Sunny Peter

After growing hopes that a deal on Iran’s nuclear programme seemed plausible, the talks in Geneva have ended without an agreement on convincing Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment programme in exchange for temporary relief from sanctions. Earlier, on Friday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had cut-short his Middle East trip to attend the Geneva Conference. With Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reaching Geneva on Saturday, speculation grew that a deal with Iran might be imminent.

The Indonesian government denied Australia’s requests to send asylum seeking boat people back to Indonesia on two occasions since the launch of Operation Sovereign Borders, according to Australian government reports. Australian Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said on Sunday that his government had made four requests to Indonesia to accept asylum seekers whom the coastal patrol had found in Indonesia's search and rescue region.

Just days after the Pakistan Prime Minister said, his government was in the process of holding talks with the Pakistani Taliban, the militant group has rejected the idea. This announcement by the Pakistani Taliban comes after its leader Hakimullah Mehsud was killed in a U.S. drone strike on Nov 1. It paved the way for the election of hardline commander Mullah Fazlullah as the new leader of the group on Thursday.

Since March 2013, news has been going around that the Obama administration was planning to shift its lethal targeted killing drone programme from the CIA to a more transparent Department of Defence (DoD). But as it turns out now, the shift of operational control has been stalled, at least for the time-being. Reports say it is not expected to happen any time soon. The reasons: operational efficiency and flexibility to carry out covert deployment.

M23 rebel group in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which at one point occupied a regional capital of Goma, have announced an end to its almost 2 years of insurgent struggle stating that they are ready to search for a political solution to the root causes which led to its creation. The end of the rebellion, however, came just hours after the government forces claimed total victory after driving the rebels from their last two strongholds.

The U.S. military and intelligence agencies directed doctors and psychologists working in U.S. military detention centres violated their ethical agreements when dealing with terror detainees. These charges have been made in a taskforce report released by the Institute on Medicine as a Profession. The independent taskforce included a panel of military, ethics, medical, public health, and legal experts.

Egypt's first freely elected President Mohamed Morsi trial on charges of incitement of violence and murder began Monday but will be adjourned until Jan. 8, 2013.

Brazil’s government on Monday admitted that its top intelligence agency spied on diplomatic targets from countries including the U.S., Iran and Russia. Brazil’s Institutional Security Cabinet, however, clarified that the spying operation conducted a decade ago, were relatively basic and “in absolute compliance” with the country’s legislation.

Burmese opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi will visit Australia from Nov 27 to Dec 2. This will be her first visit to Australia. She will attend a host of public events in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne and also hold meetings with the Burmese community in Australia.

Lending credence to the argument that the U.S. and Europe allowed the situation in Syria to deteriorate, Turkey's President Abdullah Gul said Syria is dying and threatens to become an "Afghanistan on the shores of the Mediterranean."

In a decision that will have far-reaching implication, Germany became the first country in Europe to create a new category for "indeterminate sex." According to BCC, the move is aimed at taking the pressure of parents of newborns to make a quick decision on the sex assignment surgery.

Cambodian Khmer Rouge's last two surviving leaders Nuon Chea, the regime's number two leader and Khieu Samphan, its head of state, defended themselves denying charges of crimes against humanity and distanced themselves from the deaths under the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. A verdict in the case which began two years ago is expected in early 2014.

Pakistan has announced that it has begun talks with the Pakistan Taliban in an effort to find a peaceful solution to end the years of violence that has plagued the country. Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif revealed this at a meeting with British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg in London on Thursday. Mr. Sharif, however, did not give any further details of the discussions and neither did he reveal what was on the agenda.

Syria no longer has the capability to produce chemical weapons, at least as far as their disclosed facilities are concerned. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) tasked with the job of destroying Syria’s chemical weapon stockpile has said that it has overseen the destruction of equipment used for producing, mixing and filling chemical weapons. This achievement comes a day before the Nov 1 deadline.

Following allegation that Australia used its embassy in Jakarta and consulate in Bali to run spying operations across South-East Asia, Indonesia has summoned the Australian ambassador Greg Moriarty demanding answers.

New York City Council on Wednesday voted 35 to 10 to become the largest city in the U.S. to raise the legal age to buy cigarettes from 18 to 21. This move by the Bloomberg administration is seen as the latest in public health initiatives being implemented in the city; which had earlier raised the legal drinking age to 21.

Russia, which hosted the G20 summit in September, is reported to have included bugging devices in the basket of gifts that was given to world leaders. These bugging devices gifted by Russia include USB sticks infected with Trojan horses and recharge cables.

Did European intelligence agencies partner the U.S. National Security Agency in the mass surveillance program which whistle-blower Edward Snowden exposed? If report in the Wall Street Journal, are to be believed, the millions of European phone records tracked by NSA, now threatening US’ trans-Atlantic relations, were not collected by NSA but by intelligence agencies in those countries itself. This revelation, by WSJ timed before the head of NSA was due to testify before Congress, will help to t...

The police in China arrested five suspects on Wednesday evening in connection with the Monday’s deadly car crash suicide terror attack at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, state media reports. It was also revealed that the SUV used in the attack was registered in China’s restive Xinjiang province. Reports say police also found a petrol container, two knives, extremist flag and religious slogans in the vehicle.

Authorities in China are looking out for two men belonging to the country’s ethnic Uighur Muslim minority from the country’s restive Xinjiang province on suspected terror charges as they investigate whether the SUV which crash and then caught fire at Beijing's historic Tiananmen Square on Monday killing its three occupants and two tourists, and injuring 38 others, was actually a suicide attack.

Terming, the recent killing of Iranian border guards on its border with Pakistan, as a terror attack, Iran has demanded that Pakistan identify and extradite the perpetrators. On Oct 25, 14 Iranian border guards were killed and three others wounded by "armed bandits" in the border region of Saravan in the country's south-eastern province of Sistan-and-Baluchestan. In retaliation, meanwhile, on Saturday, Iran executed 16 people, said to be elements belonging to the "terrorist" group...

Tasmanian Greenpeace activist Colin Russell, arrested by the Russian authorities along with 29 others from the Greenpeace vessel, the Arctic Sunrise has been formally charged in Russia. Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed the Mr Russell had been formally charged with hooliganism.

Chemical Weapon inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) – the international chemical weapons watchdog - have completed verification activities at 21 of the 23 sites. The other two sites are located in conflict zones where conditions necessary for safe access could not be ensured. The U.S., however, remains skeptical on the actual number of chemical weapon sites, say reports.

In the latest attack by Chinese media on global companies, Starbucks and Samsung have both come under fire for allegedly bullying Chinese customers and over-charging them. Leading the charge China Central Television (CCTV) and the China Daily. This comes after iPhone maker Apple was blasted by CCTV earlier this year for not repairing customers' iPhones for free.

With the Cancer Council in Australia estimating that of all new cancer cases being reports, over 80% account for skin cancer, public health officials in several Australian states are in the process of banning the use of indoor skin tanning bed. The latest initiative is in the state of Victoria where lawmakers banned tanning devices effective end-2014. With Victoria’s action, five of the eight Australian states and territories have now banned the use of tanning salons and devices.

It is news that could prove damaging to the Pakistan government and its intelligence agency, the ISI. Even as the Pakistan government publicly condemns incidents of U.S. drone strikes in its territory, new reports in the U.S. media reveals that top officials in the Pakistani establishment are regularly briefed by U.S. agencies of such strikes. These strikes are being carried out under top secret agreement reached between both governments since the time of George W. Bush and Pervez Musharraf.

In an obvious effort to curb anti-American sentiments, Iranian officials pulled down a bunch of new anti-American billboards that had come in the country's capital city Tehran. The reason it said was that the poster were pulled down because they were put up without the permission of the city’s municipal authorities.

Israel came under attack by an unidentified collective of hackers who managed to shut down traffic on the busy Carmel Tunnels toll road in Haifa, the country's third-largest city. The latest cyber-attack on the Carmel Tunnel which happened on Sept 8 and 9 was first reported as a traffic control system malfunction.

Israel has warned that it will not hesitate to act alone against Iran, based on the findings of a recent report, which says that Iran has the capability to produce sufficient weapons-grade uranium to build a nuclear bomb in less than a month. Israeli government said, the report issued Thursday by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) is further justification why Israel will initiate military action before Iran can build its nuclear bomb.