South Africa is mourning the sudden death of Jackson Mthembu, a cabinet minister and presidential adviser who was the public face of South Africa’s fight against COVID-19.President Cyril Ramaphosa offered condolences in a statement Thursday, saying he was shocked and …
Month: January 2021
U.S. President Joe Biden spent his first full day in office Thursday signing a number of executive orders addressing the handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has affected more people in the United States than anyplace else in the world. …
Amazon won’t be forced to immediately restore web service to Parler after a federal judge ruled Thursday against a plea to reinstate the fast-growing social media app, which is favored by followers of former President Donald Trump.U.S. District Judge Barbara …
President Joe Biden immediately began to reverse the Trump administration’s policies on climate change with one of 17 executive orders signed Wednesday after his inauguration.That’s in addition to the move to rejoin the Paris agreement to limit climate-changing greenhouse gases. After …
Google and a French publishers lobby said Thursday that they had agreed to a copyright framework for the U.S. tech giant to pay news publishers for content online, a first for Europe.The move paves the way for individual licensing agreements …
A NASA-Boeing partnership took its next steps toward deep-space exploration. Two commercial space flight companies reached new heights, and China says “foreign scientists” can inspect lunar samples it recently collected. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us the Week in Space.Produced by: Arash ArabasadiCamera: NASA/AP/Reuters/Virgin Orbit/Blue Origin …
Facebook’s independent oversight board said Thursday that it had accepted the company’s request to review its decision to suspend the accounts of former President Donald Trump.The U.S. social media giant blocked Trump’s access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts after …
Pakistan said Thursday it will receive half-a-million free doses of China’s Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine by January 31. Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi made the announcement at a news conference, saying his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, shared the “good news” in …
Fire erupted Thursday in a building under construction in India that is owned by the world’s largest vaccine maker, but the company said it would not affect production of a COVID-19 vaccine.The fire broke out at a Serum Institute of …
Chile is getting a new weapon to help in its fight against the spread of the coronavirus.Health regulators approved the emergency use of the CoronaVac vaccine made by China’s Sinovac Biotech Ltd.Heriberto Garcia, director of Chile’s Public Health Institute, said …
Zimbabwe is mourning the death of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Minister Sibusiso Moyo.The government said the country’s top diplomat died Wednesday after contracting COVID-19.Moyo gained international notoriety as an army general, becoming the spokesperson of the 2017 coup that …
Twitter has locked the account of China’s U.S. embassy for a tweet that defended China’s policies in the Xinjiang region, which the U.S. social media platform said violated the firm’s policy against “dehumanization.” The Chinese Embassy account, @ChineseEmbinUS, posted a tweet …
This week the head of the World Health Organization warns the world is on the brink of a “catastrophic moral failure” over the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. This comes after some countries are already well underway with their vaccination campaigns, …
A massive Antarctic iceberg that last month threatened a penguin-populated island off the southern tip of South America has since lost much of its mass and broken into pieces, scientists say. The main ice mass, called A68a, and its “child bergs” …
When Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th U.S. president Wednesday, he inherited several social media accounts, including the @POTUS, @WhiteHouse, @FLOTUS and @VP Twitter accounts. Unlike after the last inauguration in 2017, when then-President Barack Obama’s followers …
Twenty-two-year-old poet Amanda Gorman made headlines and dominated inauguration talk on social media Wednesday after speaking at President Joe Biden’s inauguration.Her poem, in part:“We, the successors of a country and a time,Where a skinny black girl,Descended from slaves and raised …
Israel has sped ahead of any other country in its vaccine rollout, with more than 2 million people out of a total of 9.3 million already having received the first vaccination. In exchange for access to so many doses so …
Indigenous people in Brazil’s rainforest are getting their long awaited first doses of a vaccine against the coronavirus, which has infected thousands in their community and killed hundreds of others. The Brazilian military flew medical workers and 1,000 doses of the CoronaVac Chinese vaccine into the Amazon rainforest on Tuesday and …
Kenya is under siege again by swarms of maturing desert locusts that threaten to ruin farmers’ crops and pastures. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a statement the locusts are swarming across seven counties, nearly double the number of counties impacted a week ago. The latest locust invasion …
In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, dozens of Palestinian high-tech startups are flourishing. Some are branches of international companies, others are all Palestinian. High-tech also offers new possibilities for Israeli-Palestinian cooperation. Linda Gradstein reports for VOA from Jerusalem. Camera: …
Take a ride on a new kind of bike — one that skirts across lakes and waterways – powered by an electric engine and a battery. Michelle Quinn got a ride.Camera: Michelle Quinn Producer: Rob Raffaele …
South Africa is reporting both good and bad news in the battle against the coronavirus, seeing a decline in confirmed cases along with the spread of a new, more infectious strain of the virus. First, the good news from South …
Hundreds of members of Serbia’s military lined up on Tuesday in their camouflage uniforms at an exhibition hall in Belgrade where nurses injected them with a Chinese-made vaccine against COVID-19. Last week Serbia received one million doses of Chinese Sinopharm’s …
Lawyers for the Duchess of Sussex asked a British judge on Tuesday to settle her lawsuit against a newspaper before it goes to trial by ruling that its publication of a “deeply personal” letter to her estranged father was “a …