Voters cast ballots across France on Sunday in the first round of a presidential election where far-right candidate Marine Le Pen is posing an unexpected threat to President Emmanuel Macron's re-election hopes.

France yesterday prepared for the first round of presidential elections projected to produce a run-off rematch between President Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen that will be far tighter than their duel five years ago.

Russia said it was shutting down the local offices of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International that have been working in the country for the past 30 years.

World food prices hit an all-time high in March following Russia’s invasion of agricultural powerhouse Ukraine, UN food agency said yesterday, adding to concerns about the risk of hunger around the world.

Pink Floyd have written their first new song in almost 30 years to support Ukrainians, the band announced on Thursday.

A World War II era bomb went off early yesterday in the eastern Czech city of Ostrava during excavation work, killing a man and injuring another, police and media reports said.

French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen vowed Thursday to issue fines to Muslims who wear headscarves in public, as candidates made a final push for votes three days ahead of an election seen as increasingly close.

The EU yesterday said it was building a 540-million-euro ($590 million) emergency stockpile of medicine and equipment to deal with chemical and nuclear

Nearly 100 people have died in international waters after setting off from Libya in an overcrowded boat, international organisations said. A commercial tanker, Alegria 1, rescued four people from a life raft in the Mediterranean early Saturday morning, the Doctors Without Borders charity said.

A full 99 percent of people on Earth breathe air containing too many pollutants, the World Health Organization said yesterday, blaming poor air quality for millions of deaths each year.

Nationalist Hungarian PM Viktor Orban faced a tough challenge with a united opposition in an unpredictable general election yesterday, after a campaign dominated by Russia’s invasion of neighbouring Ukraine.

A new Covid variant has been found in the UK, the World Health Organisation said in its latest report. The new mutant, called XE, may be more transmissible than any strain of Covid-19, the health body said.

Russia has declared a prominent journalist, a video blogger and six other media figures “foreign agents”, the latest in a series of such moves that critics say are designed to stifle dissent.

Pope Francis yesterday said he was considering a trip to Kyiv and implicitly criticised Russian President Vladimir Putin over the invasion of Ukraine, saying a “potentate” was fomenting conflict for nationalist interests.

International donors have pledged $2.44 billion in humanitarian aid for Afghanistan, the United Nations said, falling short of its target to provide emergency relief.

People with the “hybrid immunity” of having been both fully vaccinated and previously infected with Covid-19 have the strongest protection against the virus, two new studies said yesterday.

At least eight miners were killed and about 20 were injured on Friday when a shaft collapsed in a state-owned coal mine in southern Serbia, RTS state television reported.

Afghanistan’s economy risks falling into a “death spiral” without urgent aid, with some Afghans already forced to sell their children and body parts to survive, UN

Nearly half of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended, the UN reproductive health agency said yesterday, warning that the war in Ukraine could further exacerbate what it called a “human rights crisis”.

Two UK Supreme Court judges yesterday resigned from Hong Kong’s top court, as the government in London said it was “no longer tenable” for its judges to serve in the former colony.