International news with relevance to Thai and regional readers
WASHINGTON, Oct 5 (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden said on Tuesday that he has spoken to Chinese President Xi Jinping about Taiwan and they agreed to abide by the Taiwan agreement, as tensions have ratcheted up between Taipei and Beijing. “I’ve spoken with Xi about Taiwan. We agree … we’ll abide by the Taiwan
PARIS, Oct 5 (Reuters) – French clergy sexually abused more than 200,000 children over the past 70 years, a major investigation released on Tuesday found, and its authors said the Catholic Church had turned a blind eye to the ‘scourge’ for too long. The church had shown “deep, total and even cruel indifference for years,”
CANBERRA (AP) — Foreign tourists won’t be welcomed back to Australia until at least next year, the prime minister said Tuesday as he outlined plans for lifting some of the toughest and longest COVID-19 travel restrictions imposed by any democracy. The country will instead prioritize the return of skilled migrants and students after it hits
LONDON (AP) — Britain’s Conservative government is facing calls to tighten the country’s defenses against “dirty money” after a massive leak of offshore data showed how London, in particular, is the destination of choice for some of the world’s richest and most powerful people to conceal their cash. The cache of almost 12 million files,
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Czech prime minister, the king of Jordan and the chairman of a well-known Indian conglomerate were among global figures denying wrongdoing on Monday after the leak of what major news outlets called a secret trove of documents about offshore finance. India said it would investigate cases linked to the data dump, known collectively as the “Pandora Papers“, while
(Reuters) – The effectiveness of the Pfizer Inc (PFE.N)/BioNTech SE vaccine in preventing infection by the coronavirus dropped to 47% from 88% six months after the second dose, according to data published on Monday that U.S. health agencies considered when deciding on the need for booster shots. The data, which was published in the Lancet
(Reuters) – Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp lit up again late on Monday afternoon Eastern time after a nearly six-hour outage that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services. Facebook apologized but did not immediately explain what caused the failure, the largest ever tracked by web monitoring group
Major social media services including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were hit by a massive outage on Monday, tracking sites showed, impacting potentially tens of millions of users. Outage tracker Downdetector was showing outages in heavily populated areas like Washington and Paris, with problems being reported from around 1545 GMT. Users trying to access Facebook in
TOKYO (AP) — Fumio Kishida was elected Japan’s prime minister in a parliamentary vote Monday and will be tasked with quickly tackling the pandemic and other domestic and global challenges and leading a national election within weeks. With his party and its coalition partner holding a majority in both houses, Kishida won by a comfortable
Stockholm (AFP) – Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, who lived under police protection after his 2007 depiction of the Prophet Mohammed prompted death threats, died Sunday in a car accident. The 75-year-old and two police officers were killed in a collision with an oncoming truck, Swedish police confirmed to AFP. “This is being investigated like any other road
Facebook prematurely turned off safeguards designed to thwart misinformation and rabble rousing after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in last year’s elections in a moneymaking move that a company whistleblower alleges contributed to the deadly Jan. 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol. The whistleblower, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen, also asserted during an exclusive interview that
SEOUL (Reuters) – The two Koreas on Monday restored their hotlines that the North severed months ago, with Pyongyang urging Seoul to step up efforts to improve relations after criticising what it called double standards over weapons development. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un expressed his willingness last week to reactivate the hotlines, which North Korea cut off in early August in protest against joint South Korea-U.S. military exercises,
