NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India expects to get about 266 million COVID-19 vaccine doses in August as a simpler licensing process has helped the government secure far more than earlier expected, the president of Prime Minister Narendra Modi s party said on Friday. Late last month, a senior government official told reporters that the government could only count on getting about 150 million doses in August. Since then, India s drug regulator has approved the Johnson & Johnson vaccine - though the company has not yet committed to a delivery schedule - and commercial production of Russia s Sputnik V in India could start too. Indian drugmaker Cadila Healthcare s ZyCoV-D could also be approved soon, the health minister said this month. Writing in a column https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/fifty-crore-vaccinations-pivotal-moment-in-covid-fight-modi-govts-big-success-has-happened-despite-sustained-opposition-negativity for the Times of India daily, Jagat Prakash Nadda, preside
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Rahul Gandhi, the leader of India’s main opposition party, slammed Twitter on Friday for blocking a tweet over the alleged rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl, saying the platform was playing partisan politics. The criticism of the U.S. microblogging giant by the Congress party comes as Twitter is trying to address concerns raised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi s government over compliance issues. Gandhi s account, which has 19.5 million followers, was locked after he posted a photograph of himself with the parents of a girl who was allegedly raped and killed https://www.reuters.com/world/india/protesters-gather-indian-crematorium-where-girl-9-raped-murdered-2021-08-05 in New Delhi on Aug. 1, saying the family deserved justice. Indian law bars disclosing the identity of victims of sexual assault and the National Commission for Protection of Child Right issued a notice to Twitter asking for its removal. But Gandhi said in a video released to reporters that b
By Alistair Smout LONDON (Reuters) - A London judge on Wednesday widened the scope of a U.S. appeal against a block on the extradition of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from Britain and will hear the renewed bid in late October. A judge ruled in January that Assange should not be extradited to the United States to face criminal charges including breaking a spying law, saying his mental health problems meant he would be at risk of suicide. Assange faces 18 criminal charges in the United States of breaking an espionage law and conspiring to hack government computers. WikiLeaks published a U.S. military video in 2010 showing a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters in Baghdad that killed a dozen people, including two Reuters news staff. It then released thousands of secret classified files and diplomatic cables. The legal saga began soon afterwards when Sweden sought Assange s extradition from Britain over allegations of sex crimes. When he lost that case in 2012, he fled to the Ecuadorean e
By Alicja Ptak WARSAW (Reuters) -Poland will do away with a disciplinary system for judges which the EU s top court has ruled violates EU law, the head of the ruling PiS party said, in a bid to diffuse a row that could result in financial penalties against the country. Poland faces an Aug. 16 deadline set by the European Commission to disband the Disciplinary Chamber, which the EU says is being used to pressure judges or to exert political control over judicial decisions, and undercuts the bloc s laws. We will dissolve the Disciplinary Chamber as it currently operates and in this way the subject of the dispute will disappear, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) and a deputy prime minister, said in an interview published on Saturday with state-run news agency PAP. Under PiS Poland has clashed with the EU on a number of fronts, such as media independence and the rights of migrants, women and gays. Some legal experts say the dissolution of the Disciplinary C
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia will create a A$380 million ($280 million) reparations fund for members of its Indigenous population who were forcibly removed from families, Australian media reported on Thursday, months after 800 survivors filed a class action lawsuit. Under the compensation scheme, eligible survivors will receive a one-off A$75,000 payment for the harm caused by their forced removal, plus a further A$7000 to support their healing, the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper said in a report. The programme will be announced on Thursday by Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt as part of a A$1 billion boost to measures to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, the report said. The reparations will cover people who were under 18 and removed from their families while living in the Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory prior to the granting of self-government, as well as the Jervis Bay territory near New So