Hundreds of Australian firefighters battled large bush fires in New South Wales yesterday, with authorities saying that continued high temperatures and strong winds could spark blazes in Sydney.

Australian police uncovered a baby koala hidden in the bag of a woman they stopped in the street.

China’s parliament passed a ruling yesterday that effectively bars two elected Hong Kong pro-independence politicians from taking office, Beijing’s most direct intervention in the territory’s legal and political system since the 1997 handover.

A Cambodian opposition senator was sentenced to seven years in jail yesterday for posting a doctored document on social media about the contested border with neighbouring Vietnam.

The Indonesian capital’s Christian governor faced a marathon police grilling yesterday for allegedly insulting religion, after the accusations sparked a violent mass protest by hardliners in the country.

A page of original comic strip drawings from one of the best Tintin adventures, ‘Explorers on the Moon’, is expected to sell for up to $1 million when it goes under the hammer later this month.

German public broadcaster ARD came under fire Monday for allowing a woman wearing a full-face veil to argue on a current affairs talkshow that disillusioned youths could view war-torn Syria as the ‘promised land’.

An Indian man who triggered a bomb scare at Geneva airport to avoid missing his flight has been jailed and hit with a massive bill to compensate police for time wasted, media reported Monday.

Brunei's second-largest daily newspaper, the Brunei Times, published its final edition on Monday, after abruptly announcing plans for closure over the weekend, triggering online speculation about the reason.

At least nine people were killed and 11 wounded in South Sudan's capital, Juba, when an unidentified gunman opened fire on people watching a football match on television at the weekend, a police spokesman said on Monday.

Islamic militants who specialise in kidnappings-for-ransom have reported killing a German sailor and abducting her elderly male companion from their yacht in waters off the southern Philippines, the military said Monday.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Europe yesterday of abetting terrorism by supporting Kurdish militants and said he did not care if it called him a dictator.