A top Chinese official said yesterday that political tensions between Beijing and Australia were not behind a Unesco recommendation to place the Great Barrier Reef on its endangered list.

The Taliban’s supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada yesterday said he “strenuously favours” a political settlement to the conflict in Afghanistan even as the hardline Islamist movement has launched a sweeping offensive across the nation.

At least 23 people were killed after several homes were crushed by a collapsed wall and a landslide triggered by heavy monsoon rains in India’s financial capital Mumbai, authorities said yesterday.

Armenia’s top court on Saturday threw out a challenge by opposition parties to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s victory in snap parliamentary polls last month.

Nepal's new Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba won a vote of confidence in parliament on Sunday, days after the Supreme Court reinstated the legislature that was dissolved in May.

Afghanistan has withdrawn its ambassador and diplomats from Pakistan's capital following the kidnapping of the ambassador's daughter, the Afghan foreign ministry said on Sunday, a new blow to relations at a sensitive time for the Afghan peace process.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s spokesman on Sunday condemned a European Union court decision to allow employers to ban staff wearing Muslim headscarves as appeasing Islamophobia.

There’s no support in the region for “the imposition by force” of a new government in Afghanistan, says a joint statement signed by the United States and its five Central Asian allies.

Authorities in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Friday said there is no ban on the sacrifice of animals during the upcoming Islamic Eid al-Adha holiday, a day after the government asked law enforcers to stop the sacrifice of cows, calves, camels and other animals.

An Indian lawmaker of the main opposition Congress has urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to probe allegations that Minister of State for Home in the federal government Nisith Pramanik, from West Bengal, is a Bangladeshi national.

An earthquake of magnitude 5.4 struck the southern Philippine province of Davao Oriental early on Sunday, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said.

Thailand is looking to introduce more restrictions on movement as authorities yesterday reported record numbers of new cases and deaths, despite partial

Representatives of the Afghan government and the Taliban met in Doha for talks yesterday, AFP correspondents said, as violence rages in the country with foreign forces almost entirely withdrawn. 

West Bengal Education Minister Bratya Basu has accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of trying to "saffronize” the school education after the Uttar Pradesh government's move to omit the works of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and India’s legendary scholar Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan from the syllabus for class 10 and 12.

Representatives of the Afghan government and the Taliban met in Doha for talks on Saturday, AFP correspondents said, as violence rages in the country with foreign forces almost entirely withdrawn.

Indian Home Minister Amit Shah today said that all gaps in the country’s border fencing will be filled by next year to completely stop infiltration and other anti-national activities.

China launched its long-awaited emissions trading system yesterday, a key tool in its quest to drive down climate change-causing greenhouse gases and go carbon neutral by 2060. 

1973 - A military coup in Afghanistan led by former prime minister Sardar Muhammad Daoud Khan overthrew King Mohammed Zahir Shah; a republic was proclaimed with Daoud as president.

Reuters journalist Danish Siddiqui was killed on Friday while covering a clash between Afghan security forces and Taliban fighters near a border crossing with Pakistan, an Afghan commander said.   

People who received BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine had ten times the amount of antibodies than those given China’s Sinovac, a Hong Kong study has shown, adding to growing data on different jabs’ effectiveness.