Hurricane Laura slammed into the southern US state of Louisiana yesterday and the monster category 4 storm prompted warnings of “unsurvivable” ocean surges and evacuation orders for hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents.

Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) Chief Executive Jeff Bezos has unseated fellow tech billionaire Bill Gates as the richest person in the world, profiting from the e-commerce company’s meteoric stock rise to reach a fortune of $90.6 billion, Forbes reports.

For at least 463 million children whose schools closed due to Covid-19, “there was no such thing as remote learning”, the head of the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) said today.

New Zealand mosque gunman Brenton Tarrant was sentenced to life in prison without parole Thursday for the massacre of 51 Muslim worshippers, with a judge calling him "wicked" and "inhuman".

First lady Melania Trump offered sympathy for victims of the coronavirus pandemic and a plea for racial harmony in a Republican convention speech on Tuesday aimed directly at the women voters who have abandoned US President Donald Trump.

United Nations has blocked a controversial bid by the US to reimpose international sanctions on Iran, with the Security Council saying it could not proceed with the disputed move.

European Union nations, Britain and EU partners have agreed on a blueprint for a Covid-19 vaccination plan envisaging inoculation of at least 40% of their populations, a step that may set back the World Health Organisation’s own vaccine blueprint.

Two prominent Hong Kong opposition lawmakers were among more than a dozen people arrested yesterday in a police operation focused on last year’s huge protests, part of a widening crackdown against the city’s democracy camp.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday warned Turkey would make “no concessions” in the eastern Mediterranean and told Greece to avoid taking steps that could lead to its “ruin”.

A violent flash flood killed more than 70 people and destroyed hundreds of homes just north of Afghanistan’s capital yesterday, officials said.

Sri Lanka will adopt an “India first approach” as its new foreign policy plank and protect New Delhi’s strategic security interests, the country’s Foreign Secretary Jayanath Colombage has said, seeking to allay concerns amid China’s growing presence in the island nation.

India recorded more than 60,000 cases of Covid-19 for the eighth day in a row yesterday, as total cases crossed 3.2 million, data from the federal health ministry showed.

Three weeks after the catastrophic explosion at Beirut port, Lebanon is drifting towards even more trouble as its politicians fail to agree on a new government that can arrest a financial meltdown.

Iran agreed Wednesday to allow a UN watchdog the access it has requested to two alleged nuclear sites, as the head of the agency ended his first visit to Tehran.

President Donald Trump could take executive action to avoid massive layoffs at US airlines, while an impasse on a new coronavirus stimulus package continues in Congress, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows says.

There is likely only a slim possibility of people being reinfected with Covid-19, the UN health agency World Health Organization said yesterday, following reports in Hong Kong that a man had contracted new coronavirus for a second time after an interval of more than four months.

A third night of street protests over the police shooting of a Black man erupted into gun violence late Tuesday and early Wednesday in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two people and wounding one, police said.

The father of slain three-year-old Mucaad Ibrahim, the youngest victim in the New Zealand mosque shootings, told the white supremacist who gunned down his son that “true justice” awaited him in the next life and it would be more severe than prison.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warns that distributing a Covid-19 vaccine under special emergency use guidelines before it has been proved safe and effective in large trials is a bad idea that could have a chilling effect on the testing of other vaccines.

Families of victims gunned down at two New Zealand mosques urged a judge to impose the toughest possible sentence, life without parole, on the gunman as he showed no remorse and appeared to smirk at one survivor during a sentencing hearing yesterday.