Grieving relatives of those who died in Taiwan’s worst rail disaster in decades held prayers at the crash site yesterday as salvage crews worked to remove the tangled mass of wrecked carriages.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee took swipes at each other at simultaneous election rallies in Bengal yesterday as the election campaign for the state assembly heats up a notch further ahead of third-phase of voting in the restive state.

US First Lady Jill Biden pranked reporters and staff flying back from a trip with her on Thursday, disguising herself as a flight attendant to pass out ice cream bars for April Fool’s.

Officials from Tehran and Washington will travel to Vienna next week as part of efforts to revive the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and global powers, although they will not hold direct talks, diplomats said yesterday.

At least 51 people were killed in Taiwan yesterday when a packed train collided with a vehicle on the tracks and then derailed inside a tunnel, in the island’s worst railway accident in decades.

A prominent Muslim organisation in India has released new guidelines, asking the community to shun dowries and extravagant marriages after a woman recently died by suicide due to “dowry harassment”.

Eleven people have died from drinking bootleg alcohol in India’s poorest state Bihar, officials said yesterday, with their families blaming authorities for their alleged failure to crack down on illegal liquor makers.

Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga will hold face-to-face talks with Joe Biden in Washington on April 16, as the first foreign leader hosted by the US president, the Japanese government said yesterday.

Myanmar has refused to accept a 14-year-old Rohingya girl deported by India, an Indian media report said, as the United Nations refugee agency and rights groups criticised New Delhi for the move.

About 15 million doses of the single-shot coronavirus vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson were ruined in a factory error in the United States, The New York Times reported.

A 14-year-old Rohingya girl has been taken to a border town in northeastern India for deportation to Myanmar, police officials said yesterday, as the UN refugee agency and rights groups pressed New Delhi to halt the process.

US President Joe Biden’s administration said Wednesday that Israel’s control of the West Bank is indeed “occupation,” clarifying its stance after the release of a report that seemed to downplay the term, adopting language used by Donald Trump’s government.

Countries have gone back to reimposing lockdowns to curb the spread of coronavirus as cases and deaths surge around the world owing to the new strains of virus.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday hit back at West Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress criticism of his visit to temples in Satkhira and Orakandi in Bangladesh trip as “unethical and violative” of the election model code of conduct and defended his trips to the shrines.

Myanmar’s deposed leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has been charged with breaking a colonial-era official secrets law, her lawyer said yesterday, the most serious charge against the veteran opponent of military rule.

When Syria’s war forced Alaa al-Jaleel to close his cat sanctuary in Aleppo in 2015 and head north to the rebel stronghold of Idlib, he took around 100 animals with him and reopened it there.

Chinese furniture maker Hong Jinshi first created a couple of pint-sized statues of former US president Donald Trump meditating in a Buddhist pose as a fun project for himself last year.

The company at the center of quality problems that led Johnson & Johnson to discard an unknown amount of its coronavirus vaccine has a string of citations from US health officials for quality control problems.

A Hong Kong court found seven prominent democrats guilty of unauthorised assembly, including barrister Martin Lee and media tycoon Jimmy Lai, the latest blow to the city’s beleaguered democracy movement.

French President Emmanuel Macron has ordered France into its third national lockdown and said schools would close for three weeks as he sought to push back a third wave of COVID-19 infections that threatens to overwhelm hospitals.