US President Donald Trump's new travel ban can "compound" the anguish of refugees fleeing deadly violence and persecution, the UN refugee agency has warned.

"The imperative remains to provide protection for people fleeing deadly violence and we are concerned that this decision, though temporary, may compound the anguish for those it affects," UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Filippo Grandi said in a statement.

Grandi's statement follows the signing of the revised executive order yesterday by Trump that would, among other things, suspend the country's refugee programme for 120 days.

It would also bar for 90-days travel to the US by citizens of Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.

The new measure follows a similar order signed by Trump in January, which barred all nationals from seven Muslim- majority countries from entering the US for 90 days. Under that order, Syrian refugees were barred indefinitely.

In the wake of the new order, the UN refugee agency reiterated its readiness to engage constructively with the US administration to ensure all refugee programmes meet the highest standards for safety and security.

"Americans have long played a crucial role in promoting global stability while simultaneously exemplifying the highest humanitarian ideals, from support for refugee emergencies overseas, to welcoming some of the most vulnerable refugee families in the US to rebuild their lives in safety, freedom and dignity," said UNHCR.

"This is the gold standard in refugee protection and a powerful model for all countries," it said, adding that at a time of record-high levels of forced human displacement, "this kind of humane leadership is needed more than ever." 

He said the UN refugee office has long been a partner for the US in finding solutions to refugee problems, "and we look forward to continuing this partnership." 

Scientists have developed a new blood test that can detect cancer and locate where the tumour is growing, providing a potential alternative to invasive surgical procedures like biopsies.

When a tumour starts to take over a part of the body, it competes with normal cells for nutrients and space, killing them off in the process, according to researchers from the University of California, San Diego in the US.

As normal cells die, they release their DNA into the bloodstream and that DNA could identify the affected tissue.

"We made this discovery by accident. Initially, we were taking the conventional approach and just looking for cancer cell signals and trying to find out where they were coming from," said Kun Zhang, a professor at UC San Diego.

"But we were also seeing signals from other cells and realised that if we integrate both sets of signals together, we could actually determine the presence or absence of a tumour, and where the tumour is growing," Zhang added.

Researchers put together a database of the complete CpG methylation patterns of 10 different normal tissues (liver, intestine, colon, lung, brain, kidney, pancreas, spleen, stomach and blood).

They analysed tumour samples and blood samples from cancer patients to put together a database of cancer-specific genetic markers.

Blood samples from individuals with and without tumours were screened. They looked for signals of the cancer markers and the tissue-specific methylation patterns.

The test works like a dual authentication process. The combination of both signals, above a statistical cutoff, is required to assign a positive match, researchers said.

The study was published in the journal Nature Genetics.

Iraq announced today that its forces have retaken the provincial government headquarters and a second bridgehead from the Islamic State group in west Mosul.

The operation to retake west Mosul — IS's largest remaining urban stronghold — was launched on February 19, but the advance had slowed in the face of several days of bad weather until a renewed push began on Sunday.

"The heroes of the federal police and Rapid Response liberate the government building for Nineveh province and control the second bridge (Al-Hurriyah Bridge)," the Joint Operations Command said in a statement.

Mosul, Iraq's second city, is the capital of Nineveh province.

The city is divided by the Tigris River, and while bridges crossing it have been either damaged or destroyed, they would provide a link between the government-held east and IS-held west if they can be repaired or otherwise bridged.

The fighting in west Mosul has forced more than 50,000 people to flee, the International Organization for Migration said.

IS overran large areas north and west of Baghdad in 2014, but Iraqi forces backed by US-led air strikes and other support have since regained most of the ground they lost.

Malaysia will wait to question suspects in the Kim Jong-Nam killing believed to be holed up in Kuala Lumpur's North Korean embassy "even if it takes five years," the country's police chief said today.

A police cordon was set up outside the embassy after Pyongyang announced it would ban Malaysians from leaving North Korea, prompting an immediate tit-for-tat move from Kuala Lumpur.

The travel bans are just the latest twist in a heated diplomatic row over the Cold War-style assassination of the half-brother of North Korea's leader in Malaysia last month, which has seen Kuala Lumpur expel Pyongyang's envoy and vice-versa.

"We will wait, if it takes five years, we will wait outside. Definitely somebody will come out," police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said at a press conference in Penang, adding that he believed three people wanted in connection to the murder were in the building.

"This morning the deputy prime minister issued instructions not to allow any North Korean embassy staff to leave the country," Deputy Home Minister Nur Jazlan Mohamed told journalists outside the embassy.

"At the moment we're trying to ascertain their numbers and their movements." 

Police set up a barricade with cars blocking both ends of the street leading up to the North Korean embassy shortly after noon, an AFP journalist said.

Around a dozen armed officers wearing bulletproof vests were stationed at each end of the road.

They rolled out yellow ticker-tape reading "do not cross" and initially denied a request from an embassy official to remove the barricade so a car could leave the compound.

Shortly afterwards the tape was removed and two cars were allowed to leave. Police presence was scaled down but officers remained patrolling the road and were seen tracking movements out of the embassy in a ledger.

Around 100 journalists and photographers were also gathered outside.

The embassy, a two-storey neo-colonial house with a North Korean flag fluttering, is situated in Kuala Lumpur's well-heeled Bukit Damansara area known for its hipster cafes and restaurants.

The nascent stand-off has already been compared to the Julian Assange case, which has seen the founder of the secret-spilling Wikileaks website holed up at the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012.

Two women — from Indonesia and Vietnam — have been charged with the killing, but Malaysian police have also named eight North Korean suspects, including the embassy's second secretary and an employee of North Korea's national airline.

As many as 500 huts were gutted after a fire broke out on Tuesday at Paschimi Sundarapur panchayat in Bihar's Champaran district, police said.

Property worth several lakhs was gutted. However, no loss of life has been reported, Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Mundrika Prasad said.

"The incident took place in Malahi tola where the fire broke out in the kitchen of one of the huts. Aided by strong winds, the fire engulfed the other adjacent houses," Prasad said, adding "as many as 500 huts were gutted." 

Three fire tenders were pressed into service and the situation has been brought under control now, the officer said.

NASA is planning to send an ice chest-sized box to the International Space Station (ISS), where it will freeze gas atoms to create the coolest spot in the universe, an advance that may provide new insights into gravity and dark matter.

Inside that box, lasers, a vacuum chamber and an electromagnetic "knife" will be used to cancel out the energy of gas particles, slowing them until they're almost motionless.

The suite of instruments, developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US, is called the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL). It is set to ride to space in August aboard the SpaceX CRS-12.

CAL's instruments are designed to freeze gas atoms to a mere billionth of a degree above absolute zero – more than 100 million times colder than the depths of space.

"Studying these hyper-cold atoms could reshape our understanding of matter and the fundamental nature of gravity," said CAL Project Scientist Robert Thompson of JPL.

"The experiments we'll do with the Cold Atom Lab will give us insight into gravity and dark energy – some of the most pervasive forces in the universe," said Thompson.

When atoms are cooled to extreme temperatures, as they will be inside of CAL, they can form a distinct state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.

In this state, familiar rules of physics recede and quantum physics begins to take over. Matter can be observed behaving less like particles and more like waves.

Rows of atoms move in concert with one another as if they were riding a moving fabric. These mysterious waveforms have never been seen at temperatures as low as what CAL will achieve.

NASA has never before created or observed Bose-Einstein condensates in space. On Earth, the pull of gravity causes atoms to continually settle towards the ground, meaning they are typically only observable for fractions of a second.

However, on the ISS, ultra-cold atoms can hold their wave-like forms longer while in freefall. That offers scientists a longer window to understand physics at its most basic level.

Thompson estimated that CAL will allow Bose-Einstein condensates to be observable for up to five to 10 seconds; future development of the technologies used on CAL could allow them to last for hundreds of seconds.

Bose-Einstein condensates are a "superfluid" – a kind of fluid with zero viscosity, where atoms move without friction as if they were all one, solid substance.

"If you had superfluid water and spun it around in a glass, it would spin forever. There's no viscosity to slow it down and dissipate the kinetic energy," said Anita Sengupta of JPL, Cold Atom Lab project manager.

"If we can better understand the physics of superfluids, we can possibly learn to use those for more efficient transfer of energy," said Sengupta.

Bipasha Basu has been accused of being unprofessional by the organisers of a UK-based fashion show, a charge the actress denies.

Basu, who is currently in London with husband Karan Singh Grover, was to walk as the showstopper for the fashion show but she allegedly did not honour the commitment.

According to the talent scout of the show, Ronita Sharma Rekhi's Facebook post, the actress "wanted her husband to fly out to London with her and wanted their stay be extended to five nights, which was originally for three nights only." 

Ronita, without mentioning Bipasha's name in her post, further claimed that the actress asked the organisers to pay for their entire stay otherwise "she will not do our event so now this is like a gun point situation." 

Ronita claims the actress eventually did not turn up for the show.

However, taking to Twitter, Bipasha, 38, rubbished Ronita's claims and said, "a con woman talking utter rubbish about my work ethics." 

In another post the actress wrote, "15 years you don't last any business being unprofessional. You last because you are clear and particular and have self respect." 

She also shared a picture on Instagram which read– "less you respond (to) the negative people, the more peaceful your life will become." 

In a major development to the Panama papers leak case, the Supreme Court on Tuesday asked the Centre to file in a sealed cover report of a multi-agency probe into the case, which was set up in April last year.

The apex court said that only after going through the reports it would see whether the matter needs a SIT probe or not. The next hearing is on April 18.

Lawyer Manohar Lal Sharma had filed a plea in the apex court seeking a thorough investigation into the Panama papers leak case. The apex court was hearing the petition seeking a detailed court monitored investigation against the Indian offshore account holders and stock market regulators, whose names had been exposed in the Panama papers leak case.

Many Indian industrialists and celebrities have been named in the Panama papers leak case, the petition of Sharma claimed.

Sharma had earlier sought a direction to the CBI to lodge FIRs and conduct probe into the alleged offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act and Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

A bench led by Justice Dipak Misra was asked to direct the CBI to lodge FIRs and conduct probe into the alleged offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act and Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

The case is currently being monitored by multiple agencies headed by the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) chairman Atulesh Jindal and includes officials from the investigative unit of the CBDT and its Foreign Tax and Tax Research division, the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

China is planning to put up to 8 latest navigation satellites into space this year as part of its plan to form an orbitting network and offer worldwide navigation services by 2020.

Compared to earlier generation products, the BeiDou-3 is able to cover a wider range and has a longer lifespan of 12 years, Bao Weimin, an official with China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation was quoted as saying by state-run Xinhua news agency.

It is part of a plan to put 35 BeiDou satellites into space to form an orbiting satellite network and offer worldwide navigation services by 2020, Yang Yuanxi, deputy chief designer of the BeiDou satellite navigation system, told official media.

Named after the Chinese name for the Big Dipper constellation, the BeiDou system is designed to offer an alternative to America's Global positioning System.

A government white paper published in December said China expects to provide basic services to limited number of clients in 2018 and expand to all clients with more accurate and reliable services through better ground and satellite-based systems by 2020.

China has already sent 22 BeiDou satellites into space.

Yang said the launches this year will feature two satellites on a single carrier rocket.

The National Investigation Agency has seized counterfeit notes with the face value of Rs.3.90 lakh from two persons here, police said.

The fake notes, in the denomination of Rs.2,000, were seized from the duo during a search in Kanir More locality of the town on Wednesday.

Both the persons, hailing from Baisnabnagar area in Malda district, were suspected to have links with a fake note racket in Bangladesh, police officials said.

They were arrested.

Meanwhile, two persons were arrested for carrying one kg brown sugar, worth Rs.1 crore, 2.5 quintals of poppy seeds and 500 grams of Ganja from Kaliachak and Baisnabnager police station areas in the district during raids yesterday, Superintendent of Police Arnab Ghosh said.

Police also seized Rs.7.50 lakh from the possession of one accused.

Making handsome gains, Reliance Capital has sold nearly one per cent stake in digital wallet payments firm Paytm to China’s Alibaba Group for Rs.275 crore, media reports said on Tuesday.

The Anil Ambani-led financial services holding firm had bought this stake for Rs.10 crore.

The deal gives a valuation of over $4 billion to Paytm, which is already backed by Alibaba Group as a strategic investor.

However, according to reports, Reliance Capital has retained its stake in Paytm e-commerce, which it had got free of cost by virtue of the investment in the parent firm.

The move was expected, as Reliance Capital had said that it would trim its proprietary investment portfolio as part of its plans to monetise non-core assets.

Future automobile tires could come from the farm as much as the factory, thanks to a new way developed by scientists to convert waste tomato peels and eggshells into petroleum-based filler for sustainable rubber.

Researchers at The Ohio State University in the US have discovered that food waste can partially replace the petroleum-based filler that has been used in manufacturing tires for more than a century.

In tests, rubber made with the new fillers exceeds industrial standards for performance, which may ultimately open up new applications, researchers said.

According to researcher Katrina Cornish, the technology can make the manufacture of rubber products more sustainable and keep waste out of landfills.

Cornish developed the new method for turning eggshells and tomato peels into viable replacements for carbon black, a petroleum-based filler.

About 30 per cent of a typical automobile tire is carbon black; it is the reason tires appear black. It makes the rubber durable, and its cost varies with petroleum prices.

Carbon black is getting harder to come by, Cornish said.

"The tire industry is growing very quickly, and we do not just need more natural rubber, we need more filler, too," she said.

"We are not suggesting that we collect the eggshells from your breakfast. We are going right to the biggest source," Cornish said.

Commercial tomatoes have been bred to grow thick, fibrous skins so that they can survive being packed and transported long distances.

When food companies want to make a product such as tomato sauce, they peel and discard the skin, which is not easily digestible.

Cindy Barrera, a postdoctoral researcher in Cornish's lab, found in tests that eggshells have porous microstructures that provide larger surface area for contact with the rubber, and give rubber-based materials unusual properties.

Tomato peels, on the other hand, are highly stable at high temperatures and can also be used to generate material with good performance.

"Fillers generally make rubber stronger, but they also make it less flexible," Barrera said.

"We found that replacing different portions of carbon black with ground eggshells and tomato peels caused synergistic effects – for instance, enabling strong rubber to retain flexibility," said Barrera.

"We may find that we can pursue many applications that were not possible before with natural rubber," Cornish added.

The new rubber does not look black, but rather reddish brown, depending on the amount of eggshell or tomato in it.

Umpires will have the authority to send players off for serious breaches of behaviour under updated laws of the game which will be used from October 1, 2017, MCC has confirmed.

MCC has also laid out the restrictions on bat sizes and there will be an amendment to the run out law to protect a batsman whose bat has bounced in the air once they have crossed the popping crease.

The new laws follow the recommendations of the MCC Cricket Committee from their meeting in Mumbai last December.

"We felt the time had come to introduce sanctions for poor player behaviour and research told us that a growing number of umpires at grass roots level were leaving the game because of it," John Stephenson, the MCC's head of cricket, said.

"Hopefully these sanctions will give them more confidence to handle disciplinary issues efficiently, whilst providing a deterrent to the players."

Regarding the size of the bat, an MCC statement said, "If the bat (held by the hand) or another part of the batsman's person is grounded beyond the popping crease and this contact with the ground is subsequently lost when the wicket is put down, the batsman will be protected from being run out if he/she is running or diving and has continued forward momentum towards the stumps and beyond."

Umpire sanctions under the new code

Level 1: Offences include excessive appealing and showing dissent at an umpire's decision. Following an official warning, a second Level 1 offence will result in five penalty runs being awarded to the opposing team.

Level 2: Offences (including throwing the ball at a player or making deliberate physical contact with an opponent during play), will result in the immediate awarding of five penalty runs to the opposing team.

Level 3: Offences (including intimidating an umpire or threatening to assault another player, team official or spectator) will result in five penalty runs and a removal of the offending player from the field for a set number of overs, depending on the format of the match.

Level 4: Offences (threatening an umpire or committing any act of violence on the field of play), will result in five penalty runs and the removal of the offending player for the remainder of the match. If the player is batting at the time of the offence, he/she will be recorded as 'retired out'.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday condoled the death of popular Bengali folk music singer Kalikaprasad Bhattacharya.

Bhattacharya passed away in a road mishap at Palsit in Burdwan district on Tuesday morning.

In a message, Banerjee said, "I am deeply saddened over the untimely demise of singer Kalikaprasad Bhattacharya. My condolences to the near ones of the deceased."

Bhattacharya was travelling along with four members of his Bangla band, 'Dohar', when their SUV was hit from behind by a truck on NH 2 and fell into a waterbody.

Bhattacharya (56) was taken out from the mangled vehicle along with other occupants of the car and rushed to Burdwan Medical College and Hospital where the Silchar-born singer was declared brought dead, a police officer said.

Four others were under treatment at the hospital and condition of three of them was stated to be critical, the officer said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has dedicated the OpaL (ONGC Petro additions Limited) projects to the nation, which will be inaugurated on March 7 in Gujarat.

The four-lane extradosed bridge over river Narmada on NH-8 will be inaugurated from Krishi university maidan, Bharush, Gujarat, wherein the PM will address the people.

“Will dedicate to the nation a Four-Lane Extradosed Bridge over the Narmada at Bharuch on NH-8 and Petrochemicals Complex of OPAL at Dahej,” said Modi in his tweet.

The PM is on a two-day visit (March 7-8) to Gujarat which will include various programmes in Dahej, Bharuch, Somnath and Gandhinagar.

NASA is planning to send an ice chest-sized box to the International Space Station (ISS), where it will freeze gas atoms to create the coolest spot in the universe, an advance that may provide new insights into gravity and dark matter.

Inside that box, lasers, a vacuum chamber and an electromagnetic "knife" will be used to cancel out the energy of gas particles, slowing them until they're almost motionless.

The suite of instruments, developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US, is called the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL). It is set to ride to space in August aboard the SpaceX CRS-12.

CAL's instruments are designed to freeze gas atoms to a mere billionth of a degree above absolute zero – more than 100 million times colder than the depths of space.

"Studying these hyper-cold atoms could reshape our understanding of matter and the fundamental nature of gravity," said CAL Project Scientist Robert Thompson of JPL.

"The experiments we'll do with the Cold Atom Lab will give us insight into gravity and dark energy – some of the most pervasive forces in the universe," said Thompson.

When atoms are cooled to extreme temperatures, as they will be inside of CAL, they can form a distinct state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.

In this state, familiar rules of physics recede and quantum physics begins to take over. Matter can be observed behaving less like particles and more like waves.

Rows of atoms move in concert with one another as if they were riding a moving fabric. These mysterious waveforms have never been seen at temperatures as low as what CAL will achieve.

NASA has never before created or observed Bose-Einstein condensates in space. On Earth, the pull of gravity causes atoms to continually settle towards the ground, meaning they are typically only observable for fractions of a second.

However, on the ISS, ultra-cold atoms can hold their wave-like forms longer while in freefall. That offers scientists a longer window to understand physics at its most basic level.

Thompson estimated that CAL will allow Bose-Einstein condensates to be observable for up to five to 10 seconds; future development of the technologies used on CAL could allow them to last for hundreds of seconds.

Bose-Einstein condensates are a "superfluid" – a kind of fluid with zero viscosity, where atoms move without friction as if they were all one, solid substance.

"If you had superfluid water and spun it around in a glass, it would spin forever. There's no viscosity to slow it down and dissipate the kinetic energy," said Anita Sengupta of JPL, Cold Atom Lab project manager.

"If we can better understand the physics of superfluids, we can possibly learn to use those for more efficient transfer of energy," said Sengupta.

The Delhi High Court witnessed an animated battle between Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and senior lawyer Ram Jethmalani as the duo indulged in a day-long session of questions and answers in connection with a defamation suit filed by Jaitley against Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

Appearing for Kejriwal, Jethmalani cross-examined the union minister with a barrage of questions in a jam-packed court and at one stage, brought out a dictionary in the court room and asked Jaitley to explain the difference between "goodwill" and "reputation".

Despite the onslaught of questions, Jaitley remained calm and answered all questions without losing his cool. Jethmalani, who was expelled from the BJP, wondered if Jaitley's "personal feelings of greatness" were behind the defamation suit.

The finance minister explained that "my view about my own reputation was based on what my friends, well-wishers and other people both privately and in media, had expressed an opinion on this subject."

Several issues were covered by the two senior lawyers including the CBI raid on Delhi government's senior bureaucrat Rajendra Kumar in December 2015 as well as Chetan Sanghi's report on DDCA affairs.

When asked if he made any efforts to reverse the alleged damage, Jaitley replied: "I contradicted the allegations in the media and also in Parliament where echoes of these allegations were raised."

On the Rs.10 crore demanded as compensation by Jaitley, Jethmalani pointed out that the minister didn't seem to have suffered any monetary damage.

The minister responded: "The value I placed, towards loss of my reputation was only a small part of the enormous damage done… the loss of my reputation has been partly quantified in terms of money. Loss of reputation causes mental distress to the person defamed, which it did in my case".

"Considering my stature, background and reputation, the loss caused to me and my reputation was so enormous that it was considered unquantifiable," he added.

The hearing will continue on Tuesday.