A World War II era bomb went off early yesterday in the eastern Czech city of Ostrava during excavation work, killing a man and injuring another, police and media reports said.

French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen vowed Thursday to issue fines to Muslims who wear headscarves in public, as candidates made a final push for votes three days ahead of an election seen as increasingly close.

The EU yesterday said it was building a 540-million-euro ($590 million) emergency stockpile of medicine and equipment to deal with chemical and nuclear

Nearly 100 people have died in international waters after setting off from Libya in an overcrowded boat, international organisations said. A commercial tanker, Alegria 1, rescued four people from a life raft in the Mediterranean early Saturday morning, the Doctors Without Borders charity said.

A full 99 percent of people on Earth breathe air containing too many pollutants, the World Health Organization said yesterday, blaming poor air quality for millions of deaths each year.

Nationalist Hungarian PM Viktor Orban faced a tough challenge with a united opposition in an unpredictable general election yesterday, after a campaign dominated by Russia’s invasion of neighbouring Ukraine.

A new Covid variant has been found in the UK, the World Health Organisation said in its latest report. The new mutant, called XE, may be more transmissible than any strain of Covid-19, the health body said.

Russia has declared a prominent journalist, a video blogger and six other media figures “foreign agents”, the latest in a series of such moves that critics say are designed to stifle dissent.

Pope Francis yesterday said he was considering a trip to Kyiv and implicitly criticised Russian President Vladimir Putin over the invasion of Ukraine, saying a “potentate” was fomenting conflict for nationalist interests.

International donors have pledged $2.44 billion in humanitarian aid for Afghanistan, the United Nations said, falling short of its target to provide emergency relief.

People with the “hybrid immunity” of having been both fully vaccinated and previously infected with Covid-19 have the strongest protection against the virus, two new studies said yesterday.

At least eight miners were killed and about 20 were injured on Friday when a shaft collapsed in a state-owned coal mine in southern Serbia, RTS state television reported.

Afghanistan’s economy risks falling into a “death spiral” without urgent aid, with some Afghans already forced to sell their children and body parts to survive, UN

Two UK Supreme Court judges yesterday resigned from Hong Kong’s top court, as the government in London said it was “no longer tenable” for its judges to serve in the former colony.

Nearly half of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended, the UN reproductive health agency said yesterday, warning that the war in Ukraine could further exacerbate what it called a “human rights crisis”.

British police investigating breaches of coronavirus lockdown laws by Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his staff in Downing Street yesterday announced it would be issuing 20 initial fines.

The threat of a global conflict spawned by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should convince everyone that the time has come for humanity to abolish war before it abolishes humanity, Pope Francis said yesterday.

Prince William ended a turbulent tour of the Caribbean by starkly admitting this weekend that the region’s former British colonies must decide whether to scrap the monarchy’s role in their countries.

A top UN rights expert slammed the international community Friday for allowing Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories to evolve into a system of “apartheid”.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was expected to fly in in Israel as the Ukraine war rages, aiming to rally regional support for Kyiv and quell the Jewish state’s worries about a looming nuclear deal with Iran.