Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner and American astronaut Chris Cassidy have landed safely on Earth after spending half a year on the International Space Station (ISS), NASA said. “The trio landed in a Soyuz MS-16 spacecraft at around 0320GMT on Thursday, in a remote town in Kazakhstan,’’ NASA said in a tweet. The 402km journey back to earth took about three hours and 20 minutes. Their return marks the end of a 196-day...
Thirteen people in the Philippines escaped from police custody after testing positive for the coronavirus on Thursday, police said. They crawled through a small hole they carved out of a concrete wall in the police station in the Manila suburban city of Caloocan before dawn. Security camera footage showed the suspects escaping around 1 a.m (1700GMT), said Caloocan City Police Chief Dario Menor. “They had taken rapid tests and were supposed to undergo a confirmatory...
Officials say 12 children were killed and several others wounded in an airstrike on a mosque in Afghanistan’s northern Takhar province on Thursday. The strike occurred on Wednesday afternoon in Baharak district, where Taliban fighters had killed over 40 Afghan security forces in the early morning, provincial councilor Mohammad Azam Afzali told dpa. The provincial governor spokesman also confirmed the report. An aircraft bombarded the mosque after receiving information that Taliban fighters who were involved...
Nigeria witnessed scenes of violence and chaos as protests calling for an end to police brutality continued overnight and into Wednesday, despite a 24-hour curfew and multiple eyewitness reports of soldiers opening fire on protesters. Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu said Wednesday that one person had died at a hospital in Lagos, the country’s financial capital, after a shooting in the upmarket suburb of Lekki on Tuesday, but did not confirm whether the victim was a protester. “This is...
It can be easy to overlook how the rest of the world is making sense of America’s chaotic campaign season. But in many cases, they’re paying attention just as closely as U.S. voters are. After all, who wins the U.S. presidency has implications for countries around the world. Since Sept. 22, we’ve been using machine-learning algorithms to identify the predominant themes in foreign media coverage. How different countries cover the race between Donald Trump and Joe...
The two finalists for the position of director general of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are Yoo Myung-hee, Republic of Korea, and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a Nigerian and (since 2019) an American citizen. The media is portraying Yoo Myung-hee as an international trade specialist and a WTO insider, while Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala describes herself as a WTO outsider; she combines, however, exceptional political and diplomatic experience with her economic training and subsequent career. She has been twice Nigeria’s finance...
President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday met behind closed door with the former Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, at the Presidential Villa, Abuja. The News Agency of Nigeria reports that Okonjo-Iweala contesting for the position of the Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO). She has already emerged as one of the final two candidates for the position. NAN reports that the agenda between the president and Okonjo-Iweala was...
Louise Glück is the first poet to win the Nobel Prize in Literature since Tomas Tranströmer in 2011 and the first American to win since Toni Morrison in 1993. In their preference for the muddiness of everyday life over explicit engagement with their political and social issues, you can see a broad link between Glück and Tranströmer. On the surface, though, Morrison and Glück couldn’t appear to be more different. Morrison’s work lays bare both the lasting scars and...
The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has announced Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as one of the finalists in the run for director-general election. Yoo Myung-hee of the Republic of Korea was shortlisted alongside Okonjo-Iweala as the second candidate in the final. Both emerged from a shortlist of five which was selected from a pool of eight candidates. At every stage of the election, member countries are required to choose a preferred candidate. David Walker, the ambassador from New...
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has said about 10 percent of the world population may have contracted COVID-19. Mike Ryan, the executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies programme, made this known on Monday while speaking at a special session hosted by the organisation’s executive board. According to Worldometer, over 35 million cases of the coronavirus have been recorded globally. But with an estimated 7.6 billion world population, according to WHO’s estimates, 760 million people...
