author - oman observer

Customers in the Rome bookstore paid no attention to the circular stickers on the floor instructing them to stamp out COVID by maintaining “a distance of at least 1 meter.” “These are things...

LONDON — Trains slowed to a crawl. Schools and doctors’ offices shut their doors. The British Museum closed its galleries. Buckingham Palace curtailed the changing of the guard. And the government...

LONDON — The last time Britain’s Conservative Party elected a new leader, Boris Johnson dominated the contest from wire to wire, a political celebrity so famous that many voters just called him...

At 76 years old, Judy Fog is one of the fittest people her daughter knows. Take, for instance, her VO2 max — a common fitness metric that measures how much oxygen one can absorb while exercising. ...

When countries around the world have stumbled in the face of pandemic headwinds, China has often stood apart, seemingly impervious to financial pressures that undermined growth. But now, dragged...

No one wanted to miss out on the cryptocurrency mania. Over the past two years, as the prices of bitcoin and other virtual currencies surged, crypto startups proliferated. Companies that market...

LONDON — When Britain started a program this week offering a two-year visa to graduates from some top global universities, Nikhil Mane, an Indian computer science student at New York University,...

BRUSSELS — The European Union on Monday agreed to ban most imports of Russian oil, the harshest economic penalty yet imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, and potentially the biggest...

NEW DELHI — After spending their savings to have their son trained as a pilot in the United States, Sanjeev Ranjan Prasad and Sadhana Prasad financed his lavish wedding back in India, along with a...

Deep down, Real Madrid does not believe in magic. Or, rather, it does not only believe in magic. It might have spent much of the last three months apparently touched by some golden light, its run to...

In the Red Sea off the coast of Egypt, bottlenose dolphins barrel through a soft, bushy coral. Looks like fun, but maybe it’s medicine. Dolphins may rub on specific corals and sponges to treat...

ISLAMABAD — Pakistan’s government on Friday sharply increased fuel prices for consumers, paving the way to revive a $6 billion bailout package from the International Monetary Fund and stabilize...

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — With no end in sight to the national economic crisis that led them to take to the streets, protesters in Sri Lanka are digging in against a president they blame for crashing the...

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — When he has turned away from a gas station in Sri Lanka’s capital Monday after waiting in line for six hours, Ravi Chandra, a tour manager, decided to return before dawn the...

BAGDOLI - A health worker was making her daily rounds in a village in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan when the husband of a woman with shooting labor pains ran up to her. For months, the...

After more than three decades in Russia, McDonald’s — an icon of U.S. lifestyle and capitalism — has put its Russia business up for sale as it works to leave the country completely. The move...

Don’t judge a book by its cover. Don’t judge a dog by its breed. After conducting owner surveys for 18,385 dogs and sequencing the genomes of 2,155 dogs, a group of researchers reported a...

MELBOURNE, Australia — If the United States had the same COVID death rate as Australia, about 900,000 lives would have been saved. The Texas grandmother who made the perfect pumpkin pie might still...

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — As the guests sat down for a banquet dinner last summer at the grand colonial-era home of Sri Lanka’s president, the small talk soon turned gravely serious. Addressing...

The heavy rains that caused catastrophic flooding in South Africa in mid-April were made twice as likely to occur by climate change, scientists said Friday. An analysis of the flooding, which...