Bill Gates says pandemic could get ‘worse than I would have expected’ — and calls for leadership

Tech leaders typically use their TED talks to sketch out an optimistic vision of the future, but today Bill Gates used his to warn about a rough autumn ahead due to the continuing coronavirus pandemic. “There’s good progress … but nothing that would fundamentally alter the fact that this fall in the United States could be quite bad, and that’s…

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Why Pakistan is a big factor in China’s border clashes with India

When Indian and Chinese troops started throwing rocks at each other in a fatal skirmish in the Galwan Valley earlier this month, the incident appeared to be yet another outbreak in hostilities over an ill-defined Himalayan border between the two countries. Tensions between China and India over the border go back decades and erupted into war in 1962. But observers say…

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India opens one of the world’s largest hospitals to fight coronavirus

India has opened one of the largest hospitals in the world to help fight coronavirus, as health authorities announced the country’s biggest one-day increase in the number of new infections.The Sardar Patel COVID Care Centre, the largest facility of its kind in India, became partly operational on Sunday, with 2,000 of its 10,000 beds available, according to the Delhi government.The remaining 8,000…

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New coal power plants increasing financial burden of Pakistan: Report

Power shortages in Pakistan tend to be due to grid issues rather than a lack of generation capacity,” said Simon Nicholas, energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). With the demand for electricity growth slowing, Pakistan is faced with the increasing financial burden of power capacity payments and overcapacity risk at a time when…

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Police ordered to submit response on Cynthia Ritchie’s application by July 9

A local court in Islamabad on Saturday directed the capital police to submit its response by July 9 on US blogger Cynthia D Ritchie’s application for registration of first information report (FIR) against former interior minister Rehman Malik over rape and harassment allegations. The US blogger on Tuesday had submitted her application to an additional district and sessions judge under…

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Facing a boycott by advertisers, Facebook to ban more ‘hateful content’ in ads

Facebook said Friday it would ban a “wider category of hateful content” in ads as the embattled social media giant moved to respond to growing protests over its handling of inflammatory posts. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook also would add tags to posts that are “newsworthy” but violate platform rules following the lead of Twitter, which has used such labels on tweets…

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PIA moves to assuage concern over ‘dubious’ pilot licences

pia-move

Pakistan International Airlines has written to foreign missions and global regulatory and safety bodies, assuring them it has grounded all 141 pilots suspected of obtaining licenses through unfair means, the carrier’s spokesman said on Saturday. The move looks to assuage safety concerns after Aviation Minister Ghulam Sarwar Khan said on Friday that the government had asked various commercial airlines, flying…

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