SANTA has delivered a gift of wild and unpredictable weather to Australians this Christmas. Residents in two bushfire-affected states awoke to a white Christmas, while Queenslanders sweltered in hot and humid conditions.
Parts of Australia are in the grip of the worst drought in memory. Rainfall in many eastern and southern regions has been at near record lows. On top of that, the weather has been exceptionally warm. The parched conditions have sparked an emotional debate about global warming.
A Christian couple from Lancashire have been awarded £10,000 in an out-of-court settlement after they were questioned by police about their moral beliefs.
Helen and Joe Roberts, from Fleetwood, complained about taxpayers' money being used for leaflets about gay rights and called homosexuality "immoral".
A superbug that has killed at least 60 people in the last four years could be linked to milk and meat from British farms, warn experts. A virulent form of E.coli, which is resistant to usual antibiotics, has been found on 11 cattle farms.
The Spanish flu virus that killed up to 50 million people in 1918-19 was probably a strain that originated in birds, research has shown. US scientists have found the 1918 virus shares genetic mutations with the bird flu virus now circulating in Asia.
A global flu pandemic could kill 62 million people, experts have warned. The 1918 pandemic claimed 50 million lives, and experts in The Lancet predict the toll today would be higher than this, despite medical advances.
New Jersey's governor signed legislation Thursday giving gay couples all the rights and responsibilities of marriage allowed under state law - but not the title. When the law goes into effect Feb. 19, New Jersey will become the third state offering civil unions to gay couples and the fifth allowing gay couples some version of marriage.
A new ruling from the European Human Rights Court has affirmed the German nation's Nazi-era ban on homeschooling, concluding that society has a significant interest in preventing the development of dissent through "separate philosophical convictions."
The German government, in a throwback to its National Socialist Workers Party heritage, has declared war on homeschool families, promising to bring those with banned "religious convictions" into alignment with the state regulations.
The occupied Palestinian territories will be liberated through jihad, not elections, according to a senior al-Qaeda leader.
Iran has called for the UN Security Council to compel Israel to give up its nuclear weapons.
The Iranian central bank is to convert the state's foreign dollar assets into euros and use the euro for foreign transactions.
Russia's state-controlled natural gas monopoly threatened to cut off supplies to Georgia if it does not agree to a 125 percent increase in the price of gas imports, a company official said Wednesday
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday Israel would one day be "wiped out" at the end of a conference which "cast doubt on the Holocaust."
Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez is directing a growing share of the country's oil profits into euros as the dollar and crude prices fall. The dollar, down 9.4 percent against the euro this year, may face more pressure in 2007 because Venezuela and oil producers from the United Arab Emirates to Indonesia plan to funnel more money into the single European currency.