Category: News

Confused about all the terminology surrounding the coronavirus? These terms and definitions can help.  Coronavirus: Starting with the most obvious, this word refers to a family of hundreds of similarly shaped viruses. Under a microscope, they look like round blobs surrounded by spikes, much like…

Portugal's flag carrier TAP cancelled around 1,000 flights scheduled in March and April on Thursday after concerns about the coronavirus epidemic led to a fall in demand and said it envisaged an unspecified impact on revenues.Separately, organizers of the Lisbon Travel Market, an annual gathering…

The Carnival period in Venice usually marks the start of peak season in one of the world's most visited cities, with hordes of tourists piling onto vaporettos to cruise the Grand Canal, strolling through cobblestone streets and lingering in picturesque cafes.      Venice in…

Anna Alexander, a property manager in Virginia Beach, Virginia, started the day Monday thinking that she might avoid shaking hands because of the coronavirus outbreak. Then somebody stuck out a hand to shake. She took it. "I'm a business person,'' Alexander, 65, explained. "But if…

After nearly three decades of war, many Somalis carry invisible scars from exposure to violence.According to the World Health Organization, FILE - A man walks past a body and destroyed buildings at the scene of a blast in the capital Mogadishu, Somalia, Oct 14, 2017.‘A…

A young mother painstakingly applies disinfectant cloths to clean meticulously the baby rattles for her gurgling blue-eyed infant bouncing happily on her lap.This is normally a wet and cold season in Lazio, but this year there have been many days of blue skies and warm…

Scientists say they have used the gene editing tool CRISPR inside someone’s body for the first time, a new frontier for efforts to operate on DNA, the chemical code of life, to treat diseases.A patient recently had it done at the Casey Eye Institute at…

Its doomed maiden voyage happened more than a century ago, but the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 remains the stuff of popular culture and the object of deep-sea salvage.  A firm has recovered more than 5,000 of its artifacts, but as VOA’s Arash Arabasadi reports,…

Every year, around 12 million tons of plastic waste are dumped into the world’s oceans – polluting the water, killing wildlife, and creating microplastics that enter the food chain. Now a group of fishermen in Barcelona, Spain has begun an innovative new project in which…

A scathing new report reveals that dozens of HIV-positive women were forced or coerced into sterilization after giving birth at public hospitals in South Africa.The Commission for Gender Equality's report this week says it investigated complaints by at least 48 women of "cruel, torturous or…

President Donald Trump sought Tuesday to minimize fears about coronavirus spreading rampantly throughout the U.S., saying the situation is “very well under control in our country.”     At the same time, the Trump administration on Monday asked Congress for an additional $2.5 billion to…

The World Health Organization is urgently appealing for $40 million to salvage its operation to bring the Ebola epidemic to an end in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The Ebola operation in eastern DR Congo’s conflict-ridden North Kivu and Ituri provinces is on financial life-support.  The…

Several states have begun picking up the tab for family planning services at clinics run by Planned Parenthood, which last year quit a $260 million federal funding program over a Trump administration rule prohibiting clinics from referring women for abortions.      States including New…

Italian officials ordered schools, public buildings, restaurants and coffee shops closed in a tiny town in northern Italy Friday after six people tested positive for the new virus, including some who had not been to China or the source of the global health emergency.   …

Lebanon confirmed its first coronavirus case Friday, a 45-year-old woman who had arrived from Iran and was being quarantined in a hospital."We confirmed the first case today," Lebanese health minister Hassan Hamad told a news conference, adding that two other suspected cases are being investigated.The…

Iranian health authorities on Friday reported two more deaths from the new virus that emerged in China and said the fatalities were from among 13 new confirmed cases of the virus in Iran.      The report by the semiofficial Mehr news agency came as…

A procedure one might expect to see only on an episode of popular television show Grey’s Anatomy actually occurred at a London hospital recently as a patient played the violin while undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumor. Dagmar Turner, 53, has had a passion for playing…

Did an artificial-intelligence system beat human doctors in warning the world of a severe coronavirus outbreak in China?In a narrow sense, yes. But what the humans lacked in sheer speed, they more than made up in finesse.Early warnings of disease outbreaks can help people and…

China is reporting its biggest drop in new cases of the new coronavirus that has killed more than 2,000 people on the mainland since the outbreak began more than two months ago.The country's National Health Commission said there were just 394 confirmed new cases of…