LOS AGELES: Chadwick Boseman, star of the ground-breaking superhero movie “Black Panther”, has died after a private four-year battle with colon cancer, his publicist told AFP Friday. Boseman, 43, never publicly discussed his condition and continued to work on major Hollywood films during and between “countless” operations and chemotherapy, his
by Haydar Indhar DIWANIYAH, Iraq: With its neighbours activating new dams, Iraq’s historic twin rivers could run dry — unless new infrastructure projects and tense talks with Turkey and Iran bear fruit. Nowhere is the effect on the country more palpable than in Basra, Iraq’s only coastal province. Here, the
TAIPEI: A cloud of steam escapes into the air as 80-year-old Taiwanese street food vendor Wu Huang-yi lifts the lid on a giant steaming basket to unveil a piping-hot batch of two dozen buns. It is lunchtime at Taipei’s Huaxi Night Market — the capital’s oldest — and a queue
GENEVA, Switzerland: The coronavirus pandemic is still raging worldwide, but fresh World Health Organisation data indicates its pace is easing in most regions, with the biggest slowdown seen in the hard-hit Americas. More than 1.7 million new coronavirus cases and some 39,000 new deaths were recorded last week, the WHO
PARIS: For half a century, scientists feared that the Somali elephant shrew had vanished from the face of the Earth. No one had seen so much as a whisker. But the tiny mammal with its probing trunk-like nose was quietly thriving in the arid, rocky landscape of the Horn of
MANILA: Two suicide attackers carried out a double bombing in the southern Philippines that killed 14 people and wounded scores, the army chief said Tuesday, as he called for martial law to be imposed. Monday’s attacks — the country’s deadliest this year — happened on Jolo island in Muslim-majority Sulu
VIENNA, Austria: German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said Tuesday he was “quite confident” that a blueprint for taxing digital giants could be agreed on an international level later this year. In January, 137 countries agreed to negotiate a deal on how to tax tech multinationals by the end of 2020
TORONTO: In the shadow of Canada’s largest cluster of skyscrapers, Toronto is looking to preserve a majestic, centuries-old oak tree — but efforts have been complicated by the pandemic. The towering 24-metre (79-feet) high Northern Red Oak is one of the oldest trees in these parts, having sprouted an estimated
SHUBRA BELOULA, Egypt: At midnight, Eman Mehanna switches on her headlamp and begins her day’s work picking jasmine flowers, as their powerful fragrance wafts far across the fields in Egypt’s fertile Nile Delta. Egypt’s Gharbiya region is the heartland of its jasmine harvest. The aromatic oils extracted for perfumes from
BEIJING: Top Chinese and US negotiators spoke on the phone Tuesday and agreed to “push forward” their phase one economic deal, amid soaring tensions between the two sides on several fronts. The US and China signed the accord in January, bringing a partial truce in their lingering trade war and