Twenty-six people including a seven-year-old girl were killed after the bus they were travelling in crashed with an autorickshaw and fell into a well in western India, officials said yesterday.

Indian police have launched a sedition investigation against a primary school over a play that allegedly criticised a contentious citizenship law, officials said yesterday.

Most major railway stations in India will use facial recognition to fight crime by the end of 2020, a senior official said, in a move that digital rights campaigners on Tuesday warned could breach people’s privacy in the absence of stringent laws.

India is now capable of making Pakistan “bite the dust” in less than 10 days in any new war with its arch-rival, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said.

Indian cabinet yesterday approved moves to ease abortion laws, enabling rape survivors and other vulnerable women to terminate pregnancies up to 24 weeks after inception.

Russia and China are working to develop a coronavirus vaccine and Beijing has handed over the genome of the virus to Moscow, a Russian diplomatic mission in China said yesterday.

Japanese authorities say a man with no recent travel to China has contracted the novel strain of coronavirus -- apparently after driving tourists visiting from Wuhan, where a deadly outbreak began.

The United States and other nations race to get their citizens out of the locked-down Chinese city at ground-zero of a virus epidemic, as the death toll surges to 106 and the number of confirmed infections doubled to over 4,500.

Indian enforcement agencies should be able to break end-to-end encryption to hunt down distributors of child pornography online, a parliamentary panel has urged as the south Asian nation looks to regulate social media.

The rapid spread of a deadly virus in China caused growing global alarm yesterday, with Germany advising citizens to avoid the country, Mongolia closing its border and other nations racing to evacuate citizens trapped at the epicentre of the health emergency.

The Taliban claims a US forces aircraft has crashed in eastern Afghanistan, hours after a plane went down into an area controlled largely by the insurgents.

The Chinese army deploys medical specialists to the epicentre of a spiralling viral outbreak that has killed 41 people and spread around the world, as millions spent their normally festive Lunar New Year holiday under lockdown.

The official death toll from the coronavirus in China jumps on Saturday to 41 from 26 a day earlier, as local media reported a doctor on the frontline of the battle to contain the virus in Wuhan city had died.

Schools in Singapore ask parents to declare overseas holiday plans as authorities screened travellers at air, land and sea checkpoints, to combat the spread of a deadly flu virus that has revived memories of the SARS pandemic in 2003.

Myanmar rejected accusations of “genocide” in a statement by the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarding yesterday’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling, the Mizzima reports.

China seals off millions more people near the epicentre of a virus outbreak, shutting down public transport in an eighth city in an unprecedented quarantine effort as the death toll climbed to 26.

One of India’s most famous universities is half-empty and some students who are on campus track each other on mobile devices to ensure people are safe, as violent clashes spill on to campuses that are seen as a hotbed of anti-government protests.

In one of the biggest surrenders by militants in Assam, altogether 644 cadres of eight insurgent outfits formally laid down their arms yesterday.

Nearly 100 Indian women politicians faced abuse, including rape and death threats, on social media during elections last year, with researchers yesterday raising concerns over rising online violence against women globally.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan called on Wednesday for the United Nations to help mediate between nuclear armed India and Pakistan over the disputed territory of Kashmir.