Civilians in rebel-held eastern Aleppo are expressing desperation over their survival as fighting between the government and the opposition carves deeper into their half of the city.

Some 20,000 people have fled intensified attacks on rebel-held eastern Aleppo in Syria since Sunday, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Tuesday.

Fighting between Iraqi forces and ISIL fighters has cut water supplies across a large part of Mosul, affecting 40 percent of residents in the city where poorer families are already struggling to feed themselves.

Dutch MPs on Tuesday voted overwhelmingly to ban the full-face burqa from some public places such as schools and hospitals, the latest such move in a European country.

Freezing temperatures and heavy snowfall have killed at least 20 people, mostly children, this week in a remote northern province in Afghanistan, local officials say.

Police in Stockholm are investigating a Saturday attack on a mosque in which neo-Nazi and anti-Muslim slogans were daubed near the place of worship.

Criticizing strongly the demolition of common people’s houses in the cold weather in Zahedan, the eminent Sunni leader said the act in the winter season was ‘nonsense’.

An outstanding political activist of the Iranian Sunni community has criticized the role of the current ‘modern’ government of Iran regarding the rights of Iranian Sunnis. However, he expressed his optimism about the future of the Iranian Sunni community.

Sitting in a cafeteria in her middle-class neighbourhood of Ilioupoli, 43-year-old Anna Stamou says she soon hopes to be praying with her family at the new Athens mosque.

Horrifying stories of gang rape, torture and murder are emerging from among the thousands of desperate Rohingya migrants who have pushed into Bangladesh in the past few days to escape unfolding chaos in Myanmar.