A fire ripped through a building in the Philippine capital’s Chinatown early yesterday killing 11 people, authorities said.

Myanmar military airstrikes hit a hospital in a city controlled by an ethnic minority armed group close to the China border killing 10 people, local media reported yesterday.

The Philippine and Japanese navies held their first joint exercise yesterday in the South China Sea, as the two US allies boost security ties in the face of China’s growing pressure.

The Kremlin yesterday confirmed that Vadim Krasikov, freed by Germany in Thursday’s prisoner swap deal with the West, is an operative with Russia’s FSB security service.

Heat kills over 175,000 people a year in Europe, where temperatures are rising quicker than the rest of the globe, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) European branch said Thursday.

Venezuela’s opposition leader Maria Corina Machado called Thursday for protests “in every city” in the nation today to denounce the disputed reelection of President Nicolas Maduro.

Kamala Harris will be confirmed as the Democratic US presidential nominee in an electronic vote that started Thursday, replacing the fanfare of in-person balloting that usually kicks off the party’s national convention.

Floods brought by torrential rains in Pakistan caused damage that killed at least 30 people this week, authorities said yesterday, as the second-largest city of Lahore was drenched in the most rainfall it has received in more than four decades.

Turkey has blocked access to social media platform Instagram, the infotech regulator said on Friday, without stating a reason or duration for the ban, which also left the platform's mobile app inaccessible

US President Joe Biden said Thursday that he was concerned about soaring tensions in the Middle East and had urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to quickly reach a Gaza ceasefire deal

Japan sweltered through its hottest July since records began 126 years ago, the weather agency said, as extreme heatwaves fuelled by climate change engulfed many parts of the globe

Jailed US Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter Evan Gershkovich and ex-US Marine Paul Whelan were among 26 prisoners from the United States, Russia, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway and Belarus being freed in a major east-west exchange yesterday, Turkey’s presidency said.

US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump falsely suggested to the country’s largest annual gathering of Black journalists on Wednesday that his Democratic rival Kamala Harris had previously downplayed her Black heritage.

Israel’s military blew up more than 30 water wells in Gaza this month, a municipality official and residents said, adding to the trauma of airstrikes that have turned much of the Palestinian enclave into a wasteland ravaged by a humanitarian crisis.

The head of Hamas’ military wing, Mohammed Deif, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza last month, the Israeli military said yesterday, a day after the group’s political leader was assassinated in Tehran.

The Kremlin said yesterday that any F-16s delivered to Ukraine would be shot down and have little impact on the battlefield, in response to reports that the first fighter jets have arrived.

Torrential rains in China have killed at least 30 people and left dozens more missing, state media said yesterday, as the country grinds through another summer of extreme weather.

Emergency workers rescued nearly 1,000 people who were stranded in different parts of the Himalayas following torrential rainfall in northern India, which caused widespread damage and left at least 12 people dead, officials said yesterday.

Iran and armed groups backed by it are preparing coordinated action meant to deter Israel but avert all-out war, sources and analysts said, after the killings of top Hamas and Hezbollah figures.

India summoned the Sri Lankan envoy yesterday to protest following a collision between one of its fishing boats and a Sri Lankan naval vessel that killed a fisherman, with a second missing, authorities said.