MELBOURNE, Saturday, February 15, 2020 (Reuters/WNP): The Chinese gymnastics team entered into next week’s World Cup Gymnastics 2020 in Melbourne has pulled out due to Australian government travel restrictions put in place to limit the coronavirus outbreak, organisers said on Saturday. The restrictions on foreign nationals travelling from China were introduced in early February and […]
BEIJING, Saturday, February 15, 2020 (AFP/WNP): The death toll from China’s new coronavirus epidemic jumped past 1,500 on Saturday but new infections fell following a mid-week surge caused by a change in the way cases are counted. More than 66,000 people have now been infected in China from a virus that emerged in central Hubei […]
BRIGHTON, Monday, February 10, 2020 (Reuters/WNP): A staff member at a British doctors’ practice in the southern English city of Brighton has tested positive for coronavirus, the BBC reported. The County Oak Medical Centre has been temporarily closed down, the BBC said. It did not cite sources. Last week, health officials said a case of coronavirus had been […]
BEIJING, Sunday, February 09, 2020 (AFP/WNP): The number of deaths from China´s new coronavirus epidemic jumped to 803 on Sunday after hard-hit Hubei province reported 81 new fatalities. The toll is now higher than the global number of deaths caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus, which killed 774 people in 2002-2003. In […]
NEW DELHI, Saturday, February 08, 2020 (BBC/WNP): The Indian government has maintained before the Supreme Court that male soldiers of the country’s armed forces are not “yet mentally schooled to accept women officers in command”. It also said that women are not fit to be given ground combat roles in the country’s armed forces, BBC reported. Last […]
NEW DELHI, Saturday, February 08, 2020 (AFP/WNP): Millions in the Indian capital voted Saturday in a key regional election, with exit polls suggesting a big defeat for right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was a distant second behind the upstart Aam Aadmi Party, or Common Man’s Party, led by […]
NEW DELHI, Friday, February 07, 2020 (Reuters/WNP): India has extended the detention of four political leaders in occupied Kashmir, including former chief ministers Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti, who have been held by authorities since August of last year after the Indian government scrapped Article 370 of the Indian constitution that granted special status to the […]
MOSCOW, Friday, February 07, 2020 (AP/WNP): Russian authorities have added over 200 Jehovah’s Witnesses to a register of extremists and terrorists, the organisation said in a statement on Friday. The latest move in a crackdown on the religious group effectively cuts the believers off from the country’s financial system, as being on list leads to […]
BEIJING, Friday, February 07, 2020 (AFP/WNP): The endangered pangolin may be the link that facilitated the spread of the novel coronavirus across China, Chinese scientists said on Friday. Researchers have long suspected that the virus, which has now killed more than 630 people and infected some 31,000, was passed from an animal to a human […]
WASHINGTON DC, Friday, February 07, 2020 (AFP/WNP): President Donald Trump celebrated his impeachment acquittal on Thursday in a rambling, emotional speech raging against the investigations that have overshadowed his entire administration. Trump gathered scores of loyal Republican legislators, his legal team, wife Melania and White House aides in the ceremonial East Room and brandished the front […]
DUBAI, Thursday, February 06, 2020 (AP/WNP): Amnesty International accused Saudi Arabia on Thursday of using a secretive court established to try terrorism cases as “a weapon of repression” to imprison peaceful critics, activists, journalists, clerics and Shias, including some who were sentenced to death and executed. The London-based rights organisation examined court documents and spoke […]
WASHINGTON, Thursday, February 06, 2020 (AFP/WNP): Nasa’s Christina Koch returned to Earth safely on Thursday having shattered the spaceflight record for female astronauts after almost a year aboard the International Space Station. Koch touched down at 0912 GMT on the Kazakh steppe after 328 days in space along with Luca Parmitano of the European Space […]