World

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, Professor Gregory Gray at Duke University's Global Health Institute tasked a graduate student at his lab with developing a pan-species coronavirus test in order to help prevent the next catastrophe.

The idea was to deploy the tool, once its accuracy was validated, to look back at test samples from human patients in order to search for signs of coronaviruses that might have begun to cross over from animals.

A pair of rare Persian leopards sighted in Pakistan for the first time last year have been filmed and photographed in the wild, officials said Friday.

Sharifuddin Baloch, a senior conservation official in Balochistan province, said the pair were first spotted by rangers in the Hazarganji Wildlife Park six months ago.

Over the past five decades, the Arctic has warmed three times faster than the world as a whole, leading to rapid and widespread melting of ice and other far-reaching consequences that are important not only to local communities and ecosystems but to the fate of life on planet Earth.

The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) issued that warning on Thursday in a new report (pdf) that summarizes the latest findings on Arctic change and projections of future transformations under different climate scenarios. The publication of AMAP's report coincides with this week's meeting of the Arctic Council in Reykjavík, Iceland, which brings together policymakers from countries bordering the region.

Brazil has spent the past three weeks immersed in wall-to-wall coverage of a Senate inquiry into why Covid-19 exploded so horribly in the country -- a parade of damning, sometimes comical testimony likely to damage President Jair Bolsonaro.

The letters "CPI" -- for parliamentary investigative commission -- have been splashed across the front pages of Brazil's newspapers almost daily, while news channels carry live broadcasts of the lengthy hours of hearings.

Mountaineer Akash Neggi is fully prepared to take on the world's highest mountain -- after spending several weeks sleeping in a tent in his living room in New Jersey.

As Nepal battles Covid-19, a growing number of climbers are using oxygen-deprivation tents ahead of their expeditions to reduce exposure to the coronavirus by cutting down the length of their Himalayan adventure.

In a new documentary series set for release Friday Prince Harry is once again emphasizing that his family turned a blind eye to the struggles of his wife Meghan Markle, saying he will "never be bullied into silence."

The series comes out a day after the release of an independent inquiry in Britain that found that a BBC journalist used falsified documents to land a sensational 1995 sit-down with Lady Diana, the mother of Harry and his elder brother William, in which she detailed her troubled marriage to Prince Charles.

In an op-ed for CNN this Thursday, Peter Bergen contends that Jared Kushner's attempts to normalize relations between Israel and Arab states was "predicated by a fantasy," especially evidenced by the latest round of fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip.

The fantasy, according to Bergen was the notion "that peace would be achieved by negotiating without the Palestinians and instead by creating warmer relations between the Arab states and Israel. In Kushner's analysis, the road to peace in Israel ran not through Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank, but through the United Arab Emirates."

Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said Thursday he successfully eased out of his hunger strike and has discovered the recipe for being "happy" in prison.

Navalny, President Vladimir Putin's best known domestic critic, is serving two-and-a-half years in a penal colony outside Moscow on old fraud charges he says are politically motivated.