After almost two months of fierce battles, the Iraqi army has retaken about 50 percent of Mosul city, the second largest city in the country which was seized by the Islamic State militants in June 2014.
The French capital Paris implemented licence plate-based driving restrictions for a third day in a row yesterday and is planning bans on old cars as the City of Light experienced the worst air pollution in a decade.
A fire at a luxury hotel in the Pakistani city of Karachi killed at least 11 people on Monday and injuring dozens, media reported.
Up to 500,000 civilians in Mosul are facing a "catastrophic" drinking water shortage, the UN warned, as Iraqi forces advance against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria group in the city.
Iraqi security forces on Wednesday fought Islamic State (IS) militants in the city of Mosul and liberated another district in the city, while a UN humanitarian organization warned of the humanitarian situation in eastern Mosul.
More than 50,000 people have fled rebel-held east Aleppo in the last four days as government forces advance, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Wednesday (Nov 30).
Fighting between Iraqi troops and Islamic State militants has cut water supplies across a large part of Mosul, where poorer families are already struggling to feed themselves, and a local official said the increasingly encircled city was in crisis.
Syria's Aleppo has emerged as focus in the long-running Syria crisis, as it's an arena for wrestling for rival forces that would determine the future of the Syria, observers said.
French authorities released two of the seven suspects arrested in police raids at the weekend which broke up a terror ring plotting an attack, a judicial source told AFP.
Almost one million South Koreans marched on Saturday night to demand the resignation of President Park Geun-hye over her biggest political scandal since she took office in February 2013.
Iraqi forces piled pressure on the Islamic State group around Mosul Thursday, moving closer to cutting off the jihadists' escape route west to Syria and thrusting deeper into the east of the city.
Iraqi forces have retaken the ancient city of Nimrud, but it has been heavily damaged by the Islamic State group, an AFP journalist who visited the site on Tuesday said.
Islamic State has summarily killed 21 civilians in Mosul it accused of collaborating with U.S.-backed security forces, which said their offensive to recapture the city from the jihadists had made further advances.
Islamic State claimed a series of suicide attacks that killed at least 14 people south and west of Baghdad on Monday as a U.S.-backed campaign to capture Mosul, the insurgents' last urban stronghold in Iraq, made slow progress.
A giant sinkhole appeared in the middle of a busy Japanese city on Tuesday, swallowing part of a five-lane street near the main railway station.
Asia's largest subterranean water recycling plant commenced operation in Beijing on Thursday, one of the measures being rolled out by the capital to manage sewage in the city proper.
Islamic State fighters kept up on Wednesday their fierce defense of the southern approaches to Mosul, which has held up Iraqi troops there and forced an elite army unit east of the city to put a more rapid advance on hold.
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