POLITICS & POLICY

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.

French President Emmanuel Macron named a new government Monday evening, putting together a team under Francois Bayrou, his fourth prime minister of the year, to drag the second-largest EU economy out of political crisis.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told lawmakers on Monday that "some progress" had been made in negotiations to secure the release of hostages held in Gaza, more than 14 months into the war.

Exhausted by more than 14 months of war, the wives and mothers of Israeli soldiers are uniting in protest against exemptions from conscription for ultra-Orthodox men.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's government on Sunday pledged to investigate whether security services could have prevented the Christmas market car-ramming attack that killed five people and injured over 200.

Gaza's civil defence agency said Israeli strikes overnight and early Sunday killed at least 28 Palestinians, including at one family's home and at a school building the military said was used by Hamas.

A missile fired from Yemen by Iran-backed Huthi rebels struck Israel's commercial hub Tel Aviv before dawn on Saturday, wounding 16 people in the second such attack in days.

In the mid-19th century, Dutch colonial officials climbing an Indonesian volcano spotted an ancient statue meant to serve as protection against misfortune, looted it, and took it to the Netherlands.

Russian missiles targeted Kyiv at sunrise on Friday, killing at least one person and damaging six diplomatic missions and a university in the centre of the Ukrainian capital.

Australia said Friday it had agreed to boost Solomon Islands' police force with a multi-year funding, training and infrastructure package for the Pacific nation, which has fostered close ties with China.

China has lifted a ban on imports of Australian live rock lobsters, Canberra said Friday, demolishing the final barrier in a broader, multibillion-dollar trade war between the countries.

Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini was defiant Friday as he arrived for the verdict in his long-running trial for blocking a migrant rescue ship at sea, for which he risks six years in jail.

Lyubov Voronova still remembers a time before the war when the Oskil river flowing by her east Ukraine home was an idyll where families would swim, picnic and make memories.

In Pakistan's largest city, cars inch forward in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

From an anonymous office in a New Delhi mall, matrimonial detective Bhavna Paliwal runs the rule over prospective husbands and wives -- a booming industry in India, where younger generations are increasingly choosing love matches over arranged marriage.

In the villages above the Syrian port city of Tartus they once hailed the sons who died fighting in Bashar al-Assad's service as martyrs.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday he was ready for talks at "any time" with US President-elect Donald Trump, who has touted his ability to strike a Ukraine peace deal within hours of coming to office.

At least 100 North Koreans deployed to support Russia's war effort in Ukraine have been killed since entering combat in December, South Korean lawmaker Lee Seong-kweun told reporters Thursday.

Seated in the audience at Macau's Dom Pedro V Theatre in the 1970s, 16-year-old Miguel de Senna Fernandes understood not a word of the "strange language" spoken on stage -- but right away he was mesmerised.

US President-elect Donald Trump urged Republican lawmakers Wednesday to scupper a cross-party deal to avert a fast-looming US government shutdown, as the White House accused him of "playing politics."

The haggard faces in the wreckage-and-water-strewn corridors betrayed the nerves and exhaustion of those soldiering on at the main hospital on the French archipelago of Mayotte, ravaged by a deadly cyclone last weekend.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's wife Begona Gomez denied wrongdoing in court testimony Wednesday to an investigation into alleged corruption, one of several legal cases connected to the minority left-wing government.