CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Australians will go to the polls on Saturday following a six-week election campaign that has focused on pandemic-fueled inflation, climate change and fears of a Chinese military outpost being established less than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) off Australia’s shore.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea said Friday that nearly 10% of its 26 million people have fallen ill and 65 people have died amid its first COVID-19 outbreak, as outside experts question the validity of its reported fatalities and worry about a possible humanitarian crisis.
BERLIN (AP) — The coronavirus pandemic is not over yet, Germany's health minister warned Thursday as the country's highest court approved rules requiring health workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — On a recent nighttime visit to a drugstore, a double-masked Kim Jong Un lamented the slow delivery of medicine. Separately, the North Korean leader's lieutenants have quarantined hundreds of thousands of suspected COVID-19 patients and urged people with mild symptoms to take willow leaf or honeysuckle tea.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea on Thursday reported 262,270 more suspected COVID-19 cases as its pandemic caseload neared 2 million — a week after the country acknowledged the outbreak and scrambled to slow infections in its unvaccinated population.
GENEVA (AP) — The number of coronavirus deaths globally dropped by about 21% in the past week while cases rose in most parts of the world, according to the World Health Organization.
In its weekly report on the pandemic released Thursday, the U.N.
WASHINGTON (AP) — COVID-19 cases are increasing in the United States — and could get even worse over the coming months, federal health officials warned Wednesday in urging areas hardest hit to consider reissuing calls for indoor masking.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea on Wednesday added hundreds of thousands of infections to its growing pandemic caseload but also said that a million people have already recovered from suspected COVID-19 just a week after disclosing an outbreak, a public health crisis it appears to be trying to manage in isolation as global experts express deep concern about dire consequences.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — During more than a decade as North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un has made “self-reliance” his governing lynchpin, shunning international help and striving instead for domestic strategies to fix his battered economy.
GENEVA (AP) — The head of the World Health Organization said China’s extreme approach to containing the coronavirus is unsustainable because of the highly infectious nature of the omicron variant, but that it’s up to every country to decide what policy to pursue.
PHOENIX (AP) — Two more bills restricting responses to the coronavirus pandemic are heading to Republican Gov. Doug Ducey's desk, including one that would impact the ability of future state leaders to respond to another airborne-spreading disease and a second blocking the state from ever requiring schoolchildren to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
DETROIT (AP) — Nearly 43,000 people were killed on U.S. roads last year, the highest number in 16 years as Americans returned to the roads after the coronavirus pandemic forced many to stay at home.
NEW YORK (AP) — Far fewer Americans said "I do" during the first year of the pandemic when wedding plans were upended, a new report finds.
There were 1.7 million weddings in 2020, a drop of 17% from the year before and the lowest recorded since 1963, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.
NEW YORK (AP) — When the U.S. hit 1 million COVID-19 deaths on Monday, the news was driven by a government tally derived from death certificates.
But that's not the only tally. And you may be wondering, where do these numbers come from?
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un criticized officials over slow medicine deliveries and mobilized the military to respond to a surge in suspected COVID-19 infections, as his nation struggled to contain a fever that has reportedly killed dozens and sickened nearly a million others in a span of three days.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea has confirmed 15 more deaths and hundreds of thousands of additional patients with fevers as it mobilizes more than a million health and other workers to try to suppress the country’s first COVID-19 outbreak, state media reported Sunday.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea on Saturday reported 21 new deaths and 174,440 more people with fever symptoms as the country scrambles to slow the spread of COVID-19 across its unvaccinated population.
LAFAYETTE, Louisiana (AP) — An attorney arguing for 24 states urged a federal judge Friday to block Biden administration plans to lift pandemic-related restrictions on migrants requesting asylum, saying the decision was made without sufficient consideration on the effects the move could have on public health and law enforcement.
NEW DELHI (AP) — With one brother president, another prime minister and three more family members cabinet ministers, it appeared that the Rajapaksa clan had consolidated its grip on power in Sri Lanka after decades in and out of government.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Six people have died and 350,000 have been treated for a fever that has spread “explosively” across North Korea, state media said Friday, a day after the country acknowledged a COVID-19 outbreak for the first time in the pandemic.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden appealed to world leaders at a COVID-19 summit Thursday to reenergize a lagging international commitment to attacking the virus as he led the U.S. in marking the “tragic milestone” of 1 million deaths in America.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea imposed a nationwide lockdown Thursday to control its first acknowledged COVID-19 outbreak after holding for more than two years to a widely doubted claim of a perfect record keeping out the virus that has spread to nearly every place in the world.
GENEVA (AP) — The number of new coronavirus cases reported worldwide has continued to fall except in the Americas and Africa, the World Health Organization said in its latest assessment of the pandemic.
BERLIN (AP) — The European Union will no longer recommend medical masks be worn at airports and on planes starting next week amid the easing of coronavirus restrictions across the bloc, though member states can still require them, officials said Wednesday.
BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union’s executive arm on Wednesday unveiled a plan to require online platforms to detect and report the sharing of child sex abuse images on the internet, which quickly triggered privacy concerns.
HAVANA (AP) — The elegant Hotel Saratoga was supposed to reopen in Havana on Tuesday after a two-year pandemic break. Instead, it was a day of mourning for the 43 people known to have died in an explosion that ripped the building apart.
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Oregon’s public defender system has shown cracks for years, but a post-pandemic glut of delayed cases has exposed shocking constitutional landmines impacting defendants and crime victims alike in a state with a national reputation for progressive social justice.
Peloton's uphill ride to get more sales is getting rougher as more people return to gyms and other pre-pandemic exercise routines and embrace cheaper options.
The maker of high-end exercise bikes and treadmills, once highflying in the early days of the pandemic, on Tuesday reported mounting losses and slowing sale.
Testing for COVID-19 has plummeted across the globe, making it much tougher for scientists to track the course of the pandemic and spot new, worrisome viral mutants as they emerge and spread.
Experts say testing has dropped by 70 to 90% worldwide from the first to the second quarter of this year — the opposite of what they say should be happening with new omicron variants on the rise in places such as the United States and South Africa.
GENEVA (AP) — The head of the World Health Organization called on Pfizer to make its COVID-19 treatment more widely available in poorer countries, saying Tuesday that the pharmaceutical company's deal allowing generic producers to make the drug was insufficient.
BEIJING (AP) — The city of Shanghai is doubling down on pandemic restrictions after a brief period of loosening up, frustrating residents who were hoping a more than monthlong lockdown was finally easing as the number of new cases falls in China's financial center.
In the course of a single year, University of Maine climate scientist Jacquelyn Gill lost both her mother and her stepfather. She struggled with infertility, then during research in the Arctic, she developed embolisms in both lungs, was transferred to an intensive care unit in Siberia and nearly died.
NEW YORK (AP) — They crawled to the surface as the coronavirus pandemic roiled New York City, scurrying out of subterranean nests into the open air, feasting on a smorgasbord of scraps in streets, parks and mounds of curbside garbage.
OBERAMMERGAU, Germany (AP) — Almost 400 years ago, the Catholic residents of a small Bavarian village vowed to perform a play of “the suffering, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ” every 10 years, if only God would spare them any further losses from the plague known as the Black Death.
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A post-pandemic glut of delayed cases has exposed shocking constitutional landmines impacting defendants and crime victims alike in Oregon, a state with a national reputation for progressive social justice.
HAVANA (AP) — Relatives of the missing in Cuba’s capital desperately searched Saturday for victims of an explosion at one of Havana's most luxurious hotels that killed at least 27 people. They checked the morgue, hospitals and if unsuccessful, they returned to the partially collapsed Hotel Saratoga, where rescuers used dogs to hunt for survivors.
PHOENIX (AP) — Mary Francis had no qualms about being a poster child for COVID-19 vaccinations on the Navajo Nation, once a virus hot spot. The Navajo woman's face and words grace a digital flyer asking people on the Native American reservation to get vaccinated "to protect the shidine'e (my people)."
Doug Lambrecht was among the first of the nearly 1 million Americans to die from COVID-19. His demographic profile — an older white male with chronic health problems — mirrors the faces of many who would be lost over the next two years.
LONDON (AP) — The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 15 million people were killed either by coronavirus or by its impact on overwhelmed health systems during the first two years of the pandemic, more than double the current official death toll of over 6 million.