China reported 13,000 COVID cases on Sunday, the most since the peak of the first pandemic wave over two years ago, as health officials said they have found a suspected new subtype of the Omicron variant in the Shanghai area.China's "zero-COVID" strategy is under extreme pressure as the virus whips across the country.Until March, China had successfully kept the daily caseload down to double or triple digits, with hard, localised lockdowns, mass testing and travel restrictions.B

Nearly 4.14 million Ukrainians have fled their country since Russia's full-scale invasion began on 24 February, with tens of thousands continuing to flood into neighbouring countries each day, United Nations (UN) numbers show.The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said Saturday that 4,137,842 Ukrainians had fled in just over five weeks, an increase of 34,966 on the figure given Friday.Women and children account for 90 percent of those who have left Ukraine, with men aged 18 to 60 eligible for mil

Nearly all of Shanghai's 25 million residents were under stay-at-home orders on Saturday, as parents raised fears of being separated from their children in the event of a positive COVID-19 test.The city, which is the epicentre of China's most severe COVID outbreak since the first months of the pandemic, has faced weeks of phased lockdowns.Authorities had vowed not to shut down the whole city, China's finance hub, but have conceded to rare failures in their attempts to control t

Shanghai has not declared any new COVID deaths in the city since the outbreak of the latest wave of the virus.But people working at the Donghai Elderly Care Hospital in the city's eastern Pudong area have described a dire situation and desperate attempts to help dozens of elderly patients, some of whom have died.A nurse said that the first positive cases were discovered at the facility – one of the biggest of its kind in Shanghai – three weeks ago.Since then, it has been sealed off, and

Singapore fully reopened its borders to all vaccinated visitors Friday after a two-year coronavirus closure, with arrivals saying it felt "wonderful" to travel again without onerous restrictions.The aviation hub, a key gateway for people arriving in Asia, joins other countries in the region that have recently dropped travel curbs as they shift to living with COVID-19.Previously, only travellers from a handful of places could enter Singapore without quarantining but from Friday all v

Street protests gripped Sri Lanka Friday as demonstrators blocked main roads across the country, a day after hundreds tried to storm the president's home in anger over an unprecedented economic crisis.The South Asian nation is facing severe shortages of essentials, sharp price rises and crippling power cuts in its most painful downturn since independence from Britain in 1948.Police reimposed a night-time curfew Friday in the Western Province, which includes the capital Colombo, slightly

COVID-19 vaccines provide significant extra protection for people who have already been infected, according to two new studies.The jabs have proven highly effective in protecting those who have never had COVID, but their effectiveness at preventing symptoms and severe outcomes in people who have previously been infected has, until recently, been less clear.Now two separate pieces of research, published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, confirm that COVID-19 vaccines provide additiona

A top Shanghai official conceded Thursday the Chinese financial hub had been "insufficiently prepared" for its latest COVID outbreak, as criticism mounts over lockdowns that have caught residents off guard.The eastern megacity of 25 million has been split in two as part of a rolling lockdown plan to battle China's worst outbreak in two years.The spread of the Omicron variant is testing the country's zero-COVID strategy, which aims to crush virus clusters as soon as they em

Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine:Buses En Route To Mariupol Ukraine's government sends 45 buses to evacuate civilians from the besieged city of Mariupol, where Russia has declared a local ceasefire following a global outcry over the suffering of civilians trapped by a month of relentless shelling.The first convoy arrives in the Russian-occupied port of Berdyansk, a hub in the operation to evacuate civilians to the Ukrainian-controlled town of Zaporizhzhia.P

When Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen became the first head of state to visit Myanmar since the military seized power in a coup last year, he seemed to think he would be able to bring the generals back into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) despite the country’s worsening humanitarian crisis.“I am thinking whether we should keep ASEAN nine or ASEAN 10, because, in the recent ASEAN Summit, we have only nine, this is a problem,” he said ahead of the January trip.