YANGON: Hundreds of Myanmar villagers have fled to Thailand after junta troops clashed with an ethnic rebel group, officials said on Thursday. Fighting between Karen National Union (KNU) and the military broke out on Wednesday in the town of Lay Kay Kaw near the Thai border — the first such clashes in months. On Thursday, […]
GENEVA/VIENNA: More than half a billion (500 million) people globally were pushed into extreme poverty last year as they paid for health costs out of their own pockets during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Health Organisation and the World Bank said on Sunday. The pandemic disrupted health services globally and triggered the […]
WASHINGTON: The United States on Friday imposed extensive human rights-related sanctions on dozens of people and entities tied to China, Myanmar, North Korea and Bangladesh, and added Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company SenseTime Group to an investment blacklist. Canada and the United Kingdom joined the United States in imposing sanctions related to human rights abuse […]
THE HAGUE: The EU medicines watchdog said on Thursday the Omicron variant of Covid-19 may cause milder disease, as the World Health Organisation warned against a re-run of vaccine hoarding by rich nations as the new strain spreads. The tentative judgement from the European Medicines Agency comes after the WHO said this week there was some evidence […]
LONDON: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson imposed tougher Covid restrictions in England on Wednesday, ordering people to work from home, wear masks in public places and use vaccine passes to slow the spread of the Omicron coronavirus variant. Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are free to set their own restrictions. Undermined by accusations that his […]
A Bangladesh court sentenced 20 university students to death on Wednesday for the brutal 2019 murder of a young man who criticised the government on social media. The battered body of Abrar Fahad, 21, was found in his university dormitory hours after he wrote a Facebook post slamming Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina for signing a […]
DOHA: Turkey and Qatar on Monday raised the possibility of jointly operating Afghanistan’s Taliban-controlled airport, as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan set off for two days of talks in Doha.“We are going to act together,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told a joint press briefing with his Qatari counterpart ahead of Erdogan’s arrival. “Qatar and Turkey […]
MOSCOW: Saudi Arabia has granted approval for people vaccinated with Russia’s Sputnik jab to enter the country in a move that will enable Muslims to take part in Haj and Umrah, the vaccine’s developers said on Sunday. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has granted approval for entry of individuals vaccinated with the Russian Sputnik V […]
GENEVA: Omicron has been detected in 38 countries but there are no reported deaths so far from the new Covid-19 variant, the World Health Organisation said on Friday. A WHO spokesman told reporters that the UN health agency had “not seen reports of Omicron-related deaths yet”. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19, […]
Saudi Arabia has recorded the Gulf’s first confirmed case of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus in a citizen returning from North Africa, a health ministry official said on Wednesday. The strain, which was first announced by South Africa but has since been discovered to have been present earlier in Europe, has prompted governments around […]