By AFP Confederate monuments are coming down and statues of Christopher Columbus are being toppled as Americans grapple with the ghosts of the country’s racial history in the wake of George Floyd’s death. “It seems like maybe we’ve hit a tipping point in the retelling of the narrative of who we are as an American Read more
By AFP More than 70,000 people have died from coronavirus in Latin America as the pandemic sweeps through the region, putting growing pressure on an already stretched healthcare system. As the number of cases in the United States soared past two million, Central and South America has emerged as the new hotspot for a disease Read more
By AFP The coronavirus pandemic inflicted a “swift and massive shock” that has caused the broadest collapse of the global economy since 1870 despite unprecedented government support, the World Bank said Monday. The world economy is expected to contract by 5.2 percent this year — the worst recession in 80 years — but the sheer Read more
Foreign By AFP Violence and looting spread early Tuesday to more US cities as President Donald Trump faced heated criticism for using force outside the White House to dispel peaceful demonstrators against racial injustice. Once-in-a-generation protests have brought a multiracial and overwhelmingly peaceful coalition into the streets for the past week but each night has Read more
By AFP Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque compound — the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia — reopened on Sunday after being closed for more than two months because of the coronavirus pandemic. Dozens of worshippers in protective masks were let into the compound before the first prayers of the day, Read more
“The decision on suspending enrolment for trials using hydroxychloroquine was “a temporary measure” By AFP The World Health Organization said Monday it had “temporarily” suspended clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for COVID-19 being carried out across a range of countries as a precautionary measure. The decision came after the publication last week Read more
US President Donald Trump has accused Beijing of a lack of transparency over the outbreak, and is pushing the theory that it may have leaked from a top-security Chinese laboratory. By AFP China said Sunday that relations with the United States were “on the brink of a new Cold War”, fuelled in part by tensions Read more
…the race to develop a vaccine has been buoyed by experiments on monkeys that offered hope that humans can develop immunity to the virus. By AFP Global infections from the novel coronavirus surpassed five million on Thursday as the pandemic played out unevenly across the planet, with China eager to declare a victory, Europe tentatively Read more
By AFP The European Union backed the World Health Organisation and multilateral efforts to fight the coronavirus on Tuesday after US President Donald Trump threatened to quit the global agency. “This is the time for solidarity, not the time for finger pointing or for undermining multilateral cooperation,” European foreign affairs spokeswoman Virginie Battu-Henriksson told reporters. Read more
By AFP The French House survived two world wars and global recessions. Charles de Gaulle is said to have frequented it and Dylan Thomas once left his manuscript for “Under Milk Wood” at the bar. But the 129-year-old pub in Soho, central London, is under threat because of the coronavirus outbreak, and has launched an Read more
