An Iraqi soldier survived a mass execution carried out by Islamic State militants (Isis) by dropping to the floor and pretending to be dead.

A Briton will be the next hostage murdered by Islamist terrorists, the British extremist known as "Jihadi John" threatened in a beheading video released yesterday.

President Barack Obama's ban on the import of Russian Kalashnikov rifles.

26: When World War I came, Kiwis were ready. The first foundations of a homegrown army were already in place.

The video showing the killing of Steven Sotloff is a mirror image of that two weeks ago carrying the last words of his colleague James Foley.

Vladimir Putin has boasted to European leaders his forces could sweep into Kiev in two weeks if he wanted.

The US security services recruited Alaskan fishermen, trappers and bush pilots as "stay-behind agents" to form a secret American resistance network if the Soviet Union staged a widely feared air invasion of the territory.

Islamic radicals returning from Iraq and Syria will be forced on to "deradicalisation" programmes to reverse any brainwashing.

Russia is "practically in a state of war against Europe", with the crisis in Ukraine rapidly approaching "the point of no return", warn EU leaders.

The civil war in Syria has forced a record three million people out of the country as more than a million people fled in the past year, the United Nations refugee agency said yesterday.

A British extremist who is one of the suspects in the murder of James Foley is the son of an alleged al-Qaeda terrorist awaiting trial.

Twenty years before our air force split from the Defence Force in 1937, air fever swept the country.

For generations that have not known war, our stories from exactly a century ago are an insight into what it would be like.

An Israeli air strike hit a house in central Gaza before dawn yesterday, fatally injuring five family members, including two women and two preschoolers.

Israel said it would call up 10,000 reservists as Palestinians vowed to avenge Israel's killing of three Hamas commanders in Gaza.

A leading war historian believes millions being spent on World War I commemorations will be wasted if it fails to focus on education rather than remembrance.

Obama undeterred as air strikes continue even though jihadists say they will execute more US journalists

David Cameron has said that it is "increasingly likely" that a British jihadist beheaded American journalist James Foley

The headstone, its inscription concealed for decades under a coat of lichen, bears witness to the past.

A young soldier who died exactly 100 years ago has been officially acknowledged as the first New Zealand casualty of WWI.

Up to 80 Yazidis have been reported killed by Isis (Islamic State) fighters in the biggest massacre so far of the Iraqi minority.

Australia is considering joining the United States in a limited military operation to rescue as many as 30,000 Iraqi refugees trapped on a barren mountain in the north.

18: In 1871, a German giant mobilised the New Zealand left. That year 600 people, inspired by Karl Marx, formed an unemployed workers union and demonstrated.

The son of a WWII prisoner of war and hero of the Battle of Crete who admitted stealing nearly $90,000 from his dead father's veterans' pension will only have to repay $4500.

America is to supply weapons directly to Kurdish fighters in Iraq for the first time, to help the lightly armed forces in the north push back jihadist rebels, assisted by US air power.

17: Karl Strack risked his life to advance New Zealand over the Germans again and again; we repaid his bravery by blacklisting him.

The Sydney grandfather of a 7-year-old boy pictured clutching the severed head of a Syrian soldier has urged the Australian Government to bring the boy home.

The people of the mountain can see their villages, and the headlights of the jihadi patrols snaking through the streets they have abandoned, and know they cannot return.