China's Mars rover drove from its landing platform and began exploring the surface of the planet on Saturday, state-run Xinhua news agency said, making the country only the second nation to land and operate a rover on the Red Planet.The launch last July of the Tianwen-1 Mars probe, which carried the Zhurong rover, marked a major milestone in China's space programme.Tianwen-1 touched down on a vast northern lava plain known as the Utopia Planitia a week ago and beamed back its first

Vaxxing, not waxing, is the new must-do before a hot date, with dating apps joining the White House on Friday to promote COVID-19 shots.Tinder, Hinge, Match, OkCupid, BLK, Chispa, Plenty of Fish, Bumble, and Badoo are all adding vaccination status to the more expected details on dating profiles as part of a rollout over the next few weeks.Getting the shot may also do more for lovers than keep them healthy, the White House said in a statement."According to research from OKCupid, people wh

Six opposition rebels have been killed after days of clashes in Myanmar, an anti-junta defence force made up of civilians said Sunday, as Britain and the United States (US) condemned the military's violence against civilians.Myanmar has been in uproar since the military ousted civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi in a 1 February coup, triggering a massive uprising which authorities have sought to quell with lethal force. Pope Francis on Sunday called for an end to the bloodshed and

The South China Sea (SCS) dispute is one of the many inter-state issues that challenge the resolve of the Philippines’ foreign policy of upholding peaceful coexistence and mutual respect with other claimant-states, especially China. This is in line with a peaceful and diplomatic resolution of the dispute based on the Philippines’ commitment to international law, regional stability, and peaceful co-existence with its neighbours, without compromising the integrity of its national terri

At this point in the pandemic, the key question is whether vaccine production can be ramped up quickly enough to allow most people to be vaccinated relatively soon.

World health experts issued a grim warning Friday that the second year of COVID-19 was set to be "far more deadly", as Japan extended a state of emergency amid growing calls for the Olympics to be scrapped."We're on track for the second year of this pandemic to be far more deadly than the first," said the World Health Organization's (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.The mood also darkened in Japan where the coronavirus state of emergency took in a

An elderly French-Vietnamese woman failed Monday in her bid to sue Monsanto and other makers of the toxic chemical Agent Orange over its use by the United States (US) as a weapon during the Vietnam War, after a French court ruled that the companies had legal immunity because they were working for a sovereign government.Tran To Nga, born in 1942 in what was then French Indochina, accused 14 agrochemicals firms of causing grievous harm to her and others by selling Agent Orange to the American m

German firm BioNTech said Monday that the COVID-19 vaccine it developed with Pfizer does not require any modifications to work against variants of the virus, as it announced new plans to ramp up production of the jabs."To date, there is no evidence that an adaptation of BioNTech's current COVID-19 vaccine against key identified emerging variants is necessary," the company said in a statement.Nevertheless, in preparations for a need at some point to make tweaks to its current va

Would the United States (US) be prepared to risk a catastrophic war with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to protect the Republic of China (ROC), better known as Taiwan? President Joe Biden laid out his vision clearly last week.

Despite their increasingly bitter rivalry, the United States (US) and China have recently been sending the right signals regarding potential cooperation on combating climate change.