Too many miners were below ground at a Chinese coal mine where 104 workers were killed in a gas explosion, a safety official has alleged.

Jetstar has apologised to Paralympian Kurt Fearnley after he criticised the airline for preventing him from using his own wheelchair in Brisbane Airport.

This summer a Waikato University student will study Hawke's Bay rock formations, a six-week field trip paid for by a fund established as a memorial to a student who died on Erebus in the 1979 Air New Zealand crash.

Air New Zealand Flight 901 on November 28, 1979, ended as a national tragedy and mystery that persists to this day, writes MAX LAMBERT of NZPA.

The United States will announce a target for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions before the UN climate conference in Copenhagen, a senior official says.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Khartoum's U.N. envoy, rejecting a bleak U.N. assessment of the situation in Sudan's conflict-torn western Darfur region, said on Monday it was time for international peacekeepers to prepare to leave.

BRASILIA (AFP) - Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Monday urged his visiting Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to find a "just solution" with the West to Tehran's contested nuclear program.

Carla Bruni, the supermodel wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy, and US crooner Harry Connick Junior reunite on French television for a duet.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States will present an emissions target at upcoming UN climate change talks in Copenhagen, a senior official said Monday, as President Barack Obama mulled whether to attend the conference.

As the first anniversary of the Air New Zealand Airbus crash in France nears, the victims' families admit to being on a "tightwire" waiting for the final report into what happened.

PARIS (AFP) - The Pompidou Centre was forced to shut down on Monday after staff went on strike to protest planned job cuts at the Parisian mecca of modern and contemporary art.

ROME (AFP) - A military C-130 Hercules transport plane crashed on take-off during a training flight near Pisa in northwest Italy Monday, killing all five people on board, the Italian air force told AFP.

ROME (AFP) - A military C-130 Hercules transport plane crashed on take-off near Pisa in northwest Italy on Monday, killing at least four people, the ANSA news agency reported.

PARIS (AFP) - France's markets watchdog began hearings on Monday into claims 17 current and former EADS aerospace executives made huge profits with inside information about delays in the Airbus A380 project.

PARIS (AFP) - Top industrialised economies broke free of recession in the third quarter despite falling output in Britain, OECD data showed Monday, but the IMF warned that the recovery was "vulnerable" and markets sent a similar message.

Arabic news network Al Jazeera has broadcast a report claiming to expose the methods used by people smugglers operating between Indonesia and Australia.

The Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) has begun an investigation after a jet was forced to ditch in the sea off Norfolk Island.

A horseman who spent three nights cold, wet and injured following a spill in Victoria's high country hopes to find his missing stock horse.