Egyptian tycoon Hisham Talaat Mustafa was charged on Tuesday with paying two million dollars for the brutal killing of Lebanese pop singer Suzanne Tamim, reportedly his one-time lover. Mustafa was arrested and charged with ordering the murder of Tamim at her upmarket flat in Dubai in July, Egyptian prosecutor Abdel Meguid Mahmud said in a statement [...]

Asif Ali Zardari, the man poised to become Pakistan’s next president, is still known as “Mr. 10 Percent” because of corruption allegations. Now his own lawyers say he may have suffered from mental health problems within the past year.That has left many Pakistanis wondering: Is this the best man for the job? “People have short memories, but not [...]

Actress Masumeh Makhija’s career hasn’t fared well in Bollywood since her debut in Chupke Se, but she has bagged international films and is happy flaunting them. Having already worked in a German film, she is ready to star in a yet-to-be titled Italian venture. “My films are not crossovers but genuine European films. I have been doing [...]

President Bush, trying to prove his administration has learned the haunting lessons of Katrina, flew to Texas for briefings on Hurricane Gustav, which hit land on Monday, battering the Gulf Coast with flood waters and more than 100 mph winds. Bush had planned to address the Republican National Convention, but he headed instead to [...]

Fasting is another unique moral and spiritual characteristic of Islam. Literally defined, fasting means to abstain “completely” from foods, drinks, intimate intercourse and smoking, before the break of the dawn till sunset, during the entire month of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic year. But if we restrict the meaning of the Islamic Fasting [...]

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has insisted that he does not want to dazzle a TV audience estimated to be in the tens of millions with “a bunch of a high-flying rhetoric”, but instead, intends to focus on the kitchen-table economic issues facing American voters. “The single most important thing I have to make clear is [...]

Lesbian activist Del Martin died on Wednesday, just two months after marrying her partner of 55 years in one of the first legally recognized California same-sex weddings.Martin, 87, who wed Phyllis Lyon, 83, in San Francisco’s City Hall in June, died of natural causes at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center on Wednesday [...]

Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim will be sworn in as a member of parliament on Thursday, his party said, after a landslide by-election victory that ended his decade-long political exile. Anwar, who was sacked as deputy premier in 1998 and jailed on sodomy and corruption charges, returns to parliament as the head of the [...]

Mumbai,  Bollywood star Bipasha Basu got a tear in the knee while rehearsing her dance steps in Bangkok, but the actress says it’s no big deal. She even brought her physiotherapist to the sets in Mumbai so that she didn’t have to inconvenience anyone with her problem. “I didn’t even know it was a tear. There [...]

Pakistan’s election commission has announced that the parliament and the country’s four provincial assemblies will elect a new president on September 6. VOA’s Barry Newhouse reports from Islamabad that the election to replace former president Pervez Musharraf, who resigned this week, is likely to test the country’s fragile coalition government. Pakistan’s president has historically been a [...]

Anwar Ibrahim the opposition leader of Malaysia started his way towards parliament again after the absence of a decade. Anwar’s majority of 15,671 votes was bigger than that obtained by his wife Datuk Seri Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail in the March general election. The third candidate, Hanafi Mamat, who contested on a Parti Keadilan Insan [...]

Ailing and aging, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy summoned fellow Democrats to rally behind Barack Obama’s pioneering quest for the White House Monday night, providing a poignant opening to a party convention in search of unity for the fall campaign. “The work begins anew, the hope rises again and the dream lives on,” Kennedy said in a [...]