POLITICS & POLICY

Hollywood's awards season heats up Sunday at the Golden Globes, with surreal narco-thriller musical "Emilia Perez" -- about a Mexican drug lord who transitions to life as a woman -- leading the charge.

Saudi Arabia has put six Iranians to death for drug trafficking, the interior ministry said Wednesday, after a year in which it carried out a record number of executions, according to an AFP tally of official reports.

Under the Albanese government's New Vehicle Efficiency Standard (NVES), pollution benchmarks will be set for new vehicles, with manufacturers facing a tax of AU$100 for every gram of CO2 per kilometer their vehicles exceed the limit.

The space in which refugee Shaharzad has to live has shrunk to the small courtyard of a guesthouse in Pakistan's capital, reminiscent of her life under Taliban rule in Afghanistan.

Gaza's civil defence agency said Wednesday that an Israeli air strike in the territory's north killed at least 15 people, marking what the rescuers called the New Year's first deadly attack.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday vowed that his country would use 2025 to fight for an end to Russia's nearly three-year-long invasion by any means necessary.

A United Nations report published Tuesday found that Israeli strikes on and near hospitals in the Gaza Strip had left healthcare in the Palestinian territory on the verge of collapse.

Lifelong farmer Joe Del Bosque knows that America can't live without immigrants, but he worries that many of his countrymen think it can't live with them either.

The range of changes include welfare payment increases, rising passport fees, and new workplace laws. While some costs, like medicine prices, will remain frozen, others, such as aged care worker wages and alcohol taxes, will rise.

For decades, any Syrian daring to broach political topics got used to speaking in hushed tones and with a watchful eye trained for a listener among the crowd.

Joe Biden led US presidents and other world leaders in paying tribute to Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday aged 100.

Wearing a safety belt, helmet and work boots, Raju Nishad navigates the scaffolding, hammering blocks that will form part of a building in a new neighbourhood in central Israel's town of Beer Yaakov.

Before the earthquake changed everything, 83-year-old Sueko Naka from Japan's remote Noto Peninsula wished to live out her life at home, watched over by an altar to her ancestors.

With a focus on human rights, US policy toward Latin America under Jimmy Carter briefly tempered a long tradition of interventionism in a key sphere of American influence, analysts say.

Rampant Liverpool smashed West Ham 5-0 on Sunday to stretch their lead at the top of the Premier League to eight points as Manchester City returned to winning ways at troubled Leicester.

An Israeli military raid targeting Hamas militants has forced a major hospital in northern Gaza out of service and led to the detention of its director, the WHO and health officials said Saturday.

South Korean lawmakers impeached the acting president on Friday, as the country struggles to shake off political turmoil sparked by his predecessor's martial law declaration that shocked the world.

Israeli air strikes hit rebel-held Sanaa's international airport and other targets in Yemen on Thursday as the head of the UN's World Health Organization said he and his team prepared to fly out.

Israeli air strikes pummelled Sanaa's international airport and other targets in Yemen on Thursday, with Huthi rebel media reporting six deaths.

Liverpool powered seven points clear at the top of the Premier League as the title favourites survived a scare in their 3-1 win against Leicester, while Bruno Fernandes was sent off in Manchester United's dismal 2-0 defeat at lowly Wolves.

Finnish authorities said Thursday they were investigating an oil tanker that sailed from a Russian port over the "sabotage" of a power cable linking Finland and Estonia that was damaged the previous day.

Tearful mourners prayed and lit candles Thursday at ceremonies across Asia to remember the 220,000 people killed two decades ago when a tsunami hit coastlines around the Indian Ocean in one of the world's worst disasters.

Beside India's holy rivers, a makeshift city is being built for a Hindu religious festival expected to be so vast it will be seen from space, the largest gathering in history.

From riding pillion on zooming motorbikes to round-the-clock airport stakeouts, India's celebrity-hunting paparazzi photographers have gone from "outcasts" to becoming a key part of Bollywood's vast film industry machine.

AFP photographer Sameer al-Doumy never dreamed he would be able to return to the hometown in Syria that he escaped through a tunnel seven years ago after it was besieged by Bashar al-Assad's forces.

A massacre of more than 200 people in Haiti this month followed a gang-ordered manhunt that saw victims, many of them elderly, pulled from their homes and shot or killed with machetes, the UN said Monday.

A powerful blast ripped through an explosives plant in northwestern Turkey on Tuesday killing 12 people and injuring five others, officials said.

The status of the Panama Canal is non-negotiable, President Jose Raul Mulino said in a statement Monday signed alongside former leaders of the country, after Donald Trump's recent threats to reclaim the man-made waterway.

Far-right leader Marine Le Pen said Tuesday that the days of France's new government are already numbered, predicting an early presidential election in a few months.