Asia

    The novel coronavirus epidemic could spread to around two-thirds of the world’s population if it cannot be controlled, according to Hong Kong’s leading public health epidemiologist. His warning came after the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said recent cases of coronavirus patients who have never visited China could be the “tip of the iceberg”. Professor Gabriel Leung, chair of Public Health Medicine at Hong Kong University, said the overriding question was to figure out the size and shape of the iceberg. Most experts thought that each person infected would go on to transmit the virus to around 2.5 other people. That gave an “attack rate” of 60-80%. “Sixty per cent of the world’s population is an awfully big number,” Leung told the Guardian in London, e...

    A Thai soldier who killed at least 26 people, most of them in a shopping mall in the northeast of the country, was angry over a land deal involving a relative of his commanding officer, officials said on Sunday. Thai security forces shot and killed the rogue soldier after an overnight standoff at the Terminal 21 shopping centre in the city of Nakhon Ratchasima, where most of the victims of the massacre were killed. The soldier drove to the mall in a stolen Humvee and was armed with an assault weapon and ammunition stolen from the army base's arsenal, an official said. He initially posted written messages on Facebook during the attack before his account was shut down by the company. "It was a personal conflict...over a house deal," Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha ...

    Two people from Japan and Germany who had contracted coronavirus had not visited the area in China where the deadly viral outbreak originated, authorities have confirmed. One of the patients was a Japanese tour bus driver in his 60s in the city of Nara who had driven two groups of Chinese tourists who had come from Wuhan earlier this month. He was diagnosed with pneumonia on Saturday and has now been hospitalised. Another man in his 40s who lives in Wuhan and arrived in Japan on 20 January was also confirmed to have contracted the virus, the ministry said. The ministry said it was checking on people who had been in contact with the two new patients. The latest infections bring the total number of confirmed Japanese cases to six. It comes as Germany’s first case o...

    Britain’s embassy in Beijing has said it is working to make available an option for British nationals to leave the Chinese province at the centre of the coronavirus as the UK’s response was contrasted with that of other countries with active evacuation plans. The announcement on Monday came as the former foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, backed the idea of airlifts for British citizens in China and Public Health England said the first case of the virus was likely to come from somebody already in the UK. Our view is that, although airports are important, the most likely place that we might find a case is somebody in the country already, and it’s absolutely critical that the public health service and the NHS are ready to diagnose that and are able to designate the perso...

    Shortly before its first-ever applications period was due to close, the Schwarzman Scholars program held an admissions seminar at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing. The elite China-based graduate program, funded by American businessman Stephen Schwarzman’s personal wealth and fundraising efforts and modeled after Oxford University’s Rhodes Scholarship, had recruited heavily from the world’s top academic institutions, including Harvard, Yale, and Cambridge. It would kick off its inaugural academic year in fall 2016, and was aiming for a cohort comprising the best students from China and around the world. To guarantee a “scientific and fair” admissions process, the program invited a group of experts to participate in the seminar. The meeting, held on Sept...

    Pakistani officials raised the death toll from a mosque bombing in the country's southwest to 15 people on Saturday, as the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack. The powerful explosion ripped through a mosque in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan province, during the evening prayers on Friday. It killed a senior police officer and 13 others. The bombing also wounded another 20 worshipers. Quetta police chief Abdur Razzaq Cheema said another victim of the mosque bombing died of serious wounds in the city hospital raising the death toll to 15. He said two other victims were in critical condition. The Islamic State group said the attack a suicide bombing it had carried out targeting Afghan Taliban. The IS posted its claim on a IS Pakist...

    Muslim women whose husbands have been detained in Chinese internment camps are reportedly being forced to share beds with male government officials assigned to monitor them in their homes. Communist party workers regularly sleep alongside members of persecuted Uighur minority families during surveillance visits that last up to a week, party sources told Radio Free Asia (RFA). The monitoring forms part of the systematic repression of Muslims in China’s western Xinjiang region, where experts and human rights groups believe more than a million Uighurs most of them men have been arbitrarily detained in secretive re-education camps. Those who are not incarcerated face an increasingly strict security regime which includes armed checkpoints, ID cards, and streets lined wi...

    The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on Tuesday praised Princess Diana on their Pakistan tour with Wills telling schoolkids he’s a “big fan”. He and wife Kate, who wore two traditional outfits on day two of their trip, were told the children idolised the Princess of Wales. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrive for an event in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad in a specially-painted tuk tukCredit: Getty Contributor Wills was also told by a schoolgirl that she was a big fan of Princess Diana to which he touchingly replied 'I was a big fan of my mother too'. Princess Diana was also pictured with ex-cricketer Imran Khan, his then-wife Jemima Goldsmith, and their young son in 1997Credit: PA:Press Association Prince William and Kate Middleton visit Pakistan mountain area wh...

    A member of Prime Minister Imran Khan's cabinet has warned that, if left unchecked by the international community, the fallout of India's controversial move in Kashmir could lead to a nuclear conflict between the two longtime rivals. Speaking to Newsweek, Sayed Zulfikar Abbas Bukhari, who serves as Khan's special assistant for overseas Pakistanis and human resource development, discussed the Pakistani leader's upcoming visit to New York as part of the United Nations General Assembly. Bukhari said Khan's trip would be "very Kashmir-centric," revolving around India's decision last month to consolidate control over its share of the disputed border territory and the ongoing human rights concerns that have since emerged there. Kashmir has been the subject of three out o...

    A 74-year-old is thought to have become the world's oldest mother after giving birth to twins through IVF. Erramatti Mangayamma, from India, gave birth to two healthy baby girls this morning with her husband of 57 years, Raja Rao, 78, by her side. The pensioner, of Andhra Pradesh state, revealed she was inspired to try for a baby after her 55-year-old neighbour conceived. While her age has not yet been verified, if Mangayamma is as old as she claims, it will make her eight years older than the current record holder, Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara. It is believed the Ahalya IVF clinic in Guntur city paid for most of the procedure as medics knew it would be an historic achievement. Mangayamma has no other children and went through the menopause 30 years ago. She...