Massive floods in central China caused by record-breaking rainfall have left at least 12 people dead and more than 100,000 evacuated from their homes, the media reported. ....

At least 35 people were killed and 66 others wounded in a bomb explosion in a marketplace in eastern Baghdad on Monday, a source with the Iraqi interior ministry said. ....

The daughter of Najibullah Alikhil, the Afghan envoy to Pakistan, was abducted and tortured on her way home in Islamabad, Afghanistans Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Saturday. ....

A team of researchers has produced a stem cell model that demonstrates a potential route of entry of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, into the human brain. ....

Afghan security forces repelled an attack by the Taliban on Shiberghan city, capital of Jawzjan province, killing and injuring dozens of militants, a police officer said. ....

Israeli forces this week confiscated the homes of 84 Palestinians in Ramallah Governorate and a structure accommodating a family of eight in the northern Jordan Valley, the UN humanitarians said. ....

The Afghanistan Embassy in Australia has released a series of videos which appear to show appalling atrocities committed by the Taliban as the militant group intensifies its campaign to take control of the country, ABC reported. ....

The numbers of Covid-19 cases are surging in more than half of US states and territories, with 7-day average of daily new cases up over 65 per cent from the week before, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). ....

US researchers have successfully developed a "speech neuroprosthesis" that has enabled a man with severe paralysis to communicate in sentences, translating signals from his brain to the vocal tract directly into words that appear as text on a screen. ....

The world is now in the early stages of a third wave, amid rising cases of Covid's Delta variant, World Health Organisation Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said. ....