About 68 million people in Southern Africa are suffering the effects of an El Nino-induced drought which has wiped out crops across the region, the regional bloc SADC said yesterday.

The shutdown, which began at 6 am (0030 GMT), will cut off access to elective medical procedures and out-patient consultations in the world's most populous nation

The Israeli army ordered a fresh evacuation of areas in southern and central Gaza previously designated as a humanitarian safe zone yesterday, saying the areas had been used by Hamas as a base for firing mortars and rockets towards Israel.

Pakistan said yesterday it had confirmed a case of mpox, a day after Sweden recorded the first infection outside of Africa involving a new, more dangerous strain of the virus that has killed hundreds in the DR Congo.

The 37-year-old daughter of billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra became Thailand’s prime minister yesterday, the third member of the influential but divisive clan to lead the country.

India will hold provincial elections in the Himalayan territory of Jammu and Kashmir from September 18, the Election Commission said yesterday, the first regional polls there in a decade and five years after New Delhi scrapped the region’s special autonomy.

Indian doctors stepped up nationwide protests and strikes yesterday after the rape and murder of a colleague, a brutal killing that has focused outrage on the chronic issue of violence against women.

Russian forces destroyed a Ukrainian reconnaissance and sabotage unit that was armed with weapons from Nato countries in Russia’s western Kursk region, the RIA state-run media agency reported yesterday, citing unidentified security sources.

Undertakers are working like bricklayers in a Gaza cemetery, piling cinder blocks into tight rectangles, side by side, for freshly dug graves.

With Gaza largely in ruins after more than 10 months of war, the Hamas-run territory's health ministry has struggled to count the death toll, which on Thursday surpassed 40,000

Five people who allegedly supplied ketamine to "Friends" star Matthew Perry in a bid to exploit his drug addiction for profit have been charged in relation to his overdose death, US officials said Thursday

The Brazilian Amazon has recorded more than 37,000 forest fires so far this year, the worst number in nearly two decades, according to satellite data released Wednesday.

Google has confirmed that hackers backed by Iran are targeting the campaigns of US presidential rivals Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps yesterday said one of its colonels has died of wounds suffered in an air strike it blamed on the US-led coalition in Syria.

Venezuela’s CNE electoral council, under fire after declaring a widely rejected election victory for President Nicolas Maduro, on Wednesday described a UN report disputing the outcome as “rife with lies.”

At least 1.4 million girls in Afghanistan have been denied access to secondary education since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, with the future of an entire generation now “in jeopardy”, the United Nations’ cultural agency said yesterday.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said yesterday he wanted to press ahead with a national common civil code of law, a proposal bitterly opposed by Muslim activists as an attack on their faith.

Thailand’s Pheu Thai party has chosen 37-year-old Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the daughter of billionaire ex-PM Thaksin Shinawatra, as its candidate for prime minister, it announced yesterday, a day after a court dismissed the incumbent premier in an ethics case.

A senior Russian commander said yesterday that Ukrainian forces had been pushed out of one village in Russia’s border region but that Kyiv’s forces were still probing along the front more than nine days since the lightning incursion into Russia.

The World Health Organization on Wednesday declared the mpox surge in Africa a global public health emergency, sounding its highest possible alarm over the worsening situation.