Category: World

Several months before the coronavirus pandemic began, the Trump administration eliminated a key American public health position in Beijing intended to help detect disease outbreaks in China, Reuters has learned. The American disease expert, a medical epidemiologist embedded in China’s disease control agency, left her post in July, according to four sources with knowledge of the issue. […]

WASHINGTON: US congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard dropped out of the Democratic presidential nomination race on Thursday and immediately endorsed rival Joe Biden as flag bearer heading into the November election against President Donald Trump. “Today, I’m suspending my presidential campaign and offering my full support to vice president Joe Biden in his quest to bring our […]

LONDON: The British government apologised on Thursday for its treatment of Britons of Caribbean origin who were wrongly detained or deported for being illegal immigrants, after the publication of a devastating official report. The inquiry found that successive governments trying to show they were tough on illegal immigration displayed a “complete disregard” for the “Windrush” […]

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s Election Commission (EC) Chairman Mahinda Deshapriya announced on Thursday that the general election will not be held on April 25 as scheduled on account of the coronavirus pandemic. Sri Lanka has up till Thursday recorded 59 coronavirus patients, with the first patient, a tourist tour guide having fully recovered early this week. […]

The pharmaceutical industry expects it will take 12 to 18 months to roll out a coronavirus vaccine, executives said on Thursday, as they jointly pledged to make it available worldwide based on need. Bureaucracy could be slashed to speed up the process — but the time needed for safety testing could not be compromised, industry […]

India executed four men on Friday for the gang-rape and murder of a woman on a Delhi bus in 2012 that sparked huge nationwide protests and international revulsion. The four were hanged before dawn at Tihar Jail in the Indian capital, the head of the prison Sandeep Goel told AFP, in India’s first execution since 2015. “All […]

RIYADH: Saudi Arabia announced on Tuesday that mosques would no longer accept worshippers for the customary five daily prayers and the weekly Friday prayer, in exceptional measures intended to help limit the spread of novel coronavirus. Prayers will continue only at the two holy mosques in Makkah and Madina, state news agency SPA reported, citing […]

BEIJING: China reported on Tuesday just one new domestic coronavirus infection but found 20 more cases imported from abroad, with more regions imposing quarantines on foreign arrivals in a bid to stem the disease being brought in from overseas. The single case in Wuhan will boost China’s view that it has “basically curbed” the spread […]

The United States and Britain led a multi-billion-dollar global fightback against economic havoc wreaked by the coronavirus as the European Union shut its borders to travellers from outside for 30 days to stem the pandemic’s ferocious spread. The sweeping measures, never before seen in peacetime, have upended society worldwide and roiled financial markets on fears of […]

China withdrew the press credentials of American journalists at three US newspapers on Wednesday, intensifying a bitter fight between the world’s top two economies over the spread of coronavirus and press freedoms. The move comes after Beijing expelled three Wall Street Journal correspondents — two Americans and an Australian — last month following an opinion column by the newspaper […]