1:00 am | News Desk
Google is celebrating the birth anniversary of American costume designer Edith Head with and attractive doodle. Edith Head, who was born on October 28, 1897 in San Bernardino California, went on to become probably the most famous costume designer in Hollywood history. Throughout her sparkling career she won eight Academy Awards, more than any other woman. It was while working as a language teacher at the Hollywood School for Girls in 1932, after gaining a BA from Berkeley and an MA from Stanford, that Head bluffed her way into the costume department at Paramount. Despite having taken night classes to learn drawing her artistic skills were still at this point rudimentary. Head later admitted that she bluffed her way into Paramount by...
October 29, 2013 at 1:56 am | News Desk
London: The first trial in the phone-hacking scandal that sank Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World opened Monday with the tycoon’s key aide Rebekah Brooks in the dock alongside the British prime minister’s former media chief Andy Coulson. The two former editors of the tabloid are among eight defendants facing a jury for the first time over the scandal that sent shockwaves through British politics. Flame-haired Brooks, 45, arrived at the Old Bailey court in London to a storm of photographers’ flashes, accompanied by her racehorse trainer husband Charlie, who is also on trial. The defendants face charges ranging from illegally hacking the mobile phone voicemails of a murdered schoolgirl and celebrities such as Paul McCa...
October 29, 2013 at 1:29 am | News Desk
Pakistan Rupee Exchange Rate