A jaguar featured at an Olympic torch ceremony was shot dead by a soldier shortly after the event in the Brazilian Amazon city of Manaus as the animal escaped from its handlers

On a bright day in downtown Kabul, Jagtar Singh Laghmani was in his traditional herb shop when a man turned up, drew a knife and told him to convert to Islam or he would cut his throat. Only bystanders and other shopkeepers saved his life.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has suspended the credentials of a testing laboratory in Rio de Janeiro for failing to comply with international standards, just over a month before the city hosts the Olympic Games.

China moved closer on Monday to adopting a controversial cybersecurity law, after parliament held a second reading of the draft rules, which carry significant consequences for domestic and foreign business and threaten greater censorship.

Rio de Janeiro's interim governor Francisco Dornelles admitted that the Olympic Games could be a "big failure" if there are no appropriate measures taken in regards to security and transport during the Games.

Californians are set to decide whether to make recreational marijuana use legal, as other Western states have done, after the California Secretary of State's office said on Tuesday the issue could be put to voters in the November ballot.

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, seeking to tamp down a firestorm over meeting with former President Bill Clinton, said on Friday she will accept the recommendations of career prosecutors and the FBI director on whether to charge Hillary Clinton for mishandling emails.

Marco Streng is a miner, though he does not carry a pick around his base in south-western Iceland. Instead, he keeps tens of thousands of computers running 24 hours a day in fierce competition with others across the globe to earn bitcoins.

Flamboyant German tech entrepreneur Kim Dotcom is planning to relaunch file-sharing website Megaupload in January 2017, five years after the U.S. government took down the site accusing it of piracy.

A former Google engineer, whose speech recognition software is used in more than a billion Android smartphones, has launched a company that uses blockchain technology to build a new operating system for banks.