Category: Health

Published by Relaxnews Japan will trial small group tours with travellers from the US, Australia, Thailand and Singapore from this month, the government said on Tuesday, as it experiments with easing strict Covid border rules. The country’s borders have been closed to almost all arrivals since the spring of 2020 in response to the coronavirus pandemic.  Authorities only recently began allowing some students and business visitors to enter. There are no plans to lift border restrictions fully, as other countries have done, with the trial involving only tourists from the four countries who join package tours with prede…

Published by Reuters By Yew Lun Tian BEIJING (Reuters) – If Shanghai Communist Party chief Li Qiang has been politically bruised by the city’s struggle to tame a COVID-19 outbreak that has infuriated residents and caused severe economic damage, there is little sign of it. A close ally of President Xi Jinping for decades, Li has long been seen as destined for the powerful Politburo Standing Committee this year, tracking a well-worn path from Shanghai’s top spot that many analysts say appears safe despite the city’s COVID crisis. Outbreaks have derailed the careers of some local Chinese officials. But they

Published by Relaxnews Qantas has revealed plans for the world’s longest-duration commercial flight by the end of 2025, ferrying passengers between Sydney and London on Airbus A350s in just over 19 hours. Only a handful of airlines fly non-stop over such vast distances, which present a host of challenges including the capability of planes, commercial viability, and even the health of crew and passengers. Here are some of the longest-duration flights in the world today: Singapore to New York: 18 hrs 40 min Singapore Airlines Flight SQ24 to New York’s John F. Kennedy International airport is currently the longest comm…

Published by Reuters UK By Tom Westbrook and Alun John SINGAPORE/HONG KONG (Reuters) – Most Asian share markets advanced on Wednesday, following overnight gains on Wall Street, but trading was choppy as investors grappled with high U.S. yields and China’s cautious economic policy response to pandemic lockdowns. In a sign of the strange mood, the Japanese yen gained on the dollar, having fallen nearly every session in the past two weeks and repeatedly setting fresh 20-year lows, while spot gold fell 0.5% to its lowest in a week dragged down by higher yields. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside

Published by Global Voices Two packs of Lianhua Qingwen distributed by Hong Kong government. Photo by Oiwan Lam. While Shanghai residents are struggling with food shortages, they have an abundant supply of “Lianhua Qingwen,” a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) composed of extracts of a dozen herbs which has been widely used to treat COVID-19 in China, although the effectiveness of the medicine is not supported by reliable clinical data. As Shanghai is distributing the herbal capsules to the city’s 26 million residents, false claims that the drug can effectively protect against COVID-19 have flooded Chinese social media…

Published by Daily Financial Times Seafood lovers in Colombo are in for a special treat as the city’s newest seafood restaurant – Totally Hooked – opened its doors to the public recently. Conveniently-located at 173, W.A. Silva Mawatha, Colombo 06, Totally Hooked was ceremonially declared open amidst a gathering of guests. Totally Hooked is a seafood diner that is set to astound diners by taking them on a culinary journey that they will always remember and want to come back for more. The restaurant serves a wide array of delectable fast seafood prepared by their culinary wizards that diners can

Published by Reuters UK By Aditya Kalra, Aftab Ahmed and Anirban Sen NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Walmart’s Indian e-commerce company Flipkart has internally raised its IPO valuation target by around a third to $60-70 billion, and now plans a U.S. listing in 2023 instead of this year, two sources with direct knowledge of the plan told Reuters. Flipkart, which competes with Amazon.com Inc in India’s booming e-commerce space, had earlier set an IPO valuation goal of $50 billion, Reuters has reported. The main reason for waiting for the IPO is due to Flipkart’s internal plan to boost valuations further by

Published by Reuters (Reuters) – A fourth dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine lowered rates of COVID-19 among the elderly but the protection against infection appeared short-lived, a large study in Israel has found. The second booster’s protection against infection dwindled after four weeks, Israeli researchers showed in their study published on Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. Protection against severe illness did not wane during the six weeks after the dose but more follow-up study was needed to evaluate its longer-term protection, the researchers said. The study on 1.3 million people aged 60 and …