Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy is being held by police in connection to alleged campaign funding from late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Mr Sarkozy is being questioned as part of an investigation into irregularities in election campaign financing, a French court source told Reuters. He is said to have accepted €50m from Muammar Gaddafi's regime, claims which have been repeated by the late Libyan dictator's son and French businessman Ziad Takieddine. The amount would be more than double the legal spending limit in French elections at that time, which was €21m. Allege ... Read More

Jagmeet Singh, the head of Canadas New Democratic Party (NDP), has disavowed all acts of terrorism even as he came into the eye of a storm over his appearance at an apparently pro-Khalistan event in San Francisco in 2015. Singh, who was denied a visa by India in 2013 and had not spoken out against the practice of some guruwaras in Canada eulogising Sikh militants as heroes, had appeared at the San Francisco event on a platform with the backdrop of a large poster of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, considered in India as the person who birthed the violence of the Khalistan movement in the 1980s. ... Read More

Russian news reports say the hatch of a cargo plane carrying precious metals accidentally flew open upon take-off — scattering at least 3 tons of gold on the runway. An investigation is underway after the incident Thursday at the airport in the far-east city of Yakutsk, according to the Tass news agency. An An-12 plane operated by the airline Nimbus took off for Krasnoyarsk carrying 9.3 tons of gold and other precious metals, according to a statement from the state Investigative Committee quoted by Tass. Damage to a door handle caused it to fly open and spill some of the metal. Auth ... Read More

In Professor Dowells Head, a 1925 science fiction novel by Alexander Belyayev that was a must read when I was a kid, a dying scientist bequeaths his body to a colleague who then revives just the heart and the head. In this form, Professor Dowell lives on but hates it. The life of British physicist Stephen Hawking, who died on Tuesday, had been almost like fictional Dowells since the 1980s, and he cherished it. Hawkings scientific achievements are too obscure for most people, even though he was outstanding at popularizing his work.A Brief History of Time, his popular work on cosmology, sold ... Read More

A Japanese Nobel-winning chemist was discovered wandering in rural Northern Illinois and his wife found dead nearby, some nine hours after they had been reported missing from their home 200 miles away, police said on Wednesday. Nobel Prize winner Ei-ichi Negishi, 82, was transported to a local hospital for treatment after he was spotted walking near Rockford, Illinois, at 5am on Tuesday, the Ogle County Sheriff’s Department officials said in a written statement. Deputies later found the couple’s car and the body of his wife, Sumire Negishi, at the nearby Ochard Hills Landfill, the sh ... Read More

The US state of Oklahoma plans to become the first in the country to use nitrogen gas to execute condemned prisoners, law enforcement officials announced Wednesday. The state intends to adopt the new execution method as prison officials are unable to acquire the necessary drugs for lethal injections – the method currently employed by all American states that carry out the death penalty. States have struggled to obtain lethal injection drugs as manufacturers and suppliers increasingly have shunned them under pressure from death penalty opponents. ... Read More