World

Pope Francis created a new group of saints on Sunday, canonizing 14 individuals including the "martyrs of Damascus", killed in Syria during the Ottoman Empire and symbols of Christian persecution.

Francis presided over the canonization ceremony in Saint Peter's Square in the presence of thousands of Catholic faithful from around the world.

Six Russian soldiers who fled the fighting in Ukraine have found refuge in France and hope to receive asylum, in a landmark case of Russian deserters being welcomed in an EU country as a group.

The deserters, all of whom had reached France via Kazakhstan, told AFP in a series of interviews they hoped their actions would encourage other Russian men to defy Moscow authorities and flee the war, now in its third year.

King Charles visited Australia's capital Canberra on Monday, where he was sneezed on by a suit-wearing alpaca, heckled by an Indigenous senator, and applauded for a speech on the country's climate perils.

The 75-year-old sovereign is on a nine-day jaunt through Australia and Samoa, the first major foreign tour since his life-changing cancer diagnosis earlier this year.

South Korea summoned the Russian ambassador Monday to criticise Pyongyang's decision to send thousands of soldiers to support Moscow's war in Ukraine, the foreign ministry said, calling for their immediate withdrawal.

About 1,500 North Korean special forces soldiers are already in Russia acclimatising and likely to head to the front lines soon, Seoul's spy agency said Friday, with additional troops set to depart soon, Pyongyang's first such deployment overseas.

Gunmen in Indian-administered Kashmir raked a construction site work camp with bullets, killing seven people and wounding several others, Indian media reported Monday, updating an earlier toll.

The attack on Sunday is one of the worst this year targeting civilians.

Radical Austrian nationalist Martin Sellner, banned from entering Switzerland, was arrested Saturday having crossed the border.

The 35-year-old, who advocates mass expulsions of foreigners, had been invited by the far-right group Junge Tat, known for its anti-immigration and anti-Islamic views, to speak at a conference in Zurich on Saturday.

A man was arrested after throwing several suspected petrol bombs at the headquarters of Japan's ruling party Saturday and ramming his car into a fence outside the prime minister's office, police said.

No injuries were reported in the incident, which comes just over a week before a general election in which new Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba hopes to shore up his mandate.

The cloud from a decades-old political crisis hangs over King Charles III's tour of Australia, where the 1975 sacking of a sitting prime minister continues to fuel suspicions of royal meddling.

Governor-General John Kerr used his vice-regal powers in 1975 to topple Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, a popular leader beset by a string of parliamentary scandals.

A Guatemalan judge on Friday granted the request for prominent journalist Jose Ruben Zamora to be placed under house arrest, months after the writer's conditional release had been revoked.

Judge Erick Garcia concluded the near-eight-hour hearing in Guatemala City by ruling in favor of the request "for human rights reasons," adding "the extent of the prison sentence has exceeded the limits."

North Korea's decision to deploy thousands of soldiers to Ukraine's front lines cements Pyongyang's contentious military alliance with Moscow, experts told AFP, and pulls Russia deeper into Korean peninsula security.

About 1,500 North Korean special forces soldiers are already in Russia acclimatizing, likely to head to the front lines soon, Seoul's spy agency said Friday, with thousands more troops set to depart imminently, Pyongyang's first such deployment overseas.

Cuba was racing Friday to restore electricity after the failure of the island's biggest power plant caused a nationwide blackout, coming on the heels of weeks of extended outages across the cash-strapped country.

The capital Havana came to a virtual standstill as schools closed, public transport ground to a halt and traffic lights stopped functioning.

International media reported that North Korea sent troops to Russia to help them fight their continued invasion of Ukraine.

While complaining about not getting a White House briefing, Ohio Rep. Mike Turner, the House Republican Intelligence Committee chairman, called the move a "red line."

On a barge on Rome's River Tiber, a stone's throw from the Vatican, Loan Rocher was "ordained" in a secret ceremony in defiance of the Catholic Church's ban on women deacons and priests.

Dressed in a white robe with a rainbow stole, the 68-year-old Frenchwoman acknowledged her ordination was unauthorized by the Vatican, where a month-long summit on the future of the Church concludes next week.