ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan said yesterday he would like convicted rapists to be publicly executed or chemically castrated, reacting to a question on the rape of a woman on a highway last week that has caused uproar in the South Asian nation. Last week, a mother of two […]
Year: 2020
MILAN: A group of scientists sent a formal letter to the Lancet yesterday outlining doubts about the accuracy of early data on Russia’s Covid-19 vaccine, one of the authors said, adding further fuel to a dispute surrounding the “Sputnik-V” shot. Fifteen scientists from five countries signed the letter presenting their […]
LONDON: Taxi app Uber will battle in court on Tuesday (Sep 15) to win back its licence to operate in London after the city’s transport regulator removed it over safety concerns. Transport for London (TfL) refused in 2019 to grant the Silicon Valley-based company a new licence due to what […]
WASHINGTON: The US announced on Monday (Sep 14) it would block a range of Chinese products made by “forced labour” in the Xinjiang region, including from a “vocational” centre that it branded a “concentration camp” for Uighur minorities. “The Chinese government is engaged in systematic abuses against the Uighur people” […]
TOKYO: Yoshihide Suga, the man expected to become Japan’s next prime minister, is a farmer’s son with a reputation for inscrutability, who has become a key government adviser, spokesman and policy enforcer. The 71-year-old easily won the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s leadership race today and is all but certain to […]
SINGAPORE: Beaten-down equities in Southeast Asia have become irresistibly cheap, according to analysts at HSBC who recommend investing in Indonesia and across the region in a contrarian note on Monday (Sep 14) that forecasted the best returns from laggard Singapore. On a day when social curbs returned to Jakarta, Europe’s […]
HONG KONG: Concerns were growing today for the fate of a group of Hong Kongers in mainland custody after a senior Chinese official declared them “separatists” and lawyers were pressured to drop them as clients. Authorities said they intercepted the 12 Hong Kongers trying to flee by boat to Taiwan […]
WASHINGTON: US ambassador to China Terry Branstad is stepping down, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced today, at a time of increasingly strained ties between the world’s two biggest economies. Thanking Branstad for his service, Pompeo said in a tweet that he had “contributed to rebalancing US-China relations so that […]
COPENHAGEN: The World Health Organization (WHO) expects Europe to see a rise in the daily number of COVID-19 deaths in October and November, the head of the body’s European branch told AFP. Cases in Europe have risen sharply in recent weeks, especially in Spain and France. More than 51,000 new […]
SYDNEY: Australia reported its lowest one-day rise in novel coronavirus infections in nearly three months today as authorities began to ease restrictions aimed at slowing its spread. Thirty-nine people were found to be infected with the virus in the past 24 hours, the lowest one-day increase in new cases since […]