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Pakistan opens doors of 500-yr-old gurdwara for Indian Sikh pilgrims

Agencies
July 2, 2019

Lahore, Jul 2: A 500-year-old gurdwara in Sialkot in Pakistan's Punjab province has now opened its doors for Indian Sikh pilgrims, a media report said Monday.

Earlier, Indians were not allowed to visit the Babe-de-Ber gurdwara which is situated in Sialkot city, about 140 kms from here, The Express Tribune reported.

Several religious sites in Punjab are frequented by Sikhs from several countries including India.

Pilgrims from Pakistan, Europe, Canada and the US were allowed to visit the gurdwara.

Punjab Governor Muhammad Sarwar directed the province's Auqaf department to include Sikh pilgrims from India to the list, so they can visit the Sialkot gurdwara, the report said.

Every year, thousands of Indian Sikh devotees visit Pakistan on the birth and death anniversaries of Guru Nanak -- the founder of Sikhism and the first of the 10 Sikh Gurus -- the martyrdom of Guruwar Jin Devji and the Besakhi festival and the death anniversary of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

According to the Sikh tradition, when Guru Nanak arrived in Sialkot from Kashmir in the 16th century, he stayed under the tree of Beri. Sardar Natha Singh then built a gurdwara in his remembrance at the site, the report added.

In November 2018, India and Pakistan agreed to set up a border crossing linking Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Pakistan's Kartarpur - the final resting place of Guru Nanak - to Dera Baba Nanak in Punjab's Gurdaspur district.

The Kartarpur corridor is expected to provide visa-free access to Indian Sikh pilgrims to the gurdwara in Kartarpur Sahib — a small town in Narowal, four kilometres from the Pakistan-India border, where Guru Nanak spent the last 18 years of his life.

Pakistan will build the corridor from the Indian border to the Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur, while the other part from Dera Baba Nanak in Gurdaspur up to the border will be constructed by India.

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Agencies
August 1,2020

Mexico City, Aug 1: The number of people, who have died of COVID-19 in Mexico, has risen by 688 to 46,688 within the past 24 hours, Deputy Health Minister Hugo Lopez-Gatell said.

The number of victims in Mexico is now higher than in the United Kingdom, where 46,119 people have died of the disease. The largest number of fatalities - 153,311 - has been recorded in the United States, while Brazil comes second with 92,475 deaths.

Lopez-Gatell also said on late Friday that the number of confirmed coronavirus cases had increased by 8,458 to 424,637 over the past day.

A day earlier, the Latin American nation recorded 7,730 new cases of the coronavirus, with 639 fatalities.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 11. To date, over 17.5 million people have been infected with the coronavirus worldwide, with over 677,000 fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins University.

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News Network
June 29,2020

Paris, Jun 29: More than half a million people have been killed by the novel coronavirus, nearly two thirds of them in the United States and Europe, according to an news agency tally at 2200 GMT Sunday based on official sources.

The official death count for the disease now stands at 500,390 deaths from 10,099,576 cases recorded worldwide. The United States has suffered the highest death count (125,747), followed by Brazil (57,622) and the United Kingdom (43,550).

The tallies, using data collected by AFP from national authorities and information from the World Health Organization (WHO), probably reflect only a fraction of the actual number of infections.

Many countries are testing only the most serious cases.

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News Network
March 16,2020

Manila, Mar 16: The Philippines has detected an outbreak of avian flu in a northern province after tests showed presence of the highly infectious H5N6 subtype of the influenza A virus in a quail farm, the country's farm minister said on Monday.

Agriculture Secretary William Dar said the bird flu virus, the same strain that hit some local poultry farms in 2017, was detected in Jaen municipality in Nueva Ecija province, where about 1,500 quails had died on one farm alone.

A total of 12,000 quails have been destroyed and buried to prevent further infections, Dar said, citing field reports.

"We are on top of the situation," he said. "Surveillance around the 1-km and 7-km radius will be carried out immediately to ensure that the disease has not progressed around the said perimeter."

Animal quarantine checkpoints have also been set up to restrict the movement of all live domestic birds to and from the quarantine area, he said.

"We would like to emphasise that this is a single case affecting one quail farm only," Dar said.

Dr. Arlene Vytiaco, technical spokeswoman for avian flu at the agriculture department, said that while there is a possibility of transmission to humans through excretion and secretion, "the chances are very slim".

"There is also zero mortality rate," she said.

Dar said his department and the local government were jointly conducting an investigation and contact-tracing to determine the source of infection.

To ensure steady domestic supply of poultry, he said the transport of day-old chicks, hatching eggs and chicken meat will be allowed provided the source farms have tested negative for bird flu.

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