South Korea’s defence ministry says some of its soldiers have been using pictures of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il for official target practice. Showing disrespect to portraits of Kim Jong-il in North Korea usually results in offenders being sent to the gulag. But in the South, some army training centres have been using pictures [...]

Several lakeside towns in the Philippines are struggling to cope with mountains of rotting fish that were killed by a sudden drop in water temperatures at the weekend. The Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources says more than 750 tonnes of fish have died since Friday in Taal Lake near Manila, hitting several towns whose [...]

There has been a sharp escalation in violence in Yemen overnight, where government forces have sent warplanes to bomb tribal groups demanding the president’s removal. President Ali Abdullah Saleh came close to signing a deal to step down last Sunday, after nearly 33 years in power, but he baulked at the last minute, provoking a [...]

A Zimbabwean painter faces more than 20 years in jail for depicting the Gukurahundi massacres in which 20,000 people were killed. Police in Zimbabwe’s second largest city of Bulawayo shut down Owen Maseko’s exhibition in March last year, less than 24 hours after it opened. The exhibition graphically detailed the atrocities committed in the early [...]

The operator of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan says there might have been partial meltdowns in its No. 2 and 3 reactors from damage after the earthquake and tsunami in March. The latest announcement means all three reactors with active fuel inside the Fukushima plant, north-east of Tokyo, are believed to have suffered [...]

MARK COLVIN: Fairfax media and the journalists’ union have condemned the arrest of a journalist by Queensland Police last night as an unwarranted attack on reporters’ right to do their job. The Queensland Civil Liberties union says the police action harks back to the days of Joh Bjelke Petersen. Wendy Carlisle reports. WENDY CARLISLE: It [...]

A Japanese prosecutor has been removed from his post for releasing dozens of criminal suspects in the hours after the March earthquake and tsunami. Akira Nakamura was the chief of the Fukushima district prosecutors office when the earthquake and then tsunami struck on March 11. Mr Nakamura made the decision to release 31 suspects from [...]