The British government on Wednesday presented tougher post-Brexit immigration plans, aimed at reducing the flow of “low skills” labour. Home Secretary Priti Patel said that the Conservative government wanted to “encourage people with the right talent.” The envisaged system, due to take effect as of January 2021, would be based on a points-based immigration system […]

Two people have died in Iran after testing positive on Wednesday for the new coronavirus, the health ministry said, in the Islamic republic’s first cases of the disease. State news agency IRNA quoted Kianoush Jahanpour, a ministry spokesman, as saying the virus was detected in two elderly people with immunity problems in the holy city […]

Togo’s election authorities on Wednesday barred a main independent observer group from monitoring an upcoming poll expected to see President Faure Gnassingbe extend his family’s decades-long rule. The West African nation of 8 million holds a presidential ballot on Saturday with Gnassingbe cruising towards a fourth term in office after shrugging off a wave of […]

Chadian soldiers on Wednesday repelled an incursion into a volatile northern gold-mining region from neighbouring Libya, the army said. The rebel group, the Military Command Council for the Salvation of the Republic (CCMSR), acknowledged the deadly fighting, saying its forces had carried out a “strategic pullback”. The clash took place early Wednesday near Kouri Bougoudi, […]

Nearly three million people in Niger, over half of whom are children, are suffering at the hands of various natural and man-made crises and are in need of humanitarian aid, the United Nations said on Wednesday. In a statement, UNICEF cited “the risks posed by insecurity, malnutrition, recurrent disease epidemics and outbreaks, cyclical floods, droughts […]

Fifteen women and five children were trampled to death on Monday in a stampede for food and money for refugees in southeast Niger, a regional governor said. The accident occurred at a youth and culture centre in Diffa, the main town of a region of the same name that hosts more than a quarter of […]

Mike Bloomberg would sell the financial data and media company he created in the 1980s — which bears his name and made him a multibillionaire — if he is elected U.S. president, a top adviser said Tuesday. Bloomberg would put Bloomberg LP into a blind trust, and the trustee would then sell the company, adviser […]

United States (US) Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday closed a three-nation Africa tour with a thinly-veiled swipe at China as he talked up Washington’s ability to stimulate growth and entrepreneurship on the continent. “Countries should be wary of authoritarian regimes with empty promises. They breed corruption, dependency,” Pompeo said in a speech to […]

United States President, Donald Trump, on Tuesday, commuted the sentence of a former state (Illinois) governor jailed for corruption, as well as pardoning a New York City police chief imprisoned for tax fraud. Pardons were also handed out to Edward DeBartolo Jr, a former owner of the San Francisco 49ers football team, and Michael Milken, […]

Surgeons at King’s College Hospital in London removed a brain tumour from a woman who played the violin during the procedure. Doctors for violinist Dagmar Turner, 53, mapped her brain before the surgery to identify areas that were active when she played the instrument and those responsible for controlling language and movement. Doctors then woke […]