Indonesia’s Central Kalimantan provincial administration has declared a state of emergency over forest and bush fires, taking effect on July 1 an official said. “The policy was taken after a satellite image showed that a total of 715 hot spots were detected in 85.5 hectares of land on Tuesday,’’ acting head of the Provincial Disaster […]

An Egyptian court upheld a death sentence for one Coptic monk and life in prison for another over the killing of the abbot of a desert monastery in 2018, a judicial source said. In a case that shocked the Middle East’s largest religious minority, Bishop Epiphanius was found with a bleeding head wound after being […]

The global coronavirus pandemic is accelerating, the World Health Organization said Wednesday, with the number of daily cases surging beyond 160,000 every day in the past week, a record. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also told a virtual briefing that well over half of all cases recorded since the novel coronavirus first emerged in China late […]

Russians are set to approve constitutional reforms on Wednesday denounced by critics as a manoeuvre to allow President Vladimir Putin to stay in the Kremlin for life. The changes were passed weeks ago by Russia’s parliament and copies of the new constitution are already on sale in bookshops, but Putin says a nationwide vote ending Wednesday […]

Italian police said Wednesday they had seized a 14-tonne haul of amphetamines made by the Islamic State group in Syria, calling it the biggest seizure of such drugs in the world. The drug, in the form of around 84 million Captagon tablets hidden inside industrial goods within containers, was worth about one billion euros ($1.12 […]