Beijing choked under a thick layer of toxic smog after the Chinese capital issued its second-ever red alert and put its emergency response plan into action. (Photo: AP)
Saudi Arabians voted 17 women into public office in municipal elections in the conservative Islamic kingdom, the first to allow female participation, a state-aligned news site reported on Sunday before all official results were announced. (Photo: AP)
An outbreak of swine flu has claimed 57 lives since mid-November in Iran, where hundreds of people have been diagnosed with the virus, the health ministry said.
Software that monitors suspicious behaviour and luggage could eventually be integrated into 40,000 surveillance cameras across France, a railway firm said as the country tightens security after last month's deadly Paris attacks. (Photo:AFP)
Russia began examining the black box of its warplane that was shot down over Turkey's border with Syria, again contesting Ankara's claim it had violated Turkish airspace. (Photo: AFP)
A month after the assault in Paris on a concert by Eagles of Death Metal, prominent music groups are covering one of the band's songs to raise money for the victims. (Photo: AFP)
Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, who opened fire on a San Bernardino holiday party earlier this month, were buried on Tuesday in a quiet, graveside funeral guarded by FBI agents. (Photo: AP)
At least 23 people were killed and 55 others injured when a bomb ripped through a cloth market in the restive tribal region near the Afghan border in northwest Pakistan. (Photo: AFP)
UN Security Council has unanimously adopted a resolution to cut off all sources of funding to ISIS and al-Qaeda with finance ministers from the member nations vowing to increase sanctions against the terror groups. (Photo: AP/File)
Schools in a Virginia county were closed and a weekend holiday concert and athletic events were cancelled amid an angry backlash about a school exercise about Islamic faith. (Photo: AP)
Mali's President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita hailed the reopening of a luxury hotel at the centre of a deadly Islamist attack as a victory over the scourge of jihadist violence. (Photo: AP)
Pakistan plans to renovate and improve facilities at a historical Hindu temple complex near here besides allowing more devotees to visit it as over 120 Indian pilgrims on a trip to the country prayed for peace between the two countries at the
Tim Peake, the first Briton to travel to the International Space Station, blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with Russian space veteran Yury Malenchenko and Tim Kopra of NASA for a six-month mission. (Photo: AFP)
A Supreme Court decision in Japan this week, widely viewed as a setback for women's rights and a victory for conservative family values, upheld a 19th-century law that requires married couples to adopt one surname for legal purposes. (Photo: AP)
Heavy rains pummelled the entire Philippines, threatening to aggravate flooding that has prompted the government to declare a state of "national calamity". (Photo: AP)
Pakistan successfully test-fired a nuclear capable ballistic missile with a range of 900 kilometres, days after testing a similar missile capable of hitting targets as far as 2,750 kilometres away, bringing many Indian cities under its range. (Photo
Pakistan's leader, speaking beneath portraits of children killed by Taliban bullets, called for vengeance as the country marked the first anniversary of a school massacre that killed 151 people in its worst-ever extremist attack in Peshawar,