A court in Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia sentenced a Saudi woman and adherent of Shia Islam to 34 years in prison on Monday for using her personal Twitter account to “create public turmoil and destabilize civil and national security” by re-Tweeting posts demanding the Saudi government release women’s rights activists from prison, Turkey’s Hürriyet newspaper reported on Wednesday.
Peacekeepers and other personnel employed by the United Nations (U.N.) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) since 2018 have allegedly impregnated at least 60 different local girls and women during their times of service in the troubled country, with the youngest accuser alleging she was just ten years old when she was impregnated by a U.N. staff member, the U.K.’s Daily Mail reported on Monday, citing an original study by the University of Birmingham published by the media outlet The Conversation last week.
Zimbabwe’s latest outbreak of measles — an infectious viral disease that typically occurs during childhood — has killed at least 157 children in the country in recent weeks and caused more than 2,000 cases of the disease nationwide, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported on Tuesday.
China’s central government issued new “fertility-friendly” guidelines on Tuesday designed to increase the Chinese population, which is currently projected to contract sometime before 2025 following decades of the Chinese Communist Party’s one-child policy, the Global Times reported.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Tuesday described U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan on August 2 as “a brazen demonstration of disrespect for other countries and their own international commitments,” referring to China’s illegal territorial claims to the sovereign island nation of Taiwan, Russia’s official government website reported.
Beijing announced on Tuesday that it had detected 629 infections of the Chinese coronavirus in Tibet since the Chinese autonomous region’s latest epidemic of the disease began in recent days, prompting China’s ruling Communist Party to lock down Tibet’s prefecture-level city of Shigatse last week.
Conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol met with billionaire Microsoft founder and vaccine advocate Bill Gates on Tuesday to discuss Seoul’s current and future plans to cooperate with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to further vaccine research and development both within South Korea and worldwide, Yonhap News Agency reported.
Sinopharm, a Chinese state-run pharmaceutical company, announced on Monday that it had submitted an application for clinical trials of an “Omicron-specific mRNA COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] vaccine [candidate]” that it allegedly produced, China’s state-run Global Times reported.
The state-run Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco) announced on Sunday that it recorded a 90 percent year-on-year increase in its net income in the second quarter of 2022, amounting to a record-high profit of $48.4 billion, the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported.
An electrical fire broke out at a Coptic Christian church outside of Cairo, Egypt, on Sunday, killing at least 41 congregants, including “mostly children” gathered inside the house of worship for Mass, Reuters reported Monday.
Zimbabwe’s government last week blamed recent gatherings by members of the country’s various Apostolic sects for an ongoing outbreak of measles that has killed 80 children nationwide since April, Reuters reported on Sunday.
U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price incorrectly labeled the Haqqani network and the Taliban as “separate entities” on August 27, 2021, when responding to a reporter’s question at a press briefing concerning the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden’s chaotic withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from Afghanistan that month.
An organized crime syndicate called the Anegasaki-kai has recently disbanded after operating within Tokyo’s old downtown district since about 1912, investigative sources told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper Friday.
Tokyo has allegedly agreed to work jointly with the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) to create a new body of the U.N. public health agency that will promote universal health coverage in developing countries, Japanese Foreign Ministry sources told Kyodo News Thursday.
The government of New Delhi, India’s national capital, recently reinforced a sanitary mask mandate for public spaces in an effort to contain a recent spike in the number of local Chinese coronavirus cases, India’s WION news website reported on Friday.
The Indian Air Force recently deployed a helicopter to fly the 14th Dalai Lama to India’s disputed border with China.
South African authorities charged 14 men with rape this week in connection with the brutal gang rape of eight women at an abandoned mine near Krugersdorp on July 28, the South African news channel Newzroom Afrika reported on Thursday, noting that the “majority” of the suspects charged with rape on Thursday are illegal migrants “from Mozambique.”
Seoul’s government announced plans on Wednesday to ban basement apartments in the South Korean national capital — a style of subterranean home depicted in the Oscar-winning film Parasite — after four people drowned to death in such apartments in recent days during record floods, the BBC reported.
A 21-year-old social media influencer with dual U.S. and German citizenship told Vice News for a report published on Wednesday that she was “brutally gang raped” by two Pakistani men during a recent trip to their country to film a travel video blog.
Soldiers of the U.S. Army will deploy to a region of northern India’s Uttarakhand state — located 60 miles from India’s disputed Himalayan border with China — in October to participate in an annual joint military exercise with the Indian Armed Forces called Yudh Abhyas, the U.S. Army Pacific confirmed to Japan’s Nikkei Asia on Wednesday.
Japan’s population dropped in 2021 by 726,342, which was the greatest decline margin documented since Tokyo began recording relevant data nearly a decade ago, Kyodo News reported on Tuesday.
Hollywood actor Steven Seagal visited eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region on Tuesday to film a documentary about the current war taking place there between Moscow and Kyiv, the Moscow Times reported, citing a Telegram statement issued by Denis Pushilin, the leader of the “Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR),” a Russian separatist group operating in Donbass.
Indian traders have reportedly been settling payments for Russian coal in currencies other than the U.S. dollar — including the Chinese yuan, the Hong Kong dollar, the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) dirham, and the euro — in an effort to skirt Western sanctions imposed on Moscow in recent months in response to its latest war with Ukraine, Reuters reported on Wednesday.
Scientists from China and Singapore recently announced the detection of a novel animal-derived virus known as Langya henipavirus (LayV) in at least 35 humans across China’s eastern provinces of Henan and Shandong, China’s state-run Global Times reported on Tuesday, noting that the zoonotic virus is often found in shrews.
Chinese-owned companies in Myanmar are allegedly responsible for illegal mining operations that are destroying the natural landscape of Myanmar’s border region with China, local miners of dysprosium and terbium — two heavy rare earth minerals used in clean energy products and smart electronics — told the organization Global Witness for a report published on Tuesday.
Polls closed on Tuesday in Kenya’s presidential election, with two candidates emerging as likely frontrunners for the office — Raila Odinga and William Ruto — Kenya’s Capital FM news website reported.
New Delhi is allegedly seeking ways to prevent Chinese smartphone manufacturers from selling their devices for less than 12,000 rupees ($150) within India as part of an effort to protect domestic technology companies struggling to compete with the cheap phone makers, Bloomberg reported on Monday citing people familiar with the matter.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele criticized the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) raid on former U.S. President Donald Trump’s personal residence at Mar-A-Lago on Monday in a statement posted by Bukele’s official Twitter account, the Spanish news agency Agencia EFE reported.
Australia’s Qantas Airways recently asked some of its executives and managers to volunteer to work as baggage handlers over the next three months to help Qantas alleviate severe staff shortages in its checked baggage department, the BBC reported on Monday after reviewing an official memo from the company.
China’s trade with Russia from January to July increased by nearly 30 percent from the same period last year to reach $97.71 billion, China’s state-run Global Times reported Sunday.
Hundreds of people defied a last-minute cancelation of the Montreal Pride parade and marched through the city on Sunday with support from Quebec police officers, the Montreal Gazette reported.
Cuban authorities evacuated more than 4,000 residents over the weekend after a lightning strike allegedly sparked a fire at Cuba’s largest state oil depot in Matanzas city on Friday night, causing three oil tankers to burn and collapse as of Monday, the news website Cubanet reported.
A section of Beirut’s grain silos collapsed on Thursday, the same day that Lebanon marked the second anniversary of a deadly explosion at the Port of Beirut that devastated the city and damaged the very same grain silos, the National, a U.A.E.-based newspaper, reported.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Friday condemned acts of “mob justice” perpetrated by South Africans against illegal miners this week in response to the brutal gang rape of eight women by suspected illegal miners last week at an abandoned mine near Krugersdorp, South Africa, eNews Channel Africa (eNCA) reported.
A Russian court sentenced U.S. citizen and WNBA player Brittney Griner to nine and a half years in prison on Thursday for smuggling cannabis oil into Russia in February.
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Thomas R. Nides supported Israel’s “right to protect itself” on Friday after the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), an Iran-backed terror group in Gaza, fired 100-plus rockets at Israeli towns earlier that day.
Police officers in southeast China’s Jiangxi province arrested a 48-year-old man on Wednesday on suspicion of perpetrating a fatal stabbing at a private kindergarten in Jiangxi’s Anfu county that day that killed three people and injured six others, China’s state-run Global Times reported.
Somali Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre appointed Mukhtar Robow — a former deputy chief of al-Shabaab, which is a Somali branch of the international jihadist terror organization al-Qaeda — as Somalia’s new religion minister on Tuesday, Reuters reported.
Indian Commerce Secretary B.V.R. Subrahmanyam predicted this week that New Delhi will conduct up to $9 billion worth of trade with Russia and Sri Lanka combined over the next two months, Reuters reported on Wednesday.
China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) launched three-day-long military exercises in the airspace and waters surrounding Taiwan on Thursday, disrupting and canceling flights throughout Asia and threatening to cause further flight cancellations in the coming days, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported, noting that Beijing ordered the PLA drills in response to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei this week.
