Reuters

Venezuela's new legislative superbody on Friday gave itself the power to pass laws, superseding the opposition-led congress and fuelling criticism by government adversaries that socialist President Maduro is consolidating a dictatorship.

A man with a knife killed two people and wounded eight others in a stabbing rampage in a market square in the Finnish city of Turku, police said.

All Whites captain Winston Reid is staying at West Ham, after agreeing to a six-year contract extension that will keep him at the English Premier League club until 2023.

Veteran British television presenter and entertainer Bruce Forsyth, who appeared for decades on a string of Saturday night primetime shows, has died at the age of 89, the BBC reported.

President Donald Trump has fired chief strategist Steve Bannon, the White House announced, ending the turbulent tenure of a rabble-rousing conservative media entrepreneur and political activist who was a darling of Trump's base.

The US and Japan will step up their defence cooperation to deal with the threat from nuclear-armed North Korea as tensions in East Asia remain high.

The US Navy says it will discipline several crew members who were on a warship that collided with a Philippine container ship off the coast of Japan.

At least 26 people died overnight in police operations in the Philippines capital Manila, authorities said, a second night of heavy bloodshed this week in an intensification of President Rodrigo Duterte's fierce war on drugs and crime.

New Zealand golfer Daniel Pearce roared up the leaderboard with a scintillating start on his back nine to card a six-under 66 for a one-shot lead after the first round of the Fiji International

President Donald Trump disbanded two high-profile business advisory councils after several chief executives quit in protest over his remarks blaming weekend violence in Virginia on anti-racism activists as well as white nationalists.

Thirty-seven inmates were killed during an overnight raid by government security forces on a prison in Venezuela's southern jungle state of Amazonas, the governor says.

Sierra Leone has begun burying hundreds of victims of a mudslide that swept away homes on the edge of the capital, one of Africa's worst flood disasters in living memory.

The mother of a woman killed when a suspected white nationalist crashed his car into anti-racist demonstrators in the US says the death has ''magnified'' her daughter.

America's closest allies have condemned US President Donald Trump after he put part of the blame for clashes in Virginia on those marching against gun-brandishing neo-Nazis.