Friday, Aug 28th, 2020

Kurdish human rights lawyer Ebru Timtik dies in hospital after spending 238-days on hunger strike in protest of her imprisonment after being found guilty of being a member of the outlawed Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front. At the time of her death, she was reported to only weigh 65 pounds. (New York Post)

The Bank of Korea cuts its growth forecast and expects the country’s GDP to shrink 1.3% this year. It would be South Korea’s worst performance since the height of the Asian financial crisis in 1998. (Marketwatch)

American retailer Walmart announces its partnership with Microsoft for a bid to acquire the Chinese-based video sharing service TikTok, which faces a ban in the United States through President Donald Trump’s executive order if its parent company ByteDance fails to sell the app’s operations to an American corporation. (AFP via Bangkok Post)

Prime Minister Jean Castex announces the mandatory wearing of face masks throughout Paris after officials released statistics indicating a resurgence of cases throughout the country. (AFP via RTL Today)

France records its highest number of new daily infections since the end of the lockdown in early May, with an additional 6,111 cases reported over the past 24 hours, making it the second highest ever, after 7,578 new cases set on March 30. (BBC)

Italy records its highest number of new cases since early May, when the country was still in lockdown, with 1,411 new cases reported in the last 24 hours. (The Telegraph)

The British government removes Switzerland, the Czech Republic, and Jamaica from the travel corridor list due to rising COVID-19 infection rates. It means that arrivals from those countries will have to self-quarantine for two weeks, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps confirmed. The change will come into effect on Saturday at 4:00 am BST. (The Guardian)

Abdullah Abdullah, chairman of the High Council for National Reconciliation, says that peace talks between the Taliban and the government will start in September with the support of the Trump administration, which pushes both sides to set differences aside. (Al Arabiya)

The End