World

"The Black Dog" was a quiet London pub until it became a pilgrimage site for Taylor Swift fans who identified it from a song on the U.S. megastar's latest album.

Dewmi Fernando, a 23-year-old tourist from Singapore joined the faithful flocking in growing numbers to the bar in Vauxhall, south London.

An Iranian court has sentenced to death a popular rapper jailed for more than a year and a half for supporting nationwide protests sparked by Mahsa Amini's death, local media reported Wednesday.

"Branch 1 of Isfahan Revolutionary Court... sentenced Toomaj Salehi to death on the charge of corruption on Earth," the singer's lawyer Amir Raisian said, quoted by the reformist Shargh newspaper.

Extreme heat scorched the Philippines on Wednesday, forcing thousands of schools to suspend in-person classes and prompting warnings for people to limit the amount of time spent outdoors.

The months of March, April and May are typically the hottest and driest in the archipelago nation, but conditions this year have been exacerbated by the El Nino weather phenomenon.

Thousands of Bangladeshis gathered to pray for rain on Wednesday in the middle of an extreme heatwave that prompted authorities to shut down schools around the country.

Extensive scientific research has found climate change is causing heat waves to become longer, more frequent and more intense.

A French police trade union threatened Tuesday to disrupt the Olympics torch relay ahead of the start of the Paris Games this July unless officers were given bonuses.

The Alliance union said that the French prime minister's office and economy ministry were holding up special Olympics payments promised to police of as much as 1,900 euros ($2,032).

Under a ceaseless storm of strikes in Gaza, a baby girl has survived insurmountable odds as the only member of her family left alive after she was delivered by Caesarian section as her mother lay dying.

At just seven months pregnant, her mother, Sabreen al-Sakani, reached the emergency unit in critical condition after she was fatally wounded in the head and abdomen at the weekend.

A Moscow court on Tuesday denied US journalist Evan Gershkovich's appeal against the extension of his pre-trial detention in the espionage case that he and American authorities have rejected as false.

Gershkovich, 32, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, has been in Moscow's notorious Lefortovo prison for more than a year after he was arrested while on a reporting trip to Russia.

Taiwan's incoming president Lai Ching-te said on Tuesday that a multi-billion U.S. military aid package will "strengthen deterrence against authoritarianism", as China ramps up political and military pressure on the self-ruled island.

Democratic Taiwan is claimed by China, which has said it would never renounce the use of force to bring the island under its control.

During World War II, dozens of women Cambridge University students worked around the clock in complete secrecy to crack Nazi codes, but only now are the unsung heroes getting recognition.

At least 77 women from the women-only Newnham College were drafted to Bletchley Park, the code-breaking centre north of London, during the conflict.

Stethoscope over her white coat, Thai doctor Kachisarah Sridakhot walks hospital corridors hoping to beat a path for other trans women to be fully accepted in the kingdom.

LGBTQ activists won a major victory last month when Thai lawmakers passed a bill that should see same-sex marriages become legal later this year -- a first in Southeast Asia.

Former President Donald Trump accepted five new conditions demanded by New York Attorney General Letitia James in order to get his controversial $175 million bond accepted in his civil fraud case, according to a new analysis.

"The new conditions were needed, prosecutors argued, because they didn’t trust the financial health of the insurance company, Knight Specialty Insurance, who posted the bond for Trump.Josh Fiallo of The Daily Beast writes. "They noted that Knight had violated federal law on multiple occasions and that they relied on risk-transfer practices to artificially bolster the surplus it used to cover Trump’s bond."