International

Pompeo plays down North Korea ICBM risk

WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday played down North Korea’s parading of a massive new long-range missile, saying that agreements reached by President Donald Trump had succeeded in reducing risks. At a military parade Saturday in Pyongyang, leader Kim Jong Un viewed an intercontinental ballistic missile that analysts say is the largest road-mobile, liquid-fueled missile anywhere in the world. But Pompeo, who arranged Trump’s landmark summit with Kim […]

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WWII bomb goes off in Poland during defusal op

by Stanislaw WASZAK / Anna Maria JAKUBEK WARSAW, Poland (AFP) — A massive World War II bomb exploded during a delicate operation on Tuesday to defuse the five-tonne device in a channel near the Baltic Sea but no one was harmed, Polish officials said. The device — nicknamed “Tallboy” and also known as an “earthquake bomb” — was dropped by the Royal Air Force in an attack on a Nazi warship in 1945. It was […]

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Biden, Trump duel in battleground states 21 days from election

  by Jerome Cartillier with Sebastian Smith in Washington Agence France Presse US President Donald Trump told a Pennsylvania crowd Tuesday that he’s fighting “Marxists” and “lunatics” while his Democratic challenger Joe Biden accused him in Florida, another key electoral state, of having treated Americans as “expendable” during the Covid-19 pandemic. With only 21 days until the November 3 election and badly down in the polls, Trump fired every lurid exaggeration about the Democrats and […]

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Second Covid-19 trial paused within 24 hours over safety concerns

WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Two late-stage Covid-19 medical trials have been paused in the space of 24 hours over potential safety concerns, the latest setbacks to scientists in the long fight against the pandemic. US pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly on Tuesday suspended its Phase 3 trial of its lab-produced antibody treatment in hospitalized patients over an unspecified incident. A day earlier, the American pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson temporarily halted its Phase 3 Covid-19 […]

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Roche rolling out high-volume rapid Covid-19 test by year-end

ZURICH, Switzerland (AFP) — Swiss pharmaceuticals giant Roche said Tuesday it would produce a new antigen test for Covid-19, allowing high-volume and rapid testing for the deadly disease, by the end of the year. The new Elecsys SARS-CoV-2 Antigen test is meant to be administered by healthcare professionals in a lab setting and allows the detection of the virus that causes Covid-19 in as little as 18 minutes, Roche said. It said the “highly accurate” […]

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North Koreans rally wearing masks after military parade

SEOUL, South Korea (AFP) — Thousands of North Koreans have packed into Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung square to pledge their support for the government — all of them wearing masks, unlike at a military parade only two days earlier. Authorities held the rally on Monday at the start of an “80-Day Campaign”, a mass mobilization drive to boost the economy ahead of a ruling party congress in January. Such efforts, often dubbed “battles”, feature extra-long […]

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One-third of Chinese city of 9 million swabbed for virus in two days

BEIJING, China (AFP) — More than three million swabs have been taken in a matter of days in Qingdao, the Chinese port city where a minor coronavirus outbreak elicited a sweeping health response. Queues for testing stretched deep into Monday night across the eastern city, which detected six virus cases the day before but swiftly swung into action to head off a wider outbreak. In scenes which contrast with the fumbled efforts of other nations […]

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Trump tells fans on post-Covid comeback tour: ‘I feel so powerful’

  by Chris Lefkow Agence France Presse WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Deprived of his beloved campaign trail for 10 days by Covid-19, President Donald Trump took center stage again Monday in Florida, vowing that he is in “great shape” with 22 days to go until he faces Joe Biden in the election. “I went through it and now they say I’m immune,” Trump told a cheering crowd in Sanford, near Orlando, few of whom […]

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Ten million Americans have already voted in election: tracker

WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — More than 10 million Americans have already cast their ballots in the US presidential contest, a tracking group said late Monday, a record pace three weeks before election day November 3. “Voters have cast a total of 10,296,180 ballots in the reporting states,” the US Elections Project of the University of Florida reported on its website. The project said the early-vote count is multiple times higher than it was at […]

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Johnson & Johnson pauses Covid vaccine trial as participant becomes ill

WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Johnson & Johnson said Monday it had temporarily halted its Covid-19 vaccine trial because one of its participants had become sick. “We have temporarily paused further dosing in all our Covid-19 vaccine candidate clinical trials, including the Phase 3 ENSEMBLE trial, due to an unexplained illness in a study participant,” the company said in a statement. The pause means the online enrollment system has been closed for the 60,000-patient clinical […]

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France risks new lockdowns if Covid surge worsens: PM

PARIS, France (AFP) — French authorities could be forced to impose new lockdowns in a bid to contain another surge in coronavirus cases that is putting a strain on hospitals, Prime Minister Jean Castex warned Monday. “If over the next two weeks we see the epidemic indicators worsen, if intensive care beds fill up even more than we expect, we will indeed take additional measures,” Castex said in an interview with France Info radio. Asked […]

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Two earthquakes strike off Greek island of Crete

ATHENS, Greece (AFP) — Two moderate earthquakes of over 5.0 magnitude struck off the Greek island of Crete early Monday but there were no reports of casualties or damage. The Athens Geodynamic Institute said the first quake, with a 5.1 magnitude, hit at 4:11am local time (0111 GMT) about 47 kilometers (29 miles) northeast of the city of Sitia. A second quake, with a magnitude of 5.2, struck the same point exactly three hours later, […]

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