A Russian rocket carrying a payload of satellites into orbit – including two from Iran – blasted off successfully, The Soyuz-2.1 spacecraft lifted off as scheduled from the Vostochny Cosmodrome launchpad in far eastern Russia and put its payload into a designated orbit nine minutes after the launch on Tuesday. Roscosmos said that two Russian…

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has given a profane and conspiracy-laden speech two days before the presidential election, as his Democratic rival Kamala Harris spoke at a historically Black church in the battleground state of Michigan. In remarks on Sunday that bore no resemblance to his standard speech in the campaign’s closing stretch, Trump spoke…

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged its allies to stop “watching” and take steps before North Korean troops deployed in Russia reach the battlefield, and the country’s army chief warned that his troops are facing “one of the most powerful offensives” by Moscow since the all-out war started more than two years ago. Zelenskyy raised…

More than 1.5 million Muslim pilgrims have gathered in Saudi Arabia’s Mecca for the start of Hajj, taking place this year against the harrowing backdrop of Israel’s continued onslaught on the Gaza Strip.  The annual pilgrimage began on Friday with crowds of robed worshippers circling the Kaaba, the black cubic structure at Mecca’s Grand Mosque, many…

Greece has shut the site of the ancient Acropolis to tourists, closed schools and stationed medics across Athens as it faces the first heatwave of the summer. Temperatures were expected to hit 43 degrees Celsius (109.4 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday and Thursday in parts of the Mediterranean country, driven by southerly winds bringing hot air…

 Thangman Guite had just finished her dinner on the night of June 6 when she received a phone call. “They are coming, hide,” is all the 26-year-old school teacher heard Several other residents of Vengnuam, a village in Manipur state’s Jiribam district bordering Assam in India’s northeast, received a similar phone call. Within minutes, Guite…

A military plane carrying Malawi’s vice president and nine others has gone missing and a search is under way, the president’s office has said. The plane carrying 51-year-old Vice President Saulos Chilima left the capital, Lilongwe, on Monday but failed to make its scheduled landing at Mzuzu International Airport about 370km (230 miles) to the…

North Korea has floated hundreds more refuse-carrying balloons into South Korea after Kim Jong Un’s influential sister warned Seoul to halt propaganda broadcasts across their tense border. Pyongyang sent more than 300 waste-loaded balloons across the inter-Korean border overnight, South Korea’s military said on Monday, after Kim Yo Jong warned earlier that the loudspeaker broadcasts…

Rahul Gandhi, scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family that governed India for decades in the wake of independence, has been nominated to lead India’s opposition in parliament following an election result that pulled his party back from the political wilderness. A meeting of the leadership of Congress – the leading opposition party in the country – on Saturday…