World

Palestine defenders on Tuesday accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of swapping one "genocidal lunatic" for another after the right-wing leader fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and replaced him with Israel Katz, who was serving as foreign minister.

" Israel just doubled down on prolonging its genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza," journalist and genocide scholar Samira Mohyeddin said on social media following Netanyahu's moves.

At a drone testing field in southwestern Taiwan, university students watch anxiously as unmanned aerial vehicles they designed take off, land and, occasionally, crash in a simulated battlefield scenario.

They are taking part in a competition that is helping Taiwan's efforts to boost domestic drone production.

Snow has finally fallen on Mount Fuji, images showed Wednesday, after warm weather led to the Japanese mountain's longest-ever stint with bare slopes.

The volcano's famous snowcap begins forming on October 2 on average, and last year snow was first observed by government meteorologists on October 5.

Indonesia will permanently relocate thousands of residents from around a volcano that erupted in recent days, killing nine people after spewing fireballs and ash on homes, officials said Wednesday.

Authorities raised Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki's alert level to the highest of a four-tiered system after several eruptions since Sunday evening, telling locals and tourists to avoid a seven-kilometer (4.3-mile) radius of the crater.

A former high-level Chinese government employee has been sentenced to death for leaking state secrets to a foreign power, Beijing's spy agency said Wednesday.

The individual surnamed Zhang "provided a large number of top secret and classified state secrets to foreign intelligence agencies," the Ministry of State Security said in a post to its official WeChat account.

Taiwan has received its first batch of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) from the United States, Taipei's defense ministry said Wednesday, as the island races to boost its defenses against a potential Chinese attack.

Washington has long been Taipei's most important ally and biggest arms supplier -- angering Beijing, which claims Taiwan as part of its own territory.

A volcano in eastern Indonesia erupted again on Tuesday, blowing an ash column into the sky a day after it spewed fireballs on nearby villages that killed nine people.

Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki, a 1,703-meter (5,587-feet) twin volcano located on the popular tourist island of Flores, shot flaming rocks at residential areas overnight Monday, setting wooden houses on fire and pockmarking the ground.

German police on Tuesday arrested eight suspected members of a right-wing extremist group that had trained for what they expected would be the collapse of state order, prosecutors said.

Hundreds of police in pre-dawn raids swooped on 20 locations linked to the militant group "Saxonian Separatists" in formerly communist eastern Germany and neighboring Poland, with locations also searched in Austria.

A 22-year-old man suspected of murdering a Paris university student will be extradited to France from Switzerland on Wednesday, a source close to the case told AFP on Monday.

The murder of the 19-year-old, identified only as Philippine, shocked France and prompted calls for further toughening of deportation and migrant detention laws.

Sculptor Aung Naing Lin has spent decades carving Buddha statues to help guide Myanmar's faithful -- but getting the marble he needs from rebel-held quarries in the midst of civil war is now a perilous task.

Buddhist-majority Myanmar has been mired in bloody conflict since the military toppled the government of Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021, terminating a 10-year experiment with democracy and sparking a widespread armed uprising.

A high-profile Cambodian reporter who won an international award for uncovering alleged cyber scams told AFP Tuesday that he is quitting journalism, saying he has lost "courage" after being arrested by the authorities and freed on bail.

Police arrested Mech Dara on September 30 on charges of inciting social disorder, drawing condemnation from around the world.

The toxic smog season in India's capital has just begun, but those unable to escape cancer-causing poisonous fumes say the hazardous impact on health is already taking its toll.

New Delhi regularly ranks among the world's most polluted capitals, with a melange of factory and vehicle emissions exacerbated by agricultural fires blanketing the city each winter, stretching from mid-October until at least January.

As Donald Trump pursues a second stint in the White House, three thousand miles away in Scotland he is building a new golf course that renews scrutiny of his vexed relationship with his mother's birth country.

For some, the 18-hole links on the northeast Aberdeenshire coast will symbolise the Republican candidate's adoration for the late Mary Anne MacLeod Trump's ancestral home and will be a driver of economic investment.