Sri Lanka’s ruling Rajapaksa brothers secured a two-thirds majority in a parliamentary election that will allow them to rewrite the constitution and increase their power, final results showed yesterday.

A former senior Saudi intelligence official said in a US lawsuit Thursday that the country’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman tried to have him assassinated in 2018, just weeks after dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in Turkey.

The envoy leading President Donald Trump’s hardline push on Iran quit on Thursday, months before an election that could reorient US policy.

Even as Pakistan this week drew international attention to the plight of Muslims in Indian Kashmir, Islamabad stayed conspicuously silent about another embattled Muslim community -- China’s Uighur population.

The World Health Organization has warned against “vaccine nationalism,” saying vaccine-hogging richer countries would not be safe coronavirus havens if poor nations remained exposed.

The death toll from the Beirut port explosion has risen to 154, state news agency NNA reported yesterday as authorities detained sixteen staff members at the port amid public anger.

A landslide caused by torrential rains killed at least 15 tea garden workers in the southern Indian state of Kerala, and rescue workers were searching for more than 50 people thought to be trapped under soil and debris, officials say.

The dollar is at its most oversold level in over 40 years, investment bank Morgan Stanley says, adding it had now shifted from its dollar-bearish stance and turned “tactically neutral” on the US currency.

Radiant in a long white gown and veil, 29-year-old Lebanese bride Israa Seblani stands smiling and posing for her wedding video. The scene is shattered by a deafening roar, and a powerful shockwave nearly blows her off her feet.

US President Donald Trump on Thursday unveiled sweeping bans on US transactions with China’s ByteDance, owner of video-sharing app TikTok, and Tencent (0700.HK), operator of messenger app WeChat, in a major escalation of tensions with Beijing.

Lebanese authorities have arrested 16 people in an investigation into the Beirut port warehouse explosion, state news agency NNA says, and a judicial source and local media say the port's general manager is among those being held.

US President Donald Trump has said it was possible the United States would have a coronavirus vaccine before the November 3 election, a more optimistic forecast on timing than anything suggested by his own White House health experts.

A gunman believed to have Islamist ties is holding three people hostage in a bank in northern France.

At least 30 people were injured in a grenade attack on a rally in Karachi on Wednesday, as Pakistan marked the first anniversary of India’s revocation of Kashmir’s semi-autonomy.

India’s defence ministry has warned, in a statement since removed from its website, that a military standoff with China that began with border fighting in June is likely to be a long one, despite multiple rounds of talks between the nuclear-armed rivals to defuse the tension.

India has recorded the biggest single-day fatalities of 904 in the past 24 hours as fresh coronavirus infections surged by another 56,282 cases to reach nearly two million.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday offered a $10 million reward aimed at preventing foreign interference in the November election, as the State Department accused Russia of waging an increasingly sophisticated disinformation campaign.

Sri Lanka’s ruling party took a clear lead yesterday in early results from parliamentary elections in which the dominant Rajapaksa family hope to strengthen their grip on power.

The US is expanding its China-targeted Clean Network program to include Chinese-made cellphone apps and cloud computing services that it claims are security risks, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Wednesday.

Dinosaurs loom in the imagination as forces of nature, but a new study that identifies the first known case of cancer in the creatures shows they suffered from the debilitating disease too.