Syrian authorities on Thursday sealed a major Shia shrine that is a magnet for tens of thousands of Iranian pilgrims whom medics and the UN officials warned their congregation puts the country at risk of a major spread of coronavirus. The move comes as the war-ravaged country steps up a lockdown to stem a major outbreak with a fragile health system and porous land borders with neighboring Iraq an... More ...

A Wuhan doctor who was among the first to alert other medics to the spread of coronavirus has disappeared sparking concerns that she has been detained, reports suggest. Dr Ai Fen said she faced 'unprecedented, extremely harsh reprimanded' by officials at Wuhan Central Hospital after she shared a picture of a patient report labelled 'SARS coronavirus'. The image was widely circulated and made its... More ...

Hackers working in the interests of the Iranian government have attempted to break into the personal email accounts of staff at the World Health Organization during the coronavirus outbreak, four people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters. It is not clear if any accounts were compromised, but the attacks show how the WHO and other organizations at the center of a global effort to contain th... More ...

The hottest party in town Saturday night was on DJ D-Nice’s Instagram, where over 100,000 accounts tuned in during his epic 10-hour set including the likes of Michelle Obama, Oprah, Rihanna and Will Smith. Oprah tweeted that it was the “best party of 1 and 100K I’ve ever been to.” Smith expressed a similar sentiment. As the world practices social distancing to slow the sp... More ...

Bill Gates, who urged world leaders back in a 2015 TED talk to prepare for a pandemic, has introduced a three-point plan on how the US could defeat the novel coronavirus. Gates wrote an op-ed article for The Washington Post on Tuesday in which he made recommendations based on expert consultations he’d had through his work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is funding resear... More ...

Iraq supports the call for an OPEC+ emergency meeting to restore oil market balance and stop oil prices collapsing, an oil ministry spokesman said in a statement on Thursday. The statement added that Iraq is confident that a positive agreement can be reached at the next OPEC meeting to help restore balance in oil markets. Saudi Arabia called on Thursday for an emergency meeting of OPEC and non-O... More ...

Pakistan has overturned the death sentence of the man convicted of killing US journalist Daniel Pearl, defence lawyers have told reporters. British-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, imprisoned since 2002, has had his sentence reduced to seven years for kidnapping, said lawyer Khawaja Naveed. Three other men given life sentences over the killing have been acquitted by the Sindh High Court and release... More ...

There's plenty to love about working from home. You can cook something during your lunch break, instead of shelling out for a salad. You can ditch the repeat trips to the water fountain. The din of the open plan gives way to blessed silence. (Or, uh, construction.) But what WFH life giveth, it also taketh away, mostly in the form of that ergonomic, posture-fixing office chair. Spending eight hour... More ...

A Kashmiri villager faked his death and travelled more than a hundred miles in an ambulance with four others in a desperate bid to circumvent India’s virus lockdown and return home, police said Wednesday.Hakim Din was being treated for a minor head injury at a hospital in Jammu when an ambulance driver suggested the 70-year-old fake his death to get past checkpoints, police said. Din and th... More ...

Girls who are tall and lean during childhood are more at risk of developing endometriosis later on in life, a study has found. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen and Frederiksberg hospital looked at height and weight data from 170,000 women born in Denmark between 1930-1996, and hospital records of endometriosis or adenomyosis (a related condition) collected between 1997-2017. Endomet... More ...

An anti-coronavirus song from Senegal, applause for health workers ringing out in Paris and the return of the dawn chorus in Warsaw are just a few of the sounds that have been captured as part of an art project that aims to record how the sound of cities is dramatically changing during the Covid-19 outbreak. The Cities and Memories website has collected field recordings from around the world for ... More ...

A loss of smell or taste may be a sign that you have coronavirus, according to UK researchers. A team at King's College London looked at responses from more than 400,000 people reporting suspected Covid-19 symptoms to an app. But loss of smell and taste are also signs of other respiratory infections, such as the common cold. And experts say fever and cough remain the most important symptoms of ... More ...

“This is my opinion and I did not say anything wrong,” Kuwaiti actress Hayat al-Fahad said in response to uproar on social media after she called for a ban on expatriates amid the coronavirus outbreak in Kuwait.Dozens took to social media platforms on Wednesday to criticize the 71-year-old after she said the government should “send [expatriates] out... put them in the desert&rdqu... More ...

UEFA bowed to the inevitable on Wednesday and suspended all Champions League and Europa League football matches "until further notice" due to the coronavirus pandemic. European football's governing body also said all national team games scheduled for June have been postponed, including playoff matches for Euro 2020, which has been moved to 2021. The finals of Europe's elite Champions League comp... More ...

It’s not every day that you’re mentioned by the most powerful man in the world, but MLK, better known as @FdA found himself the star of the show when he was tagged on twitter by the leader of the free world President Donald Trump. A mix-up in Twitter handles found him mentioned on the platform by @realDONALDTRUMP, when President Trump retweeted an article about a research institute th... More ...