Australia

Sydney, Aug 20 (AP-PTI) A lockdown in Australia's largest city was extended through September and tougher measures to curb the coronavirus's delta variant were imposed Friday, including a curfew and a mask mandate outdoors.

New South Wales state, which includes Sydney, reported 642 locally acquired infections in the latest 24-hour period, the fourth consecutive day of tallies exceeding 600.

Canberra, Aug 18 (AP-PTI) Australia had evacuated the first 26 people, including Australian and Afghan citizens, from Kabul since the Taliban overran the Afghan capital, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Wednesday.

An Air Force C-130 Hercules transport aircraft landed at an Australian military base in the United Arab Emirates with the 26 who included a foreign official working for an international agency, Morrison said. The remainder were Australians and Afghans.

SYDNEY, Aug 18 (Reuters) - Sydney's Delta outbreak has not peaked and residents must brace for more deaths, authorities said on Wednesday, as Australia's largest city continued to break records for new daily infections despite a nearly two-month lockdown.

"We haven't seen the worst of it and the way that we stop this is by everybody staying at home," New South Wales (NSW) Premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters in Sydney, the state capital.

CANBERRA/SYDNEY, Aug 16 (Reuters) - Australia's biggest city of Sydney recorded its deadliest day of the COVID-19 pandemic on Monday as troops and police set up roadblocks to limit the movement of people, while Melbourne faced a nightly curfew and a further two weeks of lockdown.

Sydney, which is in its eighth week of lockdown, is the epicentre of Australia's third COVID-19 wave that threatens to push the country's A$2 trillion ($1.5 trillion) economy into its second recession in as many years.

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — The Australian government said Friday that it remained seriously concerned about the welfare of a Chinese-born Australian journalist a year after she was first detained in China.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne used the first anniversary of Cheng Lei’s detention on Aug. 13 to tell China that Australia expected “basic standards of justice, procedural fairness and humane treatment to be met, in accordance with international norms.”

SYDNEY, Aug 10 (Reuters) - On the sands of Bondi Beach, one of Sydney's wealthiest suburbs, surfers and seaside walkers jostle for space, while joggers clog the nearby promenade and fitness buffs huddle around public exercise equipment.

To the west, where COVID-19 infections are greatest, stores sit shuttered on empty streets as some of Australia's most migrant-heavy neighbourhoods endure heightened lockdowns, enforced by high-visibility policing backed up by the military.

SYDNEY, Aug 9 (NNN-AGENCIES) – As COVID-19 outbreak continued to spread to more areas in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), its neighbouring states to the north and south will tighten borders to quash budding cases.

NSW Authorities announced today that Tamworth, a city halfway between Sydney and the border with Queensland, will entre into lockdown for one week from 5:00 p.m. local time. The announcement came following a female visitor tested positive after visiting the area.

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Australian special envoy and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott said a free trade agreement between his nation and India would signal the “democratic world’s tilt away from China.”

Abbott visited New Delhi last week as Australia’s special trade envoy for India as the Australian government gives priority to sealing a bilateral trade deal.

In an opinion piece likely to anger Beijing that that was published in The Australian newspaper on Monday, Abbott said the “answer to almost every question about China is India.”

MELBOURNE, Aug 7 (Reuters) - Australia saw a record daily number of new coronavirus cases this year on Saturday, with the country's most populous states of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland recording a total of 361 cases of the highly infectious Delta variant.

With about 15 million people in the three states, or 60% of Australia's population, under a strict lockdown, the country also reported five coronavirus-related deaths, one of the highest this year.

CANBERRA, Aug. 6 (Xinhua) -- Scientists from Australian National University (ANU) have first captured the moments of the exploding death of a star.

In a study published on Thursday, the team from ANU collaborated with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and a host of international researchers to observe the earliest moments of a supernova in unprecedented detail.

The team discovered that the supernova was captured from beginning to end by NASA's now-defunct Kepler space telescope in 2017.