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Afghanistan and Pakistan have agreed to an immediate ceasefire, Qatar’s Foreign Ministry said on Sunday.

It follows more than a week of fighting that has killed dozens of people and injured hundreds.

The two sides agreed to establish mechanisms to consolidate lasting peace and stability, as well as holding follow-up talks in the coming days to ensure the ceasefire’s sustainability, the Qatari statement said.

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Delegations from Afghanistan and Pakistan were in Doha for talks to resolve the deadliest crisis between them in several years.

The talks were mediated by Qatar and Turkey.

Both governments had sent their defence ministers to lead the talks, which Pakistan said would focus on “immediate measures to end cross-border terrorism emanating from Afghanistan and restore peace and stability along the border.”

Each country has said it was responding to aggression from the other.

Afghanistan denies harbouring militants who carry out attacks in border areas.

Regional powers, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have called for calm, as the violence threatened to further destabilise a region where groups including the Islamic State group and al-Qaida are trying to resurface.

A 48-hour ceasefire intended to pause hostilities expired Friday evening. Hours later, Pakistan struck across the border.

Pakistani security officials confirmed to The Associated Press Saturday that there were strikes on two districts in Afghanistan's eastern Paktika province.

The targets were hideouts of the militant Hafiz Gul Bahadur group, according to the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to talk to the media.

One said the operation was a direct response to the suicide bombing of a security forces compound in Mir Ali, in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province a day earlier.

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The Pakistani Air Force raids killed dozens of armed fighters and there were no civilian deaths, they said.

But Afghan officials said the aerial assaults killed at least 10 civilians, including women, children and local cricketers.

The attacks prompted the national cricket board to boycott an upcoming series in Pakistan.

On Saturday, several thousand people attended funeral prayers in Paktika.

They sat in the open air as loudspeakers broadcast sermons and condemnation.

Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban government’s chief spokesman, in a statement, criticised the “repeated crimes of Pakistani forces and the violation of Afghanistan’s sovereignty.”

Such acts were deemed provocative and viewed as “deliberate attempts” to prolong the conflict, he added.

The two countries share a 2611-kilometre border known as the Durand Line, but Afghanistan has never recognised it.

Pakistan is grappling with surging militancy, especially in areas bordering Afghanistan.

It also accuses its nuclear-armed neighbour and rival India of backing armed groups, without providing any evidence.

Pakistan's army chief, Asim Munir, urged Afghans to choose “mutual security over perpetual violence and progress over hardline obscurantism.”

“The Taliban must rein in the proxies who have sanctuaries in Afghanistan,” he told an audience on Saturday at the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

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A WA family is desperately searching for answers after a much-loved mother vanished three days ago.

Mother-of-three Michelle Leahy, 50, was last seen on the afternoon of Thursday, October 16 in the Perth suburb of Nedlands.

Her family and police hold concerns for her welfare.

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Michelle's husband Murray issued a heartbreaking message directly to his missing wife.

"Michelle, you're dearly loved. We want you home. We need you home," he said.

"You are the heart and soul of our family."

Leahy was last seen wearing a white top, blue patterned pants and a black cap.

She is described as approximately 175cm tall, is of medium build, with brown hair and blue eyes.

Murray is asking locals in the Nedlands area to check their properties for any sign of Michelle.

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Police are now reviewing CCTV footage from various areas to track Michelle's movements.

A police airwing drone was also used on Friday to search the Kings Park area.

Anyone with information is urged to contact police or Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.

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They produced a document in support of their case but it was fabricated.

The minister heads to Sydney tomorrow to promote investment in New Zealand minerals.

The property manager could barely enter the home due to the smell.

It was one scandal too many.

After emails emerged this week showing that Prince Andrew remained in contact with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein longer than he previously admitted, the House of Windsor finally moved to insulate the monarchy from years of tawdry headlines about Andrew's dodgy friends and suspicious business deals.

Buckingham Palace released a statement from Andrew on Friday saying that he had agreed to give up use of his last remaining royal titles so that continued allegations about him “don’t distract from the work of His Majesty.”

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This week’s revelations demonstrated that Andrew had committed the unforgivable sin of misleading the British public, said Craig Prescott, an expert on the monarchy and constitutional law at Royal Holloway University of London.

“To say something which is proven not to be true, I think, is the straw that broke the camel’s back,’’ he said.

Insulating the monarchy at a delicate time

While the cumulative weight of Andrew’s scandals demanded a response from the royal family, this week’s revelations came at a particularly sensitive moment for the king as he prepares for a state visit to the Vatican, where he is expected to pray beside Pope Leo XIV.

The visit is very important to Charles, who has made the bridging of faiths an important part of his “mantra,” said George Gross, an expert on theology and the monarchy at King’s College, London.

“I think this was the speediest, really the quickest way of lowering his status even more without having to go to Parliament,” Gross said.

“Even if Parliament would have approved, it takes time.’’

Charles may also have been motivated by a desire to protect the work of Queen Camilla, who has made combating domestic violence one of her signature issues, and the Duchess of Edinburgh, who has sought to combat sexual violence in war zones such as Congo.

The king will hope that this move finally draws a line between Andrew and the rest of the royal family, Prescott said.

“If there are allegations, or further stuff comes out, it will all be on Prince Andrew,” he said. “They’ve severed the connection between Prince Andrew and the monarchy as an institution.”

Signs of a new direction

The move comes as Charles, who is 76 and undergoing treatment for an undisclosed form of cancer, works to ensure the long-term stability of the monarchy under his son and heir Prince William.

William recently gave an interview in which he set out his vision for the monarchy, saying that the institution needed to change to make sure that it is a force for good.

“In some ways, Prince Andrew has been the exact opposite of that,” Prescott said.

“And there is no space for that in the modern monarchy.”

Andrew, 65, is the second son of the late Queen Elizabeth II.

He spent more than 20 years as an officer in the Royal Navy before leaving to take up his royal duties in 2001.

Following Friday’s announcement, Andrew will no longer use his remaining royal titles, including the Duke of York, though he technically retains them.

Formally stripping him of those titles would be a time-consuming process requiring an act of Parliament.

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A long time coming

Andrew’s banishment completes a process that began in November 2019, when he gave up all of his public duties and charity roles.

That was triggered by a disastrous interview Andrew gave to the BBC as he sought to counter media reports about his friendship with Epstein and deny allegations that he had sex with a 17-year-old girl, Virginia Giuffre, who was trafficked by Epstein in 2001.

The prince was widely criticised for failing to show empathy for Epstein’s victims and for offering unbelievable explanations for his friendship with the disgraced financier.

The interview also sowed the seeds of this week’s upheaval, when Andrew told the BBC that he had cut off contact with Epstein in December 2010.

British newspapers on Sunday revealed that Andrew wrote an email to Epstein on February 28, 2011.

Andrew wrote the note after renewed reporting on the Epstein scandal, telling him they were “in this together” and would “have to rise above it.”

Andrew has recently faced another round of grimy stories as newspapers release excerpts of Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, which will be published on Tuesday.

Giuffre died by suicide in April at the age of 41.

Andrew in 2022 reached an out-of-court settlement with Giuffre after she filed a civil suit against him in New York.

While he didn’t admit wrongdoing, Andrew did acknowledge Giuffre’s suffering as a victim of sex trafficking.

While Andrew said he continues to “vigorously deny” the accusations, Giuffre's family saw the surrender of the use of his titles as validation for her memoir's claims that the prince acted like sex was his birthright.

“We’ve shed a lot of happy and sad tears today," her brother, Sky Roberts, told the BBC.

"In a lot of ways this vindicates Virginia.”

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Front-page fodder for wrong reasons

The prince has been the subject of tabloid stories stretching back to at least 2007, when he sold his house near Windsor Castle for 20 per cent over the 15 million pound ($31.1 million) asking price.

The buyer was reported to be Timur Kulibayev, son-in-law of Nursultan Nazarbayev, then-president of Kazakhstan, raising concerns that the deal was an attempt to buy influence in Britain.

Last year, a court case revealed Andrew’s relationship with a businessman and suspected Chinese spy who was barred from the United Kingdom as a threat to national security. Authorities were concerned that the man could have misused his influence over Andrew, according to court documents.

While the palace said Andrew had decided to give up his royal titles, royal historian Sally Bedell Smith said the king, Prince William and the entire family exerted enormous pressure on him.

“I think he was absolutely forced into this,″ said Smith, author of Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life.

“He’s had many opportunities to fall on his sword, and he hasn’t. So I think he was given a pretty stark choice: Either do this voluntarily or we’re going to have to do this the hard way.″

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When Anthony Albanese meets Donald Trump at the White House in a little under 48 hours, he'll be hoping to avoid the wretched fate two other world leaders have suffered at the hands of the US president.

Both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa were publicly ambushed after stepping into the Oval Office earlier this year.

First it was Zelenskyy, who was berated by Trump and Vice-President JD Vance in February for not being grateful enough for US aid in the face of Russia's invasion, even though Trump had recently labelled the Ukrainian president a dictator and parrotted Kremlin talking points.

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"This is going to be great television," Trump mused in front of Zelenskyy.

Months later, Ramaphosa was blindsided when Trump dimmed the lights to play "a couple of things" purporting to be proof of a genocide against white farmers in South Africa – although the so-called evidence, including an image of burial sites in the Democratic Republic of Congo, was baseless and misleading.

The unedifying displays were enough to make any world leader tetchy about a date with the US president, so does Albanese have anything to worry about?

The prime minister himself insists not, saying last week that he was "not at all" nervous about the meeting, pointing to the "really warm discussions" he's previously had with Trump.

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Certainly, the relationship between the US and Australia is better than that of the White House and Zelenskyy – who Trump clashed with as far back as 2019 – and South Africa, which has seen its aid cut and faced accusations of white genocide (which local authorities deny) by the Trump administration.

But there are some sticking points between Washington and Canberra. 

The decision made by the federal government to join the likes of the United Kingdom, France and Canada in recognising Palestine as a state put it at odds with Trump, while the Pentagon is unhappy with Australia's defence spending levels.

Before Trump's second term began, Australia had already committed to an increase in military spending from about 2 to 2.4 per cent of GDP by 2034 – still well short of the 3.5 per cent US War Secretary Pete Hegseth is calling for.

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For the government's part, it says defence spending is actually far higher than what the raw figures suggest.

"We're overseeing the largest increase in defence funding outside of war in the history of the country, and secondly, we've also been explaining that using the NATO methodology, which is the preferred methodology to compare these things, we're already at 2.8 per cent of GDP before all our increases kick in," Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy said on Thursday.

"So put that into context: that's bigger than anyone in Europe, other than Poland and the Baltic states, it's bigger than the United Kingdom, and it's larger than any of the other Indo-Pacific partners."

Albanese also holds some cards of his own: the recent defence deal with Papua New Guinea, with the potential for another with Fiji to follow, limiting Beijing's push for greater Pacific influence; billions of dollars heading to the US under the AUKUS pact; plus Washington's interest in a critical minerals deal to ease the reliance on China for the crucial rare earths.

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The latter has been touted as a potential bargaining chip to have Australia exempt from US tariffs – 50 per cent on steel and aluminium, as well as a 10 per cent baseline duty.

And according to defence analyst Michael Shoebridge, there's another factor in the prime minister's favour: the sheer weight of other issues Trump is focusing on.

"Trump is a busy man – and when it comes to Australia, that means he's just not that into us," he wrote for the Lowy Institute after the meeting was announced. 

"That's likely to mean he won't focus as much as we fear on his Aussie visitor and the challenges and differences we're all so worried about. 

"In the world of 2025, that amounts to good news."

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There's been a dramatic and dangerous escalation in the spate of arson attacks on Adelaide businesses.

This time a business at Torrensville has been targeted by a firebombing gang while it was open.

A worker was burned and one of the alleged offenders caught alight in the chaos.

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Footage of the confronting moment was captured on CCTV as the alleged arsonists made their bungled getaway.

The video shows an unsuspecting man walking towards the door of the business just as the attack unfolds.

He is seen jumping back as masked men run back outside, one of them suffering burns.

Two innocent workers were caught up in the terrifying attack, believed to be linked to Adelaide's ongoing tobacco wars.

Staff inside Saray – a Mediterranean supermarket, butcher and restaurant – were ambushed, with its owner telling 9News they had accelerant poured over them and were set alight.

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"There's just people screaming, running everywhere, next minute the fierys and everyone's here," one witness said.

Security cameras captured the alleged attackers arriving in a black Lexus.

Nearby workers chased after them as they fled down Henley Beach Road, smashing into another innocent motorist as they made their escape.

Police say three men of Asian appearance entered the store and started a fire, possibly using a Molotov cocktail.

The attack happened at about 11.30am during the busy Saturday rush, with several people inside.

Part of Henley Beach Road was shut down as police swarmed the area and paramedics treated a 26-year-old worker for burns to his legs and arms.

He was loaded into an ambulance and taken to the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

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Detectives from Operation Eclipse, who are investigating Adelaide's tobacco wars, were immediately on scene as it's made clear it was a targeted attack.

A burnt boot was left behind, belonging to one of the alleged attackers who fled.

An hour after the attack a man with serious burns was found at home in Angle Park.

He tried to tell ambulance crews he had burns from a BBQ but police believe he was involved.

And as they hunt for the other two attackers, Saray is counting the cost of another fire bombing attack – it's the third in the past 16 months.

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From West Coast Eagles' current coach to a former Australian cricket captain, legends from all codes have thrown their support behind Danny Green's Fight the Coward Punch blitz.

It's been 13 years since the WA boxing champion started the campaign and he's confident the message is cutting through.

"We've got to keep punching – excuse the pun – we've gotta keep punching away at this because it's very important," Green told 9News.

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"I'm very proud of the fact I've received a lot of support."

And that support came from Australia's sporting elite today, as fierce rivals on the field came together for Green's campaign.

"It's just not anything we want to see in public, so stop the coward punch is a great campaign," Eagles Coach Andrew McQualter told 9News.

Fremantle Football Club's Patrick Voss agrees.

"I don't think it's a show of strength coward punching – or punching anyone in general," he told 9News.

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Studies show about three quarters of survivors face significant impacts to their quality of life.

"Violence isn't going to solve anything really," Eagles player Jake Waterman told 9News.

"It resonates with a lot of people – victims and family of victims have their lives cut short or taken back from something."

Danny Hodgson is still receiving treatment for the hit that put him into a coma four years ago.

More than 172 Australians have died from a coward punch since 2000.

Danny Green is standing by his 13-year-old campaign, saying it's helping with awareness.

"People say, 'oh is it working?' I say 'yeah, it's definitely working' – the numbers, the data show the numbers have been reduced of death and injuries."

It's hoped events like these can further drill down how a split second decision can have an irreversible impact.

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