North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has promoted his sister to a senior ruling party post, state media said Sunday, and praised the country's nuclear weapons programme which has sparked international alarm.Kim Yo-Jong becomes an alternate member of the party's powerful politburo, the decision-making body presided over by her brother, the official KCNA news agency said.The promotion was announced along with those for dozens of other top officials at a party meeting led by the leader on Saturday. It c

Nuclear disarmament group ICAN won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for its decade-long campaign to rid the world of the atomic bomb as nuclear-fuelled crises swirl over North Korea and Iran.More than 70 years since atomic bombs were used on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nobel committee sought to highlight ICAN's tireless non-proliferation efforts.A handout photo made available by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons shows ICAN activists protesting against at

Wal-Mart said Thursday it no longer imports fish from a Chinese factory that employed North Koreans after a report said the US retailer may have inadvertently subsidized the nuclear-armed state.Wal-Mart barred suppliers from using fish from a facility in Hunchun, one of several in the eastern Chinese city that were reported to employ North Korean laborers in slave-like conditions.Wal-Mart gave the Hunchun facility a "red" rating after it did not cooperate with a company investigation into labor

Business magazine Forbes, famous for its annual ranking of the world's wealthiest, is launching a French edition to chart President Emmanuel Macron's progress in turning his country into a "startup nation".Forbes is a fortnightly magazine but the French-language edition, which will hit newsstands Friday, will be published only every three months.The first issue will retrace the 100-year history of the publication and look ahead to the next 100 through interviews with business magnates

With a wave of films, television series and art shows championing "gender fluidity" -- and catwalks awash with "gender neutral" models and clothes -- the old dividing line between the sexes is being increasingly called into question.But as the blurring of boundaries has gone from the margins to being a progressive cause, the political temperature of the debate has risen sharply.Gender fluidity has become a hot-button issue in the culture wars between liberals and conservatives, often reduced to

The Japanese publisher of Nagasaki-born Kazuo Ishiguro said Friday it would republish eight of the British author's books in translation, reporting "a huge number of orders" after he won the Nobel Literature Prize.Ishiguro left Japan when he was five and moved to Britain, only returning to visit his native land as an adult three decades later.Japan had been pinning its hopes on its best-known novelist Haruki Murakami to win the Nobel Prize but eagerly claimed a link to the  British winner with J

British author Kazuo Ishiguro, best known for his novel "The Remains of the Day", won the Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday, the Swedish Academy said.The 62-year-old, "in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world," the Academy wrote in its citation.In this Saturday, Aug 8, 2009 file photo, author Kazuo Ishiguro poses for photographers before receiving the "Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa" prize for literature, in Santa Margheri

A state-owned Russian company has opened up a second internet connection for North Korea which could strengthen Pyongyang's cyber capabilities and undermine US efforts to isolate the regime, security experts said.   The activation of the new line from TransTeleCom was first detected Sunday by analysts at Dyn Research, which monitors global internet connectivity.   The new connection supplements the existing link provided by China Unicom, which has almost exclusively routed North Korean internet

"Look at the inside of my shoe, ok?" replies Danica Roem when asked how many voters she has already approached in her bid to win a Virginia statehouse seat.The Democratic candidate has no time for subtleties as she races to become the first openly transgender person elected to office in this Republican US state. Danica Roem (Twitter)Whether spitting in the trashcan during a recent interview with Cosmopolitan magazine or whipping off her ballerina flat to show its worn insole to AFP, this young w

STOCKHOLM (AFP) - US astrophysicists Barry Barish, Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss were awarded the Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday for the discovery of gravitational waves -- a phenomenon that opens a door on the extreme Universe.Predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago as part of his theory of general relativity, but only detected in 2015, gravitational waves are "ripples" in space-time, as the theoretical fabric of the cosmos is called.They are caused by ultra-violent processes, such as collidin

Stephen Craig Paddock, the retired accountant who smuggled an armory's worth of weapons into a swank Las Vegas hotel and mowed down concert-goers from a 32nd story window, was a high-stakes gambler whose bank-robber father was once on the FBI's most wanted list.The 64-year-old had a home in a tranquil golf course retirement community in Mesquite, Nevada, 80 miles (130 kilometers) east of the gambling hub and, according to a brother, showed no sign he was poised to commit mass murder. This undate

WASHINGTON (AFP) - After a gunman killed more than 50 people at a Las Vegas concert Sunday, here are some of the deadliest mass shootings in the United States in the past 25 years.People carry a peson at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival after apparent gun fire was heard on Sunday in Las Vegas, Nevada. (AFP-Yonhap      - Florida club: 49 killed -   ===========================      A heavily-armed gunman opens fire inside a gay nightclub in the city of Orlando on June 12, 2016 and kills

LAS VEGAS (AFP) - Police said Monday they believe the gunman who opened fire on concertgoers on the Las Vegas strip killed himself before officers broke into his hotel room."We believe the individual killed himself prior to our entry," Las Vegas Sheriff Joseph Lombardo told a news conference.Drapes billow out of broken windows at the Mandalay Bay resort and casino Monday, Oct. 2, 2017, on the Las Vegas Strip following a deadly shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas. A gunman was found dead in

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President Donald Trump sent his "warmest condolences" Monday to the victims and families of a shooting at a concert in Las Vegas which has killed at least 50 people."My warmest condolences and sympathies to the victims and families of the terrible Las Vegas shooting. God bless you!" Trump wrote on Twitter in response to what is the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history.Police run to cover at the scene of a shooting near the Mandalay Bay resort and casino on the Las V

(Yonhap)US trio Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young won the 2017 Nobel Medicine Prize for their work on internal biological clocks known as the circadian rhythm, the jury said on Monday."Their discoveries explain how plants, animals and humans adapt their biological rhythm so that it is synchronized with the Earth's revolutions," the Nobel Assembly said.

Two women pleaded not guilty Monday to murdering the half-brother of North Korea's leader, at the start of their trial in Malaysia over the Cold War-style assassination that shocked the world.Indonesian Siti Aisyah and Vietnamese Doan Thi Huong, who arrived at the heavily guarded court in handcuffs and wearing bulletproof vests, entered their pleas through interpreters as proceedings got under way.The defendants were arrested just days after the killing of Kim Jong-Nam on February 13 as he waite

On any night of the week, residents of cosmopolitan Dubai can get a taste of reclusive North Korea's culture at Okryu-gwan, a satellite of Pyongyang's massive national canteen.   On a weekend night, a waitress, wearing a stoplight red dress and DPRK flag name tag, carried a tray full of matching red Coca-Cola cans to a table of Asian patrons.   The waitress -- one of thousands of North Koreans working in the Gulf with the blessing of Pyongyang -- served the ubiquitous American soft drink without

At least 15 people drowned and scores are feared missing after a boat carrying Rohingya families capsized off Bangladesh Thursday, as UN chief Antonio Guterres exhorted Myanmar's leaders to end the refugees' "nightmare."The growing Rohingya refugee crisis prompted the UN Security Council to hold a rare public meeting on Myanmar, with the US slamming the country for trying "to cleanse the country of an ethnic minority" while Beijing and Moscow backed the Myanmar authorities. People come to see th

North Korea on Thursday accused Donald Trump of exploiting the death of Otto Warmbier, referring to the US president as an "old lunatic" for alleging the American student was tortured while in Pyongyang's custody.In a statement issued by the state-run KCNA news agency, North Korea's foreign ministry accused the US of "luring and pushing" 22-year-old Warmbier into breaking the country's laws. "Trump and his clique, for their anti-DPRK propaganda, are again exploiting the death of Otto Warmbier,"

Britain and the EU have taken "decisive steps forward' in Brexit talks after Prime Minister Theresa May's speech last week but more work needs to be done, negotiators said Thursday.Speaking after the fourth round of talks in Brussels, EU negotiator Michel Barnier and his British counterpart David Davis said they had achieved more clarity on the details of May's speech in Florence.But Barnier warned that they were "not there yet", with time running out to achieve sufficient progress to get EU lea