World

The most senior Roman Catholic cleric convicted of covering up child sex abuse was ordered by an Australian court on Tuesday to serve his one-year sentence in home detention rather than jail.

The driver was sweating as his white Kia pickup truck sped along a rain-slicked Baghdad highway towards a neighbourhood bustling with open-air markets.

Imran takes the oath as a member of the National Assembly in Islamabad on Monday. Khan had to borrow a waistcoat from an Assembly employee for a parliamentary registration card photograph. (AP)

Five hardline extremists were sentenced to death on Monday by a special Bangladeshi tribunal for committing crimes against humanity and siding with the Pakistani troops in carrying out a genocide in a village during the Liberation War in 1971.

Passengers arriving at London's Heathrow Airport had to queue at passport control for up to two-and-a-half hours in July, official figures showed, sparking further criticism from aviation chiefs about delays caused by Britain's border regime.

Malaysia's Prime Minister said on Monday he will seek to cancel multibillion-dollar Chinese-backed infrastructure projects that were signed by his predecessor as his government works to dig itself out of debt, and he blasted Myanmar's treatment of Rohingya Muslims as "grossly unjust".

Turkey's Central bank announced a series of measures on Monday to free up cash for banks as the country grapples with a currency crisis sparked by concerns over President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's economic policies and a trade and diplomatic dispute with the United States.

V.S. Naipaul documented the migrations of peoples, the unravelling of the British Empire, the ironies of exile and the clash between belief and unbelief in more than a dozen unsparing novels and as many works of non-fiction.

V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel laureate who died at 85 on Saturday, had so many gifts as a writer - suppleness, wit, an unsparing eye for detail - that he could seemingly do whatever he wanted. What he did want, it became apparent, was to rarely please anyone but himself.

In writing about India, V.S. Naipaul faced a big problem.