1. Nepal elects first female president

    Nepal’s parliament has elected a Communist leader who has long campaigned* for women’s rights as the Himalayan nation’s first female president.

    Parliament Speaker Onsari Gharti announced that Bidhya Devi Bhandari of the Communist Party of Nepal Unified Marxist-Leninist received 327 votes against her opponent’s 214 in parliament on October 28. Bhandari is the deputy leader of the party led by Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli. He was elected earlier this month and leads a coalition government. Bhandari is Nepal’s second president.

    2. China, S. Korea, Japan to mend ties

    Leaders from China, South Korea and Japan said they pledged to boost exchanges and economic cooperation and try to repair ties badly strained* by history and territorial disputes at a rare three-way summit in Seoul on Sunday.

    The one-day summit* was the first of its kind in more than three years. High-level contact between Tokyo and its two Asian neighbors nose-dived after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took office in late 2012. Beijing and Seoul see Abe as whitewashing* Japan’s wartime atrocities*. A joint statement issued after the meeting said the sides agreed to try to resolve history-related issues and improve ties by “facing history squarely and advancing toward the future.”

    3. Adopted Chinese girl murdered

    A Spanish court on Friday convicted a couple of drugging and suffocating* their 12-year-old adopted Chinese daughter in a case that has drawn the attention of Beijing.

    Rosario Porto, a former lawyer, and her ex-husband, journalist Alfonso Basterra, had been accused of periodically* drugging their daughter Asunta Yong Fang Basterra Porto with the sedative* Orfidal for three months and finally strangling* her in September 2013. A nine-member jury unanimously* found the pair guilty of murdering Asunta, whom they had adopted as a baby, after a monthlong trial in which they had insisted their innocence. The couple could face up to 20 years in jail. The court will issue its sentence in a few weeks. Prosecutors charged that the murder had been planned by both parents, but carried out by the mother.

    4. Erdogan urges respect for his party’s win

    Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday hailed a big victory for his ruling party in the country’s parliamentary election and demanded the world respect the result.

    The ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, secured a stunning* victory in Sunday’s snap* parliamentary election, sweeping back into single-party rule only five months after losing it. With all of the ballots counted early Monday, the preliminary results showed that the party won more than 49 percent of the votes.

    5. Afghanistan to accept its citizens

    Afghanistan will take back all its citizens who are being deported from Germany as the European country struggles to accommodate* hundreds of thousands of refugees and other migrants who have arrived there this year, a Kabul official said.

    Afghans currently make up the second-largest nationality, after Syrians, arriving in Europe. So far this year, an estimated 120,000 Afghans have left the country, legally and illegally, according to authorities.

    5. Russian airline rules out technical fault

    The Russian airline whose jet crashed in Egypt killing everyone on board said on Monday the crash could not have been caused by a technical fault or human error.

    The crash, in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on Saturday, could only have been the result of some other “technical or physical action,” which caused it to break up in the air and plummet* to the ground, said Alexander Smirnov, deputy general director of the airline, Kogalymavia. He did not specify what that action might have been, saying it was up to the official investigation to determine.

    (SD-Agencies)