Olympic sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya decided to defect as she was being driven to a Tokyo airport because her grandmother told her that it was not safe to return home to Belarus.

The WHO yesterday called for a moratorium on Covid-19 vaccine booster shots until at least the end of September to address the drastic inequity in dose distribution between rich and poor nations.

Fully vaccinated people in England were one-third as likely to test positive for Covid-19, according to an ongoing survey of the population released yesterday.

Three people died and eight were seriously injured on Wednesday when a Munich-to-Prague express train ran through a stop signal and collided with a local commuter train in the Czech Republic, Czech authorities said.

An estimated 4.7 million fewer girls are expected to be born globally in the next 10 years because of sex-selective practices in countries with a cultural preference for male offspring, a trend that could undermine social cohesion in the long term, research showed yesterday.  

A missing Belarusian activist has been found hanged in a park in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, police said on Tuesday, adding they had opened a murder probe. Shishov headed the Belarusian House in Ukraine, an NGO helping his compatriots flee repression in Belarus.

1914 - WWI: Britain declares war on Germany.

We will seek to lift the tyrannical sanctions imposed by America. But we will not tie the ... economy to the will of foreigners.” Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s incoming president

A Belarusian activist living in exile in Ukraine was found hanged in a park near his home in Kyiv early on Tuesday, and Ukrainian police said they had launched a murder case.

After years of campaigning by Black legislators and community advocates, Canada on Sunday is officially marking the abolishment of slavery nearly 200 years ago in its first nationwide Emancipation Day.

A 100-year-old former concentration camp guard will stand trial in Germany in October accused of complicity in 3,518 murders, public prosecutors announced yesterday.

Poland yesterday said it was stepping up security at vaccination points following two arson incidents overnight in a single town and an attempt by anti-vaccine activists to break into another.

German politician Christian Schmidt yesterday took over as the top international envoy in Bosnia despite opposition from Russia and Bosnian Serbs who consider him “illegal” and say they won’t work with him.

French intelligence investigators have confirmed that Pegasus spyware has been found on the phones of three journalists, including a senior member of staff at the country’s international television station France 24.

Tunisian security forces have arrested two MPs from an Islamist party opposed to a power grab by President Kais Saied, their party said Sunday.

1914 - Germany declared war on France at the start of World War One.

Huan Huan, a giant panda on loan to France, gave birth to twin cubs very early yesterday, according to the Beauval zoo.

A 100-year-old former guard at the Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp near Berlin will face trial in the autumn, 76 years after the end of the

 New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern issued a sombre state apology yesterday to the Pacific community for racially targeted immigration raids in the 1970s that resulted in deportations and prosecutions. 

With climate change fueling high temperatures across the Arctic, Greenland lost a massive amount of ice on Wednesday with enough melting to cover the US state of Florida in 2 inches (5.1 cm) of water, scientists said.