World News

Hong Kong scientist Dr. Li-Meng Yan was stepping into uncharted territory. Hours before she boarded an April 28 Cathay Pacific flight to the United States, the respected doctor who specialized in virology and immunology at the Hong Kong School of Public Health had plotted her escape, packing her bag and sneaking past the censors and video cameras on campus.

The gender field will soon no longer appear in the Identification cards (IDs) of citizens, the government of the Netherlands has announced.

Poland’s incumbent conservative President Andrzej Duda has narrowly beaten his liberal challenger Rafal Trzaskowski in Sunday’s razor-blade tight presidential election. The National Electoral Commission said Duda won with 51.2 percent of the vote.

Thousands of protestors took to the streets of Sofia and at least 10 other Bulgarian towns for the fourth day Sunday in demonstrations against government corruption, VOA reports. During a march to Parliament in Sofia, more than 3,000 protestors called for the conservative government to resign with shouts of “Mafia!” The protests were triggered in support of socialist President Rumen Radev’s, after prosecutors and heavily armed police raided presidential offices on Thursday, VOA reported.

Further explosions were reported Thursday night at yet another sensitive site in Iran, the Jerusalem Post reports. The latest in a series of blasts at industrial and infrastructural areas in Iran, Thursday’s explosions reportedly took place at an Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRG) missile depot west of Tehran.

Hungary’s fiercely anti-migration government warned Sunday it would reimpose far-reaching coronavirus restrictions on people arriving from nations with a moderate or high number of coronavirus infections. The measures include mandatory two-week quarantines or bans and other limitations.

People in Poland went to the polls Sunday in what commentators called a razor-blade-close presidential election runoff amid a coronavirus pandemic. Voters were deciding whether to give another chance to the current conservative President Andrzej Duda, or to make the liberal mayor of Warsaw the next head-of-state.

Bosnia-Herzegovina commemorated over the weekend the 25th anniversary of Europe’s worst atrocity since World War Two. Some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were shot end killed by invading Serb forces in and around the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in one of the darkest episodes of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday the Trump administration is considering restricting United States’ users’ access to the Chinese social media application TikTok over concerns it is potentially being used by the Beijing government as a means to surveil and propagandize people.

Syria’s dictator Bashar Assad has signed a military cooperation agreement with Iran’s Islamic extremist regime, Algemeiner reports. The deal was concluded Wednesday, reportedly as part of an effort to increase Syria’s air defenses against “pressures by America.”

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Wednesday that US and “partner” forces seized a boat in June carrying Iranian weapons to Houthi rebels in Yemen as he renewed his call for the UN Security Council to extend an arms embargo on Iran.

Turkey, a member of NATO, tested the Russian-made S-400 air defense system on US-made F-16 jets during a drill in November 2019, Russia’s state media TASS has reported. The use of the S-400 against the F-16s was already reported last year, but the new details from Russian media appear to cement the claim and infer that something more was going on in those tests.

Serbia was facing broader civil unrest Wednesday as security forces struggled to contain angry crowds demanding the resignation of autocratic President Aleksandar Vucic.

The Trump administration has formally notified the United Nations of its withdrawal from the World Health Organization, although the pullout won’t take effect until next year, meaning it could be rescinded under a new administration or if circumstances change.

The latest in a series of unexplained blasts at sensitive sites in Iran, a further explosion reportedly killed two people and injured three at a factory in Tehran early Tuesday morning, the Times of Israel (ToI) reports. A local governor stated the blast was caused by human error but some have suggested it may be part of sustained sabotage campaign.

North Korea has warned Washington that it has “no intention” of meeting with the United States to discuss issues such as stalled nuclear diplomacy.

As Hong Kong sees life change rapidly under a new security law, protesters have quickly learned that actions that weren’t worthy of police attention a little more than a week ago could now warrant an arrest, DNA sample, and search of their home — in addition to the possibility of jail time.

A fire last week at the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran caused significant damage, an Iranian nuclear official said on July 5 in a new assessment of the incident, adding that it could slow down the development and production of advanced centrifuges in the medium term.

A growing number of defectors from North Korea’s army are telling of conditions of extreme deprivation suffered by those enlisted, the Wall Street Journal reports. One defector called Mr. Roh told the WSJ: “It was lawless there, if you had money, you could basically get away with anything.”

The European Union’s executive has apologized after its leader threw her support behind the victorious ruling conservative party in Croatia’s parliamentary elections. Ursula von der Leyen, the German president of the European Commission, appeared with other center-right politicians in a promotional video clip posted by the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party.