A cyclist has died after swerving to avoid a magpie in Australia, police said. New South Wales Police said the 76-year-old man was attempting to avoid the swooping bird on Sunday morning in Woonona, 35 miles south of Sydney. He crashed into a fence post and suffered serious head injuries and was taken to hospital […]

SYDNEY, Australia — As tensions have swelled on Australian university campuses over the democracy movement in Hong Kong, the battle lines seem to have been neatly drawn: Chinese students on the side of China, and Chinese-Australian students on the side of Hong Kong. But inside the halls, the reality is more complicated. Views are often […]

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Damien Cave, the Australia bureau chief. __________ The photographs come from all over — Manila, Mosul and Caracas, remote Australia and rural Cuba. They capture people demanding dignity in every circumstance, […]

Two Australian citizens detained in Iran have been identified as Jolie King and Mark Firkin. Ms King, who also holds a UK passport, and Mr Firkin were blogging their travels in Asia and the Middle East. They were reportedly arrested 10 weeks ago near Tehran but news of the arrest, and that of another British-Australian […]

Two Australian citizens detained in Iran have been identified as Jolie King and Mark Firkin. Ms King, who also holds a UK passport, and Mr Firkin were blogging their travels in Asia and the Middle East. They were reportedly arrested 10 weeks ago near Tehran but news of the arrest, and that of another British-Australian […]

Cam Neville looked out from the truck and caught a glimpse of burning red lines leading to a location called Hellfire Pass. It was his first night volunteering with the local fire brigade, and the Australian photographer felt anxious. What was he about to encounter? “Certainly I had a flutter of nervousness,” he told the […]

It was World War II, and Jan O’Herne, a Dutch prisoner interned by the Japanese, remembered a “large, repulsive, fat, baldheaded” Japanese officer approaching her and unsheathing his sword. “He stood right over me now, pointing the sword at my body,” she wrote in a memoir, “Fifty Years of Silence” (1994). “He threw me on […]

More than 100 bushfires across two Australian states are raging in hot and windy conditions that officials warn are unprecedented this early in spring. In Queensland more than 50 fires were burning on Sunday. Forecasters say there is no sign of an end to strong winds that have fanned the flames. One blaze in neighbouring […]

Hong Kong is now in its eighth week of street protests, which began with opposition to a controversial extradition bill but have spiralled into wider opposition to the government and Beijing. As the situation grows yet more tense, the impact is also being felt overseas, particularly among the hundreds of thousands of mainland Chinese and […]

A student pilot in Australia safely landed a light aircraft during a flying lesson, after his instructor passed out at the controls. Western Australian man Max Sylvester made a distress call to air traffic control about an hour into his flight on Saturday when his teacher collapsed beside him. Operators at an airport in Perth […]