This summer, Italy’s special rescue workers were again chalking up success: some 300 dogs ready to help save lives on dozens of Italian beaches. In early August in Tarquinia, a town about 100 kilometres north of Rome, the dogs and their human partners saved on the same day two girls that had fallen off their [...]

When Malaysia’s only openly homosexual pastor announced he was establishing the nation’s first gay church, the proposal was met with a torrent of outrage and criticism. Reverend Ouyang Wen Feng faced down threats to block the plan by government and religious leaders who said it would encourage homosexuality – still a crime punishable by 20 [...]

Like every Chinese child, Li Hanwei spent her schooldays memorising thousands of the intricate characters that make up the Chinese writing system. Yet aged just 21 and now a university student in Hong Kong, Li already finds that when she picks up a pen to write, the characters for words as simple as “embarrassed” have [...]

In his days as a jet-setting telecom executive, ready-to-eat meals were a regular part of Fazal Bahardeen’s luggage. Many of the hotels he stayed in did not have halal-certified restaurants for Muslim travellers like the 47-year-old Sri Lankan-born Singaporean. Rooms lacked markers pointing to Mecca for prayers and staff were unable to answer questions from [...]

Five-year-old Singaporean Timothy Lee has yet to enter primary school, but even before his formal schooling begins he is already attending classes six days a week. From Monday to Friday he goes to a normal kindergarten, but on Saturdays he takes special classes on phonics and abacus with four other children at an “enrichment centre” [...]

When he was just one year old, Tony’s young parents packed up their scant belongings and moved from Sydney’s world-famous beaches to build their own home on the city’s then-wild outskirts. It was the 1980s and his teenage parents, fresh out of senior school and wildly in love, dreamed of a yard with trees to [...]

High in the hills of western India, Homi Dhalla looks around the Bharot Caves complex, pointing out the cracked and crumbling stone in the roughly hewn rocks. “If we wish to save these caves, the world community has to stand up and do something about it now before it’s too late,” he says, as the [...]

Muslims around the world could be setting their watches to a new time soon when the world’s largest clock begins ticking atop a soaring skyscraper in Islam’s holiest city of Mecca. Saudi Arabia hopes the four faces of the new clock, which will loom over Mecca’s Grand Mosque from what is expected to be the [...]

Alcoholic Janetta van Bruggen settles comfortably into a clinic chair, lights a cigarette and takes a supervised swig from a tall, frosted mug – her sixth beer since breakfast. Previously forced to drink on the sly, up to two litres (two quarts) of wine and three litres of beer per day, she is one of [...]

The list of World Heritage sites, which brings an endorsement that can boost tourism and environmental protection for those on it, has swelled with 21 additions decided at a UNESCO meeting in recent days. UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, which wrapped up its deliberations in Brasilia on Tuesday after 10 days of work, awarded its seal [...]

SYDNEY Climate change could make much of the world too hot for human habitation within just three centuries, research released this week showed. Scientists from Australia’s University of New South Wales and Purdue University in the United States found that rising temperatures in some places could mean humans would be unable to adapt or survive. [...]

Fifty years ago next Sunday, a 32-year-old engineer called Theodore Maiman switched on a gadget at Hughes Research Laboratories in California, and watched as pulses of light sprang from a pink ruby crystal. It was a geek eureka: the moment when the laser was born. And the world would change forever. But not just yet. [...]