A United States (US) judge ordered the release from prison of President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, on Thursday, saying he believes the government retaliated against him for planning to release a book about Trump before November’s election. Michael Cohen’s First Amendment rights were violated when he was ordered back to prison on […]

Saudi Arabia’s 84-year-old ruler King Salman underwent successful surgery Thursday to remove his gall bladder, the royal court said, three days after he was admitted to hospital. It is rare for Saudi Arabia to report on the health of the ageing monarch, who has ruled the top oil exporter and the Arab world’s biggest economy […]

At a museum in central France, researchers tenderly feed insects and kitten milk formula to tiny orphaned bats — creatures widely reviled for their role in human disease outbreaks, most recently COVID-19. The pandemic has triggered bat-killing sprees in communities from India and Peru to Cuba and Rwanda, but the mission of the team at […]

South Africa’s central bank on Thursday cut its key interest rate for the fifth time this year in a bid to breathe life into the coronavirus-stricken economy. Along with other central banks around the world to aggressively lower borrowing costs in a bid to soften economic blow from COVID-19, the South African Reserve Bank cut […]

A Jordanian couple in Saudi Arabia burst into tears of joy to be among the chosen ones for next week’s scaled-down hajj pilgrimage, but countless rejected applications have stirred resentment. For the first time in modern history, millions of pilgrims outside Saudi Arabia have been barred from the hajj — a key pillar of Islam […]