A British police officer who falsely arrested a woman for breaking coronavirus restrictions, then kidnapped, raped and murdered her, was given a rare whole-life jail term yesterday.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un condemned a US offer of dialogue as a “petty trick”, state media reported yesterday, and accused the Joe Biden administration of continuing a hostile policy against his nuclear-armed country.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for an “urgent” international response to the political crisis created in Myanmar by the February 1 military coup, in a new report released by the United Nations on Wednesday.

CNN has blocked access to its Facebook page in Australia after a court ruled media companies were liable for defamatory user comments on their stories.

France has accused Australia of lying shortly before Canberra cancelled a major submarine contract, with the French foreign minister declaring “someone lied”.

1918 - Arab forces aided by the British under T. E. Lawrence -- Lawrence of Arabia -- captured Damascus from the Turks.

Nasa is poised to send its first spacecraft to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids to glean new insights into the solar system’s formation 4.5 billion years ago, the space agency said Tuesday.

The top US general conceded in a stark admission on Wednesday that the United States “lost” the 20-year war in Afghanistan.

The investigative work of several panels of experts tasked with monitoring compliance with UN arms embargoes and economic sanctions in conflict zones including Mali is being blocked, sometimes for months, by Russia, diplomats said Wednesday.

Norway will in 2023 shut its last coal mine in Svalbard, its operator said yesterday, drawing to a close more than a century of prospecting by Oslo in this Arctic archipelago.

The United States warned yesterday that Bosnian Serb threats to secede from Bosnia violated a 1990s peace deal and would only lead to “isolation and economic despair.”

A tornado ploughed through a rural area west of Sydney yesterday, damaging homes and scarring a tract of countryside.

YouTube announced Wednesday it would remove videos and some high-profile users that falsely claim approved vaccines are dangerous, as social networks seek to crack down on health misinformation around Covid-19 and other diseases.

A 96-year-old former Nazi concentration camp secretary who fled hours before the opening of her trial in Germany has been found, a court said yesterday in a dramatic start to the proceedings.

Poland has sent tens of thousands of text messages to foreign mobile phones along the country’s border with Belarus in a bid to target migrants and dissuade them from crossing.

A Cambodian court yesterday sentenced the owner of a news website to a year in prison for incitement to cause a felony, a prosecutor said, for posting disinformation about a land dispute at a national park.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was handed a one-year prison sentence by a Paris court yesterday after being found guilty of illegal campaign financing over his failed 2012 re-election bid.

Ecuador’s president has declared a state of emergency in the prison system following a battle among gang members in a coastal lockup that killed at least 116 people and injured 80 in what authorities say was the worst prison bloodbath ever in the country.

Scientists have discovered a new lizard species in Peru, the national conservation agency said Tuesday.

The forthcoming COP26 summit -- which could determine the viability of the Paris Agreement -- will “not be easy” but an outcome matching the urgency of the crisis is an “absolute necessity”, the UN’s climate chief said yesterday.