An Algerian appeals court on Tuesday sentenced a key figure in the country's anti-government protest movement to a year in prison, a lawyer and a rights group said.
Karim Tabbou has played a leading role in the mass protests that have rocked the North African country for more than a year.
On March 11 he was handed six months in prison and an additional six-month suspended sentence for "undermining national unity".
The Algerian League for the Defence of Human Rights (LADDH) said at the time he would be released on March 26 for time served since he was detained in September.
But on Tuesday morning, his lawyers were summoned to an unscheduled court hearing.
"The judge didn't want to listen, and withdrew to deliberate," defence lawyer Amine Sidhom told AFP.
"When he got out, he announced a sentence of a year in prison." Said Salhi, vice-president of LADDH, told AFP he was "shocked".
"We are stunned by what is happening, not only to Karim Tabbou but to the Algerian justice system. It's ...

Algerian protest figure sentenced to year in prison

PTI Automatic

Italy on Tuesday received more reassuring evidence that its coronavirus infection rate was slowing thanks to a painful lockdown that other nations are starting to apply at great economic cost.
Health officials across the ravaged Mediterranean country are poring over every new piece of data to see whether two weeks of bans and closures have made a dent in the crisis.
The harshest restrictions are theoretically due to expire on Wednesday evening -- although the government is all but certain to extend them in some form for weeks or even months.
Italy's 743 new deaths broke two days of successive declines that had taken the number down to 601 on Monday.
It set a world record of 793 fatalities on Saturday.
But officially registered new infections rose just eight percent -- the same as Monday and the lowest level since Italy registered its first death on February 21.
It had been running at as high as 50 percent at the start of March.
"The measures we took two weeks ago are starting to have .

Italy new virus infections drop to lowest point in crisis

Boeing has begun talks with China over new plane orders as the country emerges from the economic shutdown caused by the coronavirus, Boeing Chief Executive David Calhoun said Tuesday.
"Already China's returning," Calhoun said in an interview on CNBC that focused on Boeing's efforts to win $60 billion in federal government support for the US aerospace industry to help with the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
China is "talking to us about their orders and they are talking to us about future orders," Calhoun said, adding that he expects for the market to "slowly steadily recover" once Western economies get through the coronavirus.
Boeing's efforts to win the massive public package have been strongly endorsed by US President Donald Trump and others, but some lawmakers want to impose restrictions, such as outlawing on stock buybacks on companies that accept federal support.
And Boeing still faces skepticism on Capitol Hill over its development of the 737 MAX plane, which has ..

Boeing CEO sees fresh demand in China for planes

Europe's medicines agency Tuesday warned consumers not buy any online medication claiming to be a treatment for COVID-19, saying doing so could cause serious harm.
The Amsterdam-based European Medicines Agency advised online buyers only to use registered online pharmacies when buying medicines.
"The EMA is urging the general public not to buy medicines from unauthorised websites and other vendors aiming to exploit fears and concerns during the ongoing pandemic of the coronavirus disease," it said in a statement.
"Falsified medicines can cause serious harm... and may contain the wrong or no active ingredient or even harmful substances that should not be in medicines," the EMA said.
"The public is reminded that there are currently no treatments authorised for COVID-19," the agency pointed out, adding "medicines are available for treating symptoms such as fever in line with advice from your doctor or pharmacist.

Beware fake COVID-19 cyber cures, warns EU medicines agency

While most of Europe is firmly locked down in a bid to curb the spread of COVID-19, Sweden is taking a softer line, keeping primary schools, restaurants and bars open and even encouraging people to go outside for a nip of air.
This stands in stark contrast to the urgent tone elsewhere and has sparked heated debate whether Sweden is really doing the right thing.
"We cannot allow the human desperation in Wuhan and Bergamo to be repeated in Sweden. That would be a gamble that violates society's most fundamental principle: that every person has an inherent value," the editor-in-chief of Sweden's biggest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, wrote on Sunday, calling for either tougher measures or more widespread coronavirus testing.
Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, in a televised speech on Sunday, urged people to "take responsibility" and follow the government's recommendations.
Those include working from home if you can, staying home if you feel sick, practice social distancing, and stay home if you ...

Lockdown can wait: Sweden goes its own way

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg said Tuesday that it was "extremely likely" that she had contracted the new coronavirus, after experiencing several symptoms following a trip to central Europe.
"Around ten days ago I started feeling some symptoms... I was feeling tired, had shivers, a sore throat and coughed," the teenage climate champion said in an Instagram post.
Thunberg said the symptoms emerged after she returned from a trip around central Europe, and that she and her father had isolated themselves as a precaution.
As of Tuesday, Sweden had reported 2,272 confirmed cases, but only those with severe symptoms in need of hospital care and staff working with at risk groups are tested.
Therefore, Thunberg said she had not been tested, but said "it's extremely likely" that she had it, "given the combined symptoms and circumstances."
The 17-year-old also said she had now "basically recovered," but cautioned others, saying she "almost didn't feel ill."
She warned that others, ...

Greta Thunberg says she 'likely' had new coronavirus

The coronavirus has killed another 240 people in France, the top French health official said on Tuesday, bringing the death toll in the country from the pandemic to 1,100.
Jerome Salomon told reporters that 22,300 people had tested positive for the virus in France, with a total of 10,176 hospitalised of whom 2,516 people are in intensive care.
Officials believe that the published number of those infected largely underestimates the real figure, as only those showing severe symptoms are usually tested.
Salomon also emphasised that the death toll of 1,100 includes only those recorded to have died of the coronavirus in hospitals and not those who pass away in old people's homes.
He said that the hospital deaths were only a part of the total toll and vowed to give data on mortality in old people's homes in the next days.

France coronavirus death toll jumps 240 to 1,100: official

Eight members of a neo-Nazi cell were jailed Tuesday after a German court found them guilty of forming a "terrorist organisation" that was planning a campaign of violence.
The higher regional court in Dresden sentenced the accused, aged between 22 and 32, to prison terms ranging from two years and three months to five and a half years for the ringleader of the group that called itself "Revolution Chemnitz".
The trial, which lasted six months, was closely watched in Germany where concern has been growing over an increasingly militant far-right scene.
A racist gunman shot dead nine people at a shisha bar and a cafe in the western city of Hanau last month, stunning the country and prompting Chancellor Angela Merkel to urge Germans to resist the "poison" of xenophobia and hatred.
The eight jailed on Tuesday were part of the hooligan, neo-Nazi and skinhead scene in and around the city of Chemnitz in Saxony state, in Germany's former communist East.
They banded together in an online chat ...

Jail terms for neo-Nazi 'terror group' in Germany

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo warned Tuesday of "troubling and astronomical numbers" in the rate of coronavirus infections in New York, saying they were doubling every three days.
Cuomo said the virus could now peak in one of the country's most populous states in as few as two weeks, with some 40,000 people needing intensive care -- numbers that could severely stress under-equipped hospitals that currently have only 3,000 intensive care unit beds.
"We haven't flattened the curve and the curve is actually increasing," he told reporters at Manhattan's Javits Center, where the Army Corps of Engineers is constructing an emergency hospital in the large space that normally hosts conventions.
"We are not slowing it. And it is accelerating on its own," he said.
"One of the forecasters said we were looking at a freight train coming across the country. We're now looking at a bullet train." Cuomo said New York state had surpassed 25,000 known cases of COVID-19, with 14,900 in densely populated .

NY governor sounds alarm over 'astronomical' coronavirus numbers

Spain's armed forces on Tuesday asked NATO for humanitarian assistance to fight the novel coronavirus as the national death toll touched 2,700 and infections soared towards 40,000.
With the pandemic spreading across the world, Spain has been one of the worst-hit countries, logging the third highest number of deaths with the latest toll standing at 2,696 after another 514 people died over the past 24 hours.
Despite an unprecedented lockdown imposed on March 14, both deaths and infections have continued to mount, with the Spanish army called in to join efforts to curb its spread.
With authorities stepping up testing, the number of people diagnosed with COVID-19 rose by nearly 20 percent to 39,673, the health ministry said.
Health authorities said it would become clear whether the lockdown was having the desired effect.
"This is a very hard week because we're in the first stages of overcoming the virus, a phase in which we are approaching the peak of the epidemic," Health Minister ...

Spain seeks NATO help as virus death toll touches 2,700

The British government said Tuesday it will open a 4,000-bed field hospital at a London exhibition centre as part of its plans to treat coronavirus cases.
The move comes after Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday ordered the country into lockdown to tackle the spread of the outbreak, which has seen 422 deaths and 8,077 cases in Britain.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock told a news conference the temporary hospital, to be known as the NHS Nightingale Hospital, would open at the ExCeL centre in east London with two wards each with a capacity for 2,000 people.
"With the help of the military and NHS clinicians, we will make sure we have the capacity we need so everyone can get the support they need," he said.
In his televised address on Monday, Johnson called for people to "stay at home" to prevent close-contact transmission of the virus and ease pressure on the state-run National Health Service.
Non-essential shops and services were told to shut, with unprecedented peacetime restrictions .

UK to open 4,000-bed virus field hospital in London

Cameroon's government on Tuesday announced the country's first death due to coronavirus, saying the victim had returned from Italy and was already infected on his arrival.
"Unfortunately we have registered our first death due to COVID-19," Health Minister Malachie Manaouda said on Twitter.
The official count of coronavirus cases in the Central African nation has risen to 66. But the figures are restricted by the limited laboratory capacity for testing.  Throughout Africa more than 2,000 coronavirus cases had been declared at 1700 GMT Tuesday, according to an AFP tall.
The Cameroon government has already taken measures to stem the spread of the virus, closing schools, restaurants and bars but has not so far sought to confine residents to their homes.
Italy is the worst hit country with over 6,000 deaths attributed to coronavirus.

First Coronavirus death in Cameroon

Several people have been killed in southern Guinea, according to local officials, in an outbreak of violence after the country's contested constitutional referendum.
The number killed in Nzerekore, the West African state's second-largest city, which borders Liberia, is unclear and the circumstances are sketchy.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres condemned the violence in Guinea and called on all sides to immediately show restraint, his spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
The local government has said that three people were killed in unrest there, while a local doctor and the political opposition cited a figure of 15.
AFP was unable to independently confirm the figures.
City residents said that clashes have taken place in the city since Sunday -- the day of the referendum on changing the constitution.
Guinea's government has argued that a new constitution is needed to enshrine gender equality in the impoverished former French colony.
But critics fear the real motive is to allow ...

Several dead in unrest in southern Guinea

World stock markets rallied strongly Tuesday after the US Federal Reserve launched an unprecedented bond-buying plan, the latest salvo in a global counter-attack against the economic fallout from the coronavirus outbreak.
AxiCorp's Stephen Innes called the Fed's move "the most significant monetary experiment in the history of financial markets".
Hopes that the US government is close to unleashing its own financial fireworks and G7 promises for massive help also helped push equities higher.
On Wall Street, the DJIA had gained close to 10 percent by the late New York morning, a spectacular recovery from Monday's rout, mirrored in Europe where Frankfurt's Dax index managed a double-digit rise by the close.
"Political fighting in the US has prevented a stimulus scheme from being revealed earlier, but dealers are optimistic nonetheless," said CMC Markets UK analyst David Madden.
US senators remain gridlocked, with Democrats on Monday again blocking a nearly $2 trillion rescue package for ..

Global stock markets surge on Fed boost

A senior Iranian official Tuesday ruled out "foreign" help on the ground to deal with the coronavirus epidemic after an offer from a France-based medical charity, as the country's death toll from the illness neared 2,000.
"Due to Iran's national mobilisation against the virus and the full use of the medical capacity of the armed forces, it is not necessary for now for hospital beds to be set up by foreign forces, and their presence is ruled out," Alireza Vahabzadeh, advisor to Iran's health minister, said on Twitter.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) had said Sunday that it planned to send a nine-member team and equipment to set up a 50-bed hospital, stirring opposition from ultra-conservative circles in the Islamic republic who charged that MSF staff would serve as "spies".
Health ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour earlier said a record 1,762 new cases have been confirmed in Iran over the past 24 hours and 24,811 people are now known to have been infected with the new coronavirus.
He .

Iran rejects 'foreign' help as virus death toll nears 2,000

Italy's daily COVID-19 death toll shot back up Tuesday, but more evidence emerged that the coronavirus infection rate is slowing thanks to a painful national lockdown.
Health officials across the ravaged Mediterranean country are poring over every new piece of data to see whether two weeks of bans and closures have made a dent in the crisis.
The harshest restrictions are theoretically due to expire on Wednesday evening -- although the government is all but certain to extend them in some form for weeks or even months.
Italy's 743 new deaths broke two days of successive declines that had taken the number down to 601 on Monday.
It set a world record of 793 fatalities on Saturday.
But the rate of officially registered new infections was just eight percent -- the same as Monday and the lowest level since Italy registered its first death on February 21.
It had been as high as 50 percent at the start of March.
"The measures we took two weeks ago are starting to have an effect," civil ...

Italy's virus toll shoots back up, but medics see hope

African nations  have ordered curfews and lockdowns in response to the growing coronavirus epidemic, raising fears of turmoil for low-income workers and cash-strapped governments across the continent.
Cases have risen across the world's poorest continent over the past week to a total of 2,225 according to an AFP tally, prompting countries to enact strict counter measures.
South Africa, the continent's most developed economy -- which at 554 cases has Africa's largest outbreak -- on Monday announced a nationwide lockdown.
"Without decisive action, the number of people infected will rapidly increase... to hundreds of thousands," South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said at the time.
There are fears that weak health infrastructure in Africa will leave the continent particularly exposed to an outbreak on the scale of virus-stricken Europe.  Other countries are following suit with similar measures. More are expected to be announced in the coming days.
On Monday, Senegal and Ivory Coast ..

Economic fears as Africa escalates coronavirus response

Italy has the world's largest outbreak of the coronavirus after China.

Italy, coronavirus

Italy reported a sharp rise in its coronavirus death toll Tuesday, with 743 more victims, breaking a two-day trend that had fuelled hopes the epidemic may be on the wane.

Italy records 743 coronavirus deaths, surging to break two-day trend

Press Trust of India

President Donald Trump on Tuesday defended his push to relax the coronavirus lockdown in the United States, warning that the measures could "destroy" the country.
"A lot of people agree with me. Our country -- it's not built to shut down," he said on Fox News. "You can destroy a country this way by closing it down."
Trump says that starting next week he will "assess" whether to lift social distancing and quarantine measures in order to get the hobbled economy back on track.
"We can't lose a Boeing, we can't lose some of these companies," he said. "If we lose those companies we're talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs, millions of jobs.

Trump warns coronavirus shutdown could 'destroy a country'

Aston Villa goalkeeper Pepe Reina has said he believes he has been suffering from the new coronavirus.
Reina, who joined Villa on loan from AC Milan in January, was unable to take a test but says doctors considered his symptoms to be consistent with COVID-19.
"They don't give you a test here unless you're feeling really ill," Reina told Spanish radio station Cope on Tuesday.
"I spoke with doctors and the symptoms I had were consistent with this (the virus) but there was no official confirmation.
"It was a different sort of week as I had to take precautions to avoid infecting those living with me."
Reina, who has 36 caps for Spain and won the World Cup with his country in 2010, said his concern was more for people living in difficult conditions.
"We are very privileged people," said the former Liverpool goalkeeper. "We have a big house with a garden.
"I think of the people who live in a 70-metres-squared apartment with two children. For me they are the people showing a lot of strength.

Aston Villa goalkeeper Reina says he showed symptoms of coronavirus

The coronavirus pandemic could spell "apocalypse" in the airline industry without urgent government aid, the global aviation association said Tuesday, warning that carriers could lose more than $250 billion in revenues this year alone.
The International Air Transport Association said its latest analysis showed that annual passenger revenues will fall by $252 billion if severe travel restrictions remain in place for three months.
That would mark a 44-percent drop compared to 2019 revenues, and is more than double the $113 billion drop previously predicted by IATA before countries around the world began introducing sweeping travel restrictions.
"It is the deepest crisis we ever had in our industry," IATA chief Alexandre de Juniac told reporters in a virtual briefing, calling on governments to quickly step up and provide desperately needed liquidity.
"Airlines are fighting for survival in every corner of the world," he said in a statement, pointing out that "travel restrictions and ...

AFP

AFP

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