An influential Shiite cleric announced Monday that he would resign from Iraqi politics, prompting hundreds of his angry followers to storm the government palace and sparking clashes with security forces. At least 15 protesters were killed.

Ukraine yesterday announced the start of a long-awaited counter-offensive to retake territory in the south seized by Russian forces since their invasion six months ago, a move reflecting Kyiv’s growing confidence as Western military aid flows in.

Billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has fathered 10 children, said yesterday the world needs to “make more babies” -- and keep digging for oil.

Police in the US city of Detroit on Sunday caught a suspect believed to have shot four people at “random”, killing three of them, authorities said.

Sparks flew Sunday as far-right President Jair Bolsonaro accused leftist rival Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of massive corruption -- and drew accusations of “destroying Brazil” in return -- as they faced off in their first election debate.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz yesterday pledged emphatic backing for Ukraine and other hopefuls to join the European Union, underlining however that enlarging the bloc to “30 or 36” would require reforms.

The Iranian president yesterday said reviving a 2015 deal with world powers will be pointless unless the UN nuclear watchdog puts an end to its probe of undeclared sites in the country.

An engine problem yesterday forced Nasa to postpone for at least four days the debut launch of the colossal rocketship it hopes will one day fly astronauts back to the Moon, more than a half-century after Apollo’s last lunar mission.

A 75-year-old Austrian citizen of Iranian origin, jailed in Iran on charges of espionage, has been given a five-day release from prison, his daughter told AFP yesterday.

Russia said Monday it will launch sweeping military drills in the country’s east that will involve forces from China — a show of increasingly close defense ties between Moscow and Beijing amid tensions with the West over the Kremlin’s action in Ukraine.

Europe could face several winters of gas shortage as a result of the cuts to Russian supplies, Shell Chief Executive Ben van Beurden said.

The world must continue to extract oil and gas in order to sustain civilisation, while also developing sustainable sources of energy, Tesla (TSLA.O) founder Elon Musk told reporters at a conference in Norway on Monday.

The message from the world's top finance chiefs is loud and clear: rampant inflation is here to stay and taming it will take an extraordinary effort, most likely a recession with job losses and shockwaves through emerging markets.

The Russian defence ministry said it had destroyed a large ammunition depot in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region that had contained US-made HIMARS rocket systems and shells for M777 Howitzers.

Facebook has reached a preliminary agreement in a long-running lawsuit seeking damages from the social network for allowing third parties, including the company Cambridge Analytica, to access users’ private data.

Iran says its review of the United States’s response to a European-Union drafted text to restore their 2015 nuclear deal will take several more days as Qatar continues to mediate between the sides.

Dutch police yesterday said six people were killed and seven other people hurt after a truck ran off the top of a dike road and ploughed into revellers at a neighbourhood barbecue.

Serbia and Kosovo have agreed on an arrangement for free movement between their countries, the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell announced yesterday.

Two United States warships sailed through the Taiwan Strait yesterday, the American navy said, the first such transit since China staged unprecedented military drills around the island.

Flights resumed and shops re-opened in Libya’s capital Tripoli yesterday after clashes between backers of rival governments killed at least 32 people and sparked fears of major new conflict.