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Malaysia has strengthened its controversial sedition law, imposing a minimum jail term of three years and allowing the government to block online media deemed to be seditious, lawmakers said on Friday.   The toughening of the Sedition Act, which dates back to British colonial rule, comes after a crackdown in which scores of people have been detained under the law ...

A Turkish court has ordered blocks on Twitter and YouTube for sharing photos of a hostage taken during an armed siege last week. The blocks have been imposed because images of a deadly siege were being shared via the social networks. In the siege two gunmen reportedly from a far-left group took a prosecutor hostage at Istanbul central courthouse. All ...

Poland is to build observation towers along its land border with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, according to a Polish news agency. The six towers will be up to 50m (164ft) high and will stream images to Polish guards monitoring the 200km (124-mile) border, the PAP agency says. The total cost is reported to be 14m zloty (£2.5m; $3.8m), with ...

The Israeli army has placed a female Palestinian legislator under detention for six months without trial, a lawyer for the politician said. Khalida Jarrar, a senior political leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a left-wing Palestinian faction, is being held for alleged activities in a hostile organisation, lawyer Mahmoud Hassan said on Monday. The PFLP ...

A Chinese man was caught out when 17 of his girlfriends turned up to see him in hospital after a car accident, it’s reported. The man, identified as Mr Yuan from the city of Changsha, in Hunan province, had apparently been dating all the women at the same time, and even has a child with one of them, the South ...

An explosion has ripped through a chemical plant in south-eastern China’s Fujian province, sparking a major fire. The blast occurred on Monday evening at the plant in Zhangzhou. State news agency Xinhua reported one injury. The plant produces paraxylene (PX), a flammable chemical used in polyester and plastics manufacturing. The location of PX plants in China has sparked protests from ...

Two Australian drug smugglers sentenced to death cannot challenge the president’s decision to refuse them clemency, an Indonesian court has ruled. Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were the leaders of the “Bali Nine” group of heroin smugglers arrested in 2005. They are scheduled to be executed by firing squad in Indonesia soon. Australia has campaigned hard for their sentences to ...

The United States will provide aerial refueling for a Saudi-led campaign in Yemen but is not passing on precise information for air raids, a senior military official said Thursday. The US military’s Central Command (CENTCOM) has been given the green light to deploy refueling tankers for the Saudis and their Gulf partners in the operation, though the refueling will take ...

Kenya is mourning 147 people killed in Thursday’s al-Shabab attack on Garissa university campus, amid questions over why warnings were ignored. Kenyan newspapers say there was intelligence information of an imminent attack on a school or university. Locals question why security was not heightened, with only two guards on duty at the time of the attack. Uganda is on heightened ...

Data from the second ‘black box’ flight recorder belonging to the Germanwings plane that crashed in the Alps suggests that the co-pilot deliberately accelerated its descent, French investigators say. They say Andreas Lubitz modified the automatic pilot system several times to increase the speed of descent. The information they recovered also confirms earlier findings that Lubitz deliberately crashed the plane. ...