US, Israel quit UNESCO for respecting Palestine

London, Mar 25: Prince Charles on Wednesday has tested positive for the novel coronavirus and is working from home with mild symptoms, according to UK media.
A Clarence House spokesperson said the Prince of Wales was "displaying mild symptoms but otherwise remains in good health and has been working from home throughout the last few days as usual", the Telegraph UK reported.
"He has been displaying mild symptoms but otherwise remains in good health and has been working from home throughout the last few days as usual," the spokesperson added.
In accordance with the government and medical advice, the 71-year old heir to the British throne and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, are now self-isolating at their home in Scotland.
The Duchess of Cornwall has also been tested but does not have the virus.
The tests were carried out by the NHS in Aberdeenshire where they met the criteria required for testing.
"It is not possible to ascertain from whom the Prince caught the virus owing to the high number of engagements he carried out in his public role during recent weeks," the statement further said.

Jun 2: Pakistan's COVID-19 cases reached 76,398 on Tuesday after 3,938 new infections were reported across the country, while the death toll due to the coronavirus has gone up to 1,621, according to the health ministry.

The Ministry of National Health Services said that 78 COVID-19 deaths were recorded in the last 24 hours, taking the total number of fatalities in Pakistan to 1,621.

A total of 27, 110 people have recovered, it said.

Sindh has 29,647 patients, Punjab 27,850, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa 10,485, Balochistan 4,514, Islamabad 2,893, Gilgit-Baltistan 738 and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir 271, it added.

The authorities have conducted 577,974 tests, including 16,548 in the last 24 hours.

The jump in the number of cases comes a day after Prime Minister Imran Khan said that people should learn to live with COVID-19 until a vaccine is developed.

Khan addressed the media after chairing the meeting of National Coordination Committee, the highest body to tackle the pandemic.

"Coronavirus will not go away until the vaccine is discovered. We need to learn to live with it and we can live with it if we follow precautions," he said.

He said the one million volunteers of the government's coronavirus force will raise awareness of the need to follow guidelines.

The government also said that all sectors will be opened slowly after deciding the negative list of businesses which will not be allowed.

Washington, Jan 9: The U.S. and Iran stepped back from the brink of possible war Wednesday as President Donald Trump signaled he would not retaliate militarily for Iran's missile strikes on Iraqi bases housing U.S. troops. No one was harmed in the strikes, but U.S. forces in the region remained on high alert.

Speaking from the White House, Trump seemed intent on deescalating the crisis, which spiralled after he authorized the assassination of Iran's top general, Qassem Soleimani. Iran responded overnight by firing more than a dozen missiles at two installations in Iraq, its most direct assault on America since the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

Trump's takeaway was that “Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world.”

The region remained on edge, however, and American troops including a quick-reaction force dispatched over the weekend were on high alert. Hours after Trump spoke, an ‘incoming’ siren went off in Baghdad's Green Zone after what seemed to be small rockets “impacted” the diplomatic area, a Western official said. There were no reports of casualties.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the overnight strike was not necessarily the totality of Iran's response. “Last night they received a slap,” Khamenei said. “These military actions are not sufficient (for revenge). What is important is that the corrupt presence of America in this region comes to an end.”

The strikes had pushed Tehran and Washington perilously close to all-out conflict and left the world waiting to see whether the American president would respond with more military force. Trump, in his nine-minute, televised address, spoke of a robust U.S. military with missiles that are “big, powerful, accurate, lethal and fast.'' But then he added: “We do not want to use it."

Iran for days had been promising to respond forcefully to Soleimani's killing, but its limited strike on two bases--one in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil and the other at Ain al-Asad in western Iraq--appeared to signal that it too was uninterested in a wider clash with the U.S. Foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted that the country had “concluded proportionate measures in self-defence.”

Trump said the U.S. was “ready to embrace peace with all who seek it.” That marked a sharp change in tone from his warning a day earlier that “if Iran does anything that they shouldn't be doing, they're going to be suffering the consequences, and very strongly.”

Trump opened his remarks at the White House by reiterating his promise that “Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.” Iran had announced in the wake of Soleimani's killing that it would no longer comply with any of the limits on uranium enrichment in the 2015 nuclear deal crafted to keep it from building a nuclear device.

The president, who had earlier pulled the U.S. out of the deal, seized on the moment of calm to call for negotiations toward a new agreement that would do more to limit Iran's ballistic missile programmes and constrain regional proxy campaigns like those led by Soleimani.

Trump spoke of new sanctions on Iran, but it was not immediately clear what those would be.