A further 39 people on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship off the Japan coast have tested positive for the new coronavirus, authorities say, as thousands more steel themselves for a second week in quarantine.

Another 41 people on a cruise ship quarantined off Japan have the new coronavirus, the country's health minister says, confirming more on board will now be tested for the illness.

US President Donald Trump expresses his "confidence" in China's ability to tackle the novel coronavirus epidemic during talks with his Beijing counterpart Xi Jinping, the White House said.

The death of a whistleblowing doctor whose early warnings about China's new coronavirus outbreak were suppressed by the police unleashes a wave of anger at the government's handling of the crisis -- and bold demands for more freedom.

Myanmar has reimposed an internet shutdown in two conflict-torn western states, after partially lifting the blackout five months ago, says a leading telecoms operator.

Japanese officials begin screening more than 3,700 passengers and crew on a cruise ship quarantined off the port of Yokohama near Tokyo after a Hong Kong man who sailed on the vessel last month tested positive for coronavirus.

Hong Kong reports its first coronavirus death, a 39-year-old male who had been suffering from an underlying illness and had visited China's Wuhan city in January, hospital staff says, marking the second death outside mainland China.

China reported an outbreak of a highly pathogenic strain of H5N1 bird flu at a farm in Shaoyang city of the southern province of Hunan, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs says.

Four Indian airlines have banned a top stand-up comic over a mid-air confrontation with a star political television presenter that has become an internet sensation.

Twenty-six people including a seven-year-old girl were killed after the bus they were travelling in crashed with an autorickshaw and fell into a well in western India, officials said yesterday.

Indian police have launched a sedition investigation against a primary school over a play that allegedly criticised a contentious citizenship law, officials said yesterday.

Most major railway stations in India will use facial recognition to fight crime by the end of 2020, a senior official said, in a move that digital rights campaigners on Tuesday warned could breach people’s privacy in the absence of stringent laws.

India is now capable of making Pakistan “bite the dust” in less than 10 days in any new war with its arch-rival, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said.

Indian cabinet yesterday approved moves to ease abortion laws, enabling rape survivors and other vulnerable women to terminate pregnancies up to 24 weeks after inception.

Russia and China are working to develop a coronavirus vaccine and Beijing has handed over the genome of the virus to Moscow, a Russian diplomatic mission in China said yesterday.

Japanese authorities say a man with no recent travel to China has contracted the novel strain of coronavirus -- apparently after driving tourists visiting from Wuhan, where a deadly outbreak began.

The United States and other nations race to get their citizens out of the locked-down Chinese city at ground-zero of a virus epidemic, as the death toll surges to 106 and the number of confirmed infections doubled to over 4,500.

The rapid spread of a deadly virus in China caused growing global alarm yesterday, with Germany advising citizens to avoid the country, Mongolia closing its border and other nations racing to evacuate citizens trapped at the epicentre of the health emergency.

Indian enforcement agencies should be able to break end-to-end encryption to hunt down distributors of child pornography online, a parliamentary panel has urged as the south Asian nation looks to regulate social media.

The Taliban claims a US forces aircraft has crashed in eastern Afghanistan, hours after a plane went down into an area controlled largely by the insurgents.