Puerto Rico’s governor raised the US territory’s official death toll from Hurricane Maria from 64 to 2,975 on Tuesday after an independent study found the number of people who succumbed in the desperate, sweltering aftermath had been severely undercounted. The new estimate of nearly 3,000 dead in the six months after Maria devastated the island in…
Wondering why there aren’t more Indian-made video games? In a way, you’ve been playing them for years without realising it. Faced by a massive rise in AAA development budgets since the early noughties, international publishers like EA typically outsource work to skilled but lower-wage workers in less affluent regions. Many of India’s biggest studios derive…
The bodies of a couple and their nine-year-old daughter were pulled from the twisted rubble of the collapsed Genoa bridge, officially drawing a line under the search and rescue mission. The last bodies were pulled from the wreckage as a report claims experts were aware the bridge was deteriorating. Firefighters discovered the last remaining missing…
Brussels will look on the results of the Swedish election and breathe a sigh of relief. It could have been much, much worse. By the time the smoke clears, the fonctionnaires of the EU will have realised that they don’t have the political disaster on their hands that some may have feared. The far right…
Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president, is coming under withering attack for nominations to some of the senior positions in his administration after it was revealed that five of the names put forward have skeletons in their closets. Confirmation hearings are taking place before the National Assembly after Mr Moon decided to shuffle his cabinet…
China’s transport ministry on Sunday slammed Didi Chuxing’s safety lapses as the ride-hailing giant said it would suspend its Hitch service after the rape and murder of a passenger, the second such killing this year. A 20-year-old female passenger was raped and killed by her driver on Friday in the eastern city of Wenzhou, barely three months…
A 95-year-old British veteran of the Second World War broke his own record on Saturday as the world’s oldest scuba diver after taking the plunge to explore a shipwreck off Cyprus. Ray Woolley, who turned 95 on August 28, already holds the record as the oldest active male scuba diver. On Saturday he dived for 44 minutes at a depth of…
Skyrim’s dirty little secret is that it isn’t that large. Oh, it remains fairly gigantic by the standards of other virtual landscapes, even next to its youthful imitator and usurper, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. But set against what it pretends to be – a kingdom stretching from arctic wastes to the…
China is to build its first military base in Afghanistan for hundreds of troops carrying out counter-terrorism training missions across the border from its western Xinjiang region, according to reports. The base will be only the second overseas site for the increasingly active Chinese military, coming a year after a base was opened in Djibouti…
An Egyptian court handed a five-year jail sentence to award-winning photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid on Saturday and confirmed death sentences against 75 people in one of the largest mass trials since the 2011 uprising. Abu Zeid, widely known as Shawkan, who earlier this year received UNESCO’s World Freedom Prize, is however expected to walk free…