International News

A wild storm system has moved away from Sydney after pounding Australia's largest city with four days of torrential rain, satellite images showed on Wednesday, although river waters stayed above danger levels, forcing more evacuations.

The man accused of spraying gunfire into a July Fourth parade from a Chicago-area rooftop, was due to make his first court appearance on Wednesday to face seven first-degree murder charges.

The Secretary-General of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Mohammad Barkindo has died. He was 63.

Britain's finance and health ministers resigned on Tuesday, in what looked to be the final blow for Prime Minister Boris Johnson's premiership after he had tried to apologise for the latest scandal to dog his administration.

Twenty-two migrants from Mali, including three children, have died off the coast of Libya, Mali's government said on Tuesday.

The man accused of detonating a car bomb that killed a prominent Maltese journalist has confessed to the crime in an interview with a Reuters reporter and says he will soon implicate others in plotting to assassinate her.

A gunman, who killed six people and wounded 36 others at a Fourth of July parade in Chicago, has been arrested.

Russian forces set their sights on their next objectives in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk province, after President Vladimir Putin claimed victory in neighbouring Luhansk province as the five-month-long war entered a new phase.

Torrential rains kept battering Australia's east coast on Tuesday, intensifying the flood crisis in Sydney as thousands more residents were ordered to leave their homes after rivers swiftly rose past danger levels.

Heatwaves are predicted to sweep through northern China in the next two weeks, with more than 250 million people expected to grapple with temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius in some regions.

Ukraine needs $750 billion for a three-stage recovery plan in the wake of Russia's invasion, its prime minister said on Monday.

The Eiffel Tower is riddled with rust and in need of full repairs, but instead it is being given a cosmetic 60 million euro paint job ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, according to confidential reports cited by French magazine Marianne.

Three people were killed and several more were woundedin a shooting at a shopping centre in Copenhagen on Sunday, Danish police said, adding they had arrested a 22-year-old Danish man and charged him with manslaughter.

Ukraine's forces have withdrawn from the bombed-out city of Lysychansk, prompting Russia to claim full control of the eastern Luhansk region, a key Kremlin war goal, but President Volodymyr Zelenskiy vowed to regain the lost territory.

Search and rescue operations resumed on Monday in the Italian Alps with 17 people missing, authorities said, after part of a mountain glacier collapsed, killing at least six people and injuring eight.

President Emmanuel Macron on Monday turned to the health minister who steered France through COVID to sell the government's policies to a disgruntled electorate worried about a spike in inflation as he carried out a limited reshuffle.

Fresh evacuation orders were issued for thousands of Sydney residents on Monday after relentless rains flooded several suburbs in Australia's largest city, with officials warning of more wild weather over the next 12 hours.

At least three people were killed and dozens of homes damaged in the Russian city of Belgorod near the Ukraine border, the regional governor said on Sunday, as Kyiv acknowledged it could lose its last big bastion in eastern Ukraine to Kremlin forces.

A passenger bus plunged into a ravine in southwestern Pakistan on Sunday killing 20 people, a government official said.

Thousands of residents were ordered to evacuate southwest Sydney on Sunday with torrential rain and damaging winds pounding the east coast and floods expected to be worse than those that hit the region in the past year.

A study of bone loss in 17 astronauts who flew aboard the International Space Station is providing a fuller understanding of the effects of space travel on the human body and steps that can mitigate it.

An Iranian-flagged tanker seized by Greece in April, part of whose cargo was confiscated by the United States, was towed to the port of Piraeus on Saturday.

More than two dozen crew on an engineering vessel with 30 people on board were missing after it snapped in two in waters off Hong Kong as tropical storm Chaba passed through, authorities said.

At least five people were killed, and 49 injured by a magnitude 6.1 earthquake in southern Iran early on Saturday, with the area also hit soon after by two strong quakes of up to 6.3 magnitude.

The New York state has banned guns from many public places, including Times Square, requiring gun-license applicants to prove their shooting proficiency and submit their social media accounts for review by government officials.

India on Friday imposed a ban on single-use plastics on items ranging from straws to cigarette packets to combat worsening pollution in the country.

Russian missiles hit an apartment building and a resort near Ukraine's Black Sea port of Odesa on Friday, killing at least 17 people and wounding dozens, Ukrainian authorities said.

Authorities deployed a massive security force around Hong Kong on Friday as Chinese President Xi Jinping prepared to swear in the city's new leader and attend celebrations to mark the 25th anniversary of the former British colony's handover to Beijing.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Britain would do all it could to hold Beijing to its commitments on democratic rights made 25 years ago when Hong Kong was handed back to China.

North Korea claimed on Friday that the country's first COVID-19 outbreak began with patients touching "alien things" near the border with South Korea.

Russia pressed on with its offensive in eastern Ukraine on Thursday after NATO branded Moscow the biggest "direct threat" to Western security and agreed to plans to modernise Kyiv's beleaguered armed forces.

Piles of luggage beside baggage belts in airports from Canada to Europe are driving further demand for ground handlers, and adding to summer travel chaos as airlines scramble to bring back workers lost during COVID-19.

The son and namesake of late dictator Ferdinand Marcos was sworn in as president of the Philippines on Thursday, completing a stunning comeback for one of Asia's most famous political dynasties, 36 years after it was ousted in a popular uprising.

A French court has handed a life sentence to the only surviving member of a group that killed 130 people in a night of carnage across Paris.

The chief minister of India's western state of Maharashtra, the richest state in the country, resigned late on Wednesday, after a group in his ruling party defected to the opposition.

The World Health Organization says "sustained transmission" of monkeypox worldwide could see the virus begin to move into high-risk groups, such as pregnant women, immunocompromised people and children.

South Korea approved its first domestically developed COVID-19 vaccine, manufactured by SK bioscience, for general public use following positive clinical data, authorities said on Wednesday.

Sir Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, will be boarding Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity and blasting off to space on Sunday.

Singapore is reviewing penalties for violent offences following an outcry over a 12-day prison sentence for a student who strangled his girlfriend until she blacked out.