US President Barack Obama called his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and discussed with him the Iranian nuclear issues and the current situation in Syria, the White House said. Obama called Putin yesterday to discuss next steps in the bilateral relationship and to coordinate on regional and global issues, the White House said in a statement.

The Union home ministry has asked the Andhra Pradesh government to hand over the probe into the Dilsukhnagar twin blasts here to the National Investigation Agency (NIA), a senior officer said today.

Amid calls for a larger role for him, Narendra Modi today won singular praise from BJP president Rajnath Singh for being the “most popular” chief minister having registered “never before” three consecutive electoral wins for the party in Gujarat.

Former military ruler Pervez Musharraf, who has been living in self-exile for nearly four years, on Friday said he would return to Pakistan within a week of the formation of a caretaker administration later this month.

In a stern warning to rebels, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Friday said that from now on the doors will not remain open for those who leave the party and contest elections against official nominees as he would do away with the practice of re-inducting such members.

Two Afghan teenagers — Fawad Mohammadi and Jawanmard Paiz — whose film Buzkashi Boys was recently nominated at the Oscars, capturing the attention of Hollywood for their impressive acting, look up to Indian superstars Shah Rukh Khan and Sunny Deol as their idols.

Telepathy just around the corner? Researchers have allowed rats thousands of miles apart to communicate with each other by connecting their brains through cables. Scientists wired the brains of two rats together and show that signals from one rat’s brain can help the second rat solve a problem it would otherwise have no clue how to solve.

In good news for teens, scientists have discovered that acne bacteria contain some beneficial strains which may act as body’s natural defence to protect the skin from pimples. Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), along with those at Washington University in St Louis and the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute have discovered that acne bacteria contain “bad” strains associated with pimples and “good” strains that may protect the skin.

Astronomers have captured the first direct images of a forming planet still embedded in a thick disc of gas and dust surrounding a young star, just 335 light-years from earth.

Columbus, credited with the discovery of Americas, may not have been the first to set foot on the continent, says a British explorer, claiming that Phoenicians actually beat him by 2,000 years.