South African public healthcare workers dispersed into the buzzing streets of Johannesburg's Yeoville neighbourhood on Friday as Africa's worst virus-hit country rolled out mass door-to-door testing for COVID-19. Armed with screening questionnaires and testing kits, medics and...

Six nights a week, Shelley Howard could normally be found at a restaurant or bar in the famous Rush Street area of Chicago, dining out or having a drink with friends. A naturally social person, Howard, 73, regularly posted online pictures from his nights out, often showing him giving...

A delicate remote control operation to remove a tracking collar from a tiger on an epic 13-month trek through India has been carried out to avoid the device choking the animal. The feline explorer, named Walker for the roughly 3,000 kilometres (1,800 miles) of terrain it covered, has...

Poaching and habitat loss have decimated Indonesia's orangutan population, but now coronavirus has emerged as another potential deadly threat to the critically endangered species. While there have been no confirmed cases of transmission from humans to the fuzzy-haired apes, they share...

Before New Zealand began its four-week lockdown to fight the coronavirus, a reporter asked Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern what would happen if an earthquake struck while everybody was sequestered in their homes. "Why on earth would your mind go there?" Ardern quipped back. Every...

It would be a “mistake” for the United States to stop masks badly needed by health care professionals from coming into Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday. Trudeau was reacting to the Trump administration order to 3M to stop exporting the essential supplies to Canada. He...

The WHO and IMF chiefs insisted Friday that saving lives was a "prerequisite" to saving livelihoods in the coronavirus pandemic -- a crisis they called "one of humanity's darkest hours". World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and International Monetary Fund...

New York suffered its deadliest single day from the novel coronavirus, with 562 additional deaths in the last 24 hours for a total of 2,935 fatalities, by far the most of any U.S. state, Governor Andrew Cuomo said Friday. Cuomo warned that people were "going to die in the near term" due to...

The new coronavirus might spread through the air via normal breathing and speaking, a top US scientist said Friday as the government was poised to recommend the use of face masks for everyone. Anthony Fauci, head of infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health, told Fox News the...

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Friday renewed his call for a global ceasefire, urging all parties to conflict to lay down arms and allow war-torn nations to combat the coronavirus pandemic. "The worst is yet to come," Guterres said, referring to countries beset with fighting like...

President Jair Bolsonaro said on Friday that Brazilian society will not be able to stand two or three months of shutdowns to fight the new coronavirus, denouncing social-distancing measures enforced by states and municipalities across the country. “You know my stance. It will bring massive...

A record-long streak of U.S. job growth ended suddenly in March after nearly a decade as employers cut 701,000 jobs because of the viral outbreak that's all but shut down the U.S. economy. The unemployment rate jumped to 4.4 percent from a 50-year low of 3.5 percent. The monthly job loss...

Mosques were allowed to remain open Friday in Pakistan, when Muslims gather for weekly prayers, even as the coronavirus pandemic spread and much of the country had shut down. Prime Minister Imran Khan is relying on restricting the size of congregations attending mosques and advice to stay...

Europe's stock markets slid in early deals Friday as global novel coronavirus infections topped one million and the death toll surpassed 50,000. In initial deals, London's benchmark FTSE 100 index of major blue-chip firms erased 1.3 percent to 5,410.95 points compared with Thursday's...

The U.N. General Assembly approved Thursday a resolution calling for "international cooperation" and "multilateralism" in the fight against COVID-19, in the first text to come out of the international body since the outbreak began. The resolution, approved by consensus, also stresses "the...

 At a tense cabinet meeting on Saturday in the Brazilian president’s official residence, Jair Bolsonaro found himself isolated. The far-right leader convened the emergency meeting in Brasilia’s modernist Alvarado Palace to resolve a dispute with Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta,...

Twitter took down thousands of accounts linked to Egypt, Honduras, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Serbia on Thursday for either taking directions from the governments or promoting pro-government content. Twitter and other social media companies are under pressure to clean up misinformation and...

Australia's science agency announced on Thursday it has begun trials on ferrets to produce a vaccine against the novel coronavirus.  A statement released by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) -- the country's national science agency -- said that...

The U.S. Democratic Party on Thursday postponed its presidential nominating convention by a month until August, citing the coronavirus health crisis which has upended life in the country. The delay is the latest sign the coronavirus pandemic is having a profound impact on the presidential...

Google on Thursday said it is pumping $6.5 million into fact-checkers and nonprofits as it ramps up its the battle against coronavirus misinformation. Fact-checking organizations, which often operate on relatively small budgets, are seeing a surge in demand for their work as mistaken or...