Australia amended its national anthem to remove reference to the country being “young and free” amid calls to recognise that its Indigenous people are the oldest continued civilization in the world.

On a scrap of land surrounded by flooding in South Sudan, families drink and bathe from the waters that swept away latrines and continue to rise.

This New Year’s Eve is being celebrated like no other in most of the world, with many bidding farewell to a year they’d prefer to forget.

The UN yesterday voiced outrage at the execution of a man in Iran who was only 16 when he committed his alleged crime, marking the fourth juvenile offender put to death in the country this year.

Indian security forces said they killed three militants in Kashmir’s main city, Srinagar, on Wednesday after a gun battle, but families of the dead men said they were innocent.

The United Nations-African Union mission in Darfur is set to end 13 years of peacekeeping in the vast Sudanese region yesterday, even as recent violent clashes leave residents fearful of new conflict.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif yesterday accused outgoing US President Donald Trump of aiming to fabricate a “pretext for war” as tensions mount between the two countries.

US Senate leader Mitch McConnell dealt a likely death blow on Wednesday to President Donald Trump’s bid to boost coronavirus aid to Americans, declining to schedule a swift Senate vote on a bill to raise relief checks to $2,000 from $600.

The Syrian conflict claimed at least 6,800 people in 2020, the lowest annual death toll since it began nearly a decade ago, a war monitor said yesterday.

At least two dozen people, including several Muslim clerics, were detained yesterday after a mob attacked and set fire to a Hindu temple in northwest Pakistan, police said.

An Indian state ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party on Wednesday passed a law abolishing all Islamic schools, saying they provided sub-standard education.

The father of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson yesterday said he was in the process of applying for a French passport to maintain his ties with the European Union after Brexit.

Alarmed that a political crisis in Nepal could endanger China’s strategic interests and Belt and Road projects, a Chinese Communist Party emissary has held days of talks to try to stop the Himalayan country’s ruling communist party from tearing itself apart.

The US logged its highest ever daily death toll from the coronavirus as the world prepares to turn the page on a grim year defined by the pandemic, with much of the globe united in one hope for 2021: that a slew of new vaccines will stamp out Covid-19.

As Asia says goodbye to 2020 - a tumultuous year that saw the planet roiled by a deadly pandemic - celebrations will be smaller, shorter and more muted amid fears of coronavirus flare-ups.

The world risks a “moral catastrophe” if Covid-19 vaccinations are delayed in Africa while wealthier regions inoculate their entire populations, the head of the continent’s disease control body said.

China has confirmed its first case of a new coronavirus variant that was recently detected in Britain, health officials said.

More than 10 million children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, northeast Nigeria, the Central Sahel, South Sudan and Yemen will suffer from acute malnutrition in 2021, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) has said.

India today announced it would conduct a dry run of Covid-19 vaccine roll-out in all the states on January 2.

Chinese health regulators said Thursday that they have given conditional approval to a coronavirus vaccine developed by state-owned Sinopharm.