Beijing

UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace admitted to being "pretty blunt about [the troop withdrawal] publicly… a rare thing when it comes to United States decisions." True to his confession of a lack of diplomacy, he added: "I think the [peace] deal that was done in Doha was a rotten deal. It effectively told a Taliban that wasn't winning that they were winning."

Populist President Milos Zeman told his favourite pro-Russian disinformation website Parlamentni listy that NATO's legitimacy has been called in question due to its failure in the Central Asian country. Claiming that NATO has left a void that will be filled by terrorism, Zeman also said Czechia should now focus its budget on national defence and no longer "waste money" on the alliance.

China is looking to fill political and security void in the region after the US troops and the West left Afghanistan, for which it had long been prepared, writes Jessica Taneja.

Jessica Taneja is a journalist based in Delhi. 

China on Aug. 13 rejected the World Health Organization's calls for a renewed probe into the origins of COVID-19, saying it supported "scientific" over "political" efforts to find out how the virus started.

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Team Romania to the Tokyo Paralympic Games (24 August - 5 September) will be made up of 7 athletes, who will compete in table tennis, judo, athletics, cycling and archery, their goal being to win three medals, the vice-president of the National Paralympic Committee, Ciprian Anton, told AGERPRES.

China Telecom could raise more than $8 billion in a Shanghai initial public offering that would be the biggest this year, months after it was delisted in the United States amid Washington's stand-off with Beijing.

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The number of COVID-19 infections recorded worldwide passed 200 million on Aug. 5, an AFP count showed, as China pledged to provide two billion vaccine doses this year to combat surging infections caused by the Delta variant.

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Bulgaria's 21-year-old Ivet Goranova has won the gold medal at the Olympic Karate in Tokyo. Thus, she won the first Olympic gold for Bulgaria since Beijing 2008 when Bulgarian rower Rumyana Neykova triumphed with the gold.   Ivet Goranova defeated Anzhelika Terliuga of Ukraine with 5:1 in the final of the women's 55-kilogram division.

Chinese officials have ordered all 11 million residents of Wuhan to be tested for Covid-19, after new cases emerged in the city for the first time in more than a year.

On Tuesday the national health commission reported eight cases in Wuhan, the city where Covid-19 was first detected in late 2019, before spreading around the world.

Authorities in Wuhan on Aug. 3 said they would test its entire population for COVID-19 after the central Chinese city where the coronavirus emerged reported its first local infections in more than a year.

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