Scientists and government representatives meeting at a conference in France voted on Friday to scrap leap seconds by 2035, the organisation responsible for global timekeeping said.

A suspected gas explosion early yesterday in a five-storey residential building killed nine people in Russia’s southeastern Sakhalin island, the local governor said.

Iranian security forces have killed at least 378 people -- including 47 children -- in a crackdown on protests sparked by Mahsa Amini’s death, a rights group said in an updated toll yesterday.

Nine people have been found dead in the rubble of a five-storey apartment block that partially collapsed on the Russian Pacific island of Sakhalin, the regional governor said on Saturday, and emergency services were searching for one still missing..Russian news agencies said the collapse a

Protesters in Iran have set on fire the ancestral home of the Islamic republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini two months into the anti-regime protest movement, images showed yesterday.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has a “significant impact” on the security of other countries, G7 interior ministers said yesterday, warning of attacks on key infrastructure and risks posed by returning foreign fighters.

French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday urged an end to “confrontation” as he relaunched his strategy for the Asia-Pacific region after a bitter row over a cancelled submarine contract with Australia.

Rotting teeth, swollen gums and oral cancers: nearly half the world’s population suffer from mouth diseases, the World Health Organization said yesterday.

The James Webb Space Telescope unveiled its latest image of celestial majesty on Wednesday, an ethereal hourglass of orange and blue dust being shot out from a newly forming star at its centre.

The EU vowed to step up its emissions cuts at UN climate talks yesterday as developing nations admonished rich polluters for falling short on efforts to help them cope with global warming.

Two people died in an explosion in Przewodow, a village in eastern Poland near the border with Ukraine, firefighters said yesterday.

The last time Russian President Vladimir Putin found himself isolated at a G20 summit was in 2014, soon after he seized Crimea -- and he was so shunned that he left early.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres yesterday heaped pressure on G20 nations to work together to slow global warming, saying their action, or inaction, would dictate the fate of the planet.

Natasa Pirc Musar, a lawyer, won the second round of Slovenia's presidential election on Sunday and will become its first female head of state, preliminary results showed.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday condemned the "vile attack" that ripped through central Istanbul, and which he said killed six people and wounded dozens of others.

A shooting that sent four people to hospital and another gun-related incident forced thousands of students at two Montreal area colleges to go into lockdown on Friday.

Talks about how to compensate vulnerable countries for the damage caused by climate change are not ready to agree on a funding mechanism, a European Union negotiator said on Friday, but did not exclude progress on the issue at COP27.

A few countries have resisted mentioning a global goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in the official text of the COP27 summit in Egypt, US Special Climate Envoy John Kerry said at the conference yesterday.

An electric helicopter with multiple rotors took its first flight in conventional air traffic near Paris on Thursday as it prepares for commercial flights from 2024.

Food imports costs across the world are on course to hit a near $2 trillion record in 2022, piling pressure on the globe’s poorest countries who likely shipped in considerably less volumes of food, the UN Food Agency said yesterday.