Kabul, Nov 21: A suicide bomber blew himself up in the Afghan capital Kabul on Tuesday, killing more than 50 people, three government officials said.
Najib Danish, a spokesman for the interior ministry, said more than 70 other people were injured in the attack.
“A suicide bomber detonated his explosives inside a wedding hall where Islamic religious scholars had gathered to commemorate the birthday of Prophet Mohammad,” Danish said.
There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the blast.
Beijing, May 24: The Chinese virology institute in the city where COVID-19 first emerged has three live strains of bat coronavirus on-site, but none match the new contagion wreaking chaos across the world, its director has said.
Scientists think COVID-19 -- which first emerged in Wuhan and has killed some 340,000 people worldwide -- originated in bats and could have been transmitted to people via another mammal.
But the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology told state broadcaster CGTN that claims made by US President Donald Trump and others that the virus could have leaked from the facility were "pure fabrication".
"Now we have three strains of live viruses... But their highest similarity to SARS-CoV-2 only reaches 79.8 percent," she said, referring to the coronavirus strain that causes COVID-19.
US demands immediate start to WHO review
The United States called on the World Health Organisation on Friday to begin working immediately on investigating the source of the novel coronavirus, as well as its handling of the response to the pandemic.
One of their research teams, led by Professor Shi Zhengli, has been researching bat coronaviruses since 2004 and focused on the "source tracing of SARS", the strain behind another virus outbreak nearly two decades ago.
"We know that the whole genome of SARS-CoV-2 is only 80 percent similar to that of SARS. It's an obvious difference," she said.
"So, in Professor Shi's past research, they didn't pay attention to such viruses which are less similar to the SARS virus."
Conspiracy rumours that the biosafety lab was involved in the outbreak swirled online for months before Trump and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo brought the theory into the mainstream by claiming that there is evidence the pathogen came from the institute.
The lab has said it received samples of the then-unknown virus on December 30, determined the viral genome sequence on January 2 and submitted information on the pathogen to the WHO on January 11.
Wang said in the interview that before it received samples in December, their team had never "encountered, researched or kept the virus."
"In fact, like everyone else, we didn't even know the virus existed," she said. "How could it have leaked from our lab when we never had it?"
The World Health Organization said Washington had offered no evidence to support the "speculative" claims.
In an interview with Scientific American, Shi said the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence did not match any of the bat coronaviruses her laboratory had previously collected and studied.
May 6: In a first, a Pakistani Hindu youth has become the first person from the minority community to join the Pakistan Air Force.
Rahul Dev has been recruited as a General Duty Pilot Officer, the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) said in a tweet.
Dev hails from Tharparkar district of Sindh province.
Sharing the picture of the young man, the PAF recently tweeted, "Good news during #COVID19 tense situation. Thar rocked again...Congratulations #RahulDev who hails from very remote village of Tharparkar has been selected as GD Pilot in #PAF."
Though Dev's exact age is not known, those inducted in PAF at his level are often around 20.
The official Radio Pakistan on Wednesday said it is "for the first time in Pakistan's history" that a Hindu youth has been recruited as a general duty pilot officer in PAF.
The Express Tribune in a report published on Wednesday said the induction showed that the PAF was breaking barriers.
Last year, Kainat Junaid became the first woman from Khyber-Pakthunkhwa province to have been selected for fighter pilot training.
Junaid not only secured the top position in PAF's test for General Duty Pilot, but also became Pakistan’s first female fighter pilot to serve the country alongside her father.
Her father Ahmed Junaid is a Squadron Leader in the PAF.
Beijing, Feb 18: Police in China have arrested a prominent activist who had been a fugitive for weeks and criticised President Xi Jinping's handling of the coronavirus epidemic while in hiding, a rights group said Tuesday.
Anti-corruption activist Xu Zhiyong was arrested on Saturday after being on the run since December, according to Amnesty International.
China's ruling Communist Party has severely curtailed civil liberties since Xi took power in 2012, rounding up rights lawyers, labour activists and even Marxist students.
The death this month of a whistleblowing doctor who was reprimanded by police for raising the alarm about the deadly new virus before dying of it himself triggered rare calls for political reform and freedom of speech.
The "Chinese government's battle against the coronavirus has in no way diverted it from its ongoing general campaign to crush all dissenting voices," said Patrick Poon, China researcher at Amnesty International, in an emailed statement.
Another source, who spoke to news agency on the condition of anonymity, said Xu had been arrested in the southern city of Guangzhou.
Guangzhou police did not respond to requests for comment.
Xu went into hiding after authorities broke up a December gathering of intellectuals discussing political reform in the eastern coastal city of Xiamen in Fujian province, prior to the coronavirus crisis.
Over a dozen lawyers and activists were detained or disappeared after the Xiamen gathering, according to rights groups -- and Xu's detention appears linked to his presence at the meeting, explained Poon.
But while on the run, Xu continued to post information on Twitter about rights issues.
On February 4 Xu released an article calling on Xi to step down and criticised his leadership across a range of issues including the US-China trade war, Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests and the coronavirus epidemic, which has now killed nearly 1,900 people.
"Medical supplies are tight, hospitals are filled with patients, and a large number of infected people have no way to be diagnosed," he wrote. "It's a mess."
"The coronavirus outbreak shows just how important values like freedom of expression and transparency are -- the exact values that Xu has long advocated," Yaqiu Wang, China researcher at Human Rights Watch, told news agency.
But the disappearance of Xu illustrates how the Chinese state "persists in its old ways" by "silencing its critics", she said.
Xu -- who founded a movement calling for greater transparency among high-ranking officials -- previously served a four-year prison sentence from 2013 to 2017 for organising an "illegal gathering".
"That he was a fugitive for so many days while continuing to speak out, that in itself was... a kind of challenge to (Chinese authorities)," said Hua Ze, a long-time friend of Xu who told AFP she lost contact with the Chinese activist on Saturday morning.
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