The US efforts to ban Iran's oil exports will be futile as it is not an easy task to block the country's crude from the global market, an Iranian oil official said on Wednesday.

The Congress on Thursday accused the Modi government of leveraging the 2016 surgical strikes across the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir as "political fodder" to garner votes and listed similar multiple strikes carried out over last two decades to assert that such action was not the first of its kind though they were not "politicised" earlier.

The rupee fell to an all-time low against the US dollar on Thursday tracking Asian peers, with weakening macro-economic fundamentals on the domestic front also weighing on the currency. The dollar's sharp gain overnight coupled with falls in Asian peers caused the drop in early trade, traders said, adding they were hopeful the central bank would step in to prevent further losses. The rupee was trading at 68.92/93 to the dollar at 11.12 am, after hitting a life low of 69.0950 earlier in the session, and sharply lower than its previous close of 68.65/66.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has become a "fully fledged military dictator", according to a new Human Rights Watch report released on Thursday.

The Swiss government on Wednesday said it opposes a proposed burka ban that is due to come to a referendum after supporters gained 106,600 signatures last year to enable a popular vote against full facial covering.

At least eight civilians, including three minors, were killed by pro-government bombings in southern Syria, a region of the war-torn nation that has seen a surge in violence in recent days, according to activists on Wednesday.

Mangaluru: The National Highway Authorities on Thursday conducted an inspection of the on-going emergency maintenance work of the Gurupura Bridge. Traffic movement has been blocked during this time.

Bad weather along both the north and south Kashmir routes of Baltal and Pahalgam on Thursday halted the Amarnath Yatra that officially started earlier in the day.