Vanuatu

Can China fill funding and leadership gaps after America quit the WHO?

Can China fill funding and leadership gaps after America quit the WHO? Beijing is now the global health body’s biggest assessed contributor, but its voluntary donations remained low in 2025 “I’m here to lobby for support,” said Jenny Stephens, Vanuatu’s director of public health. “We are experiencing the global funding cuts – it’s affecting our programmes like malaria, TB and HIV.

Australia could still buy five US submarines if needed, defence minister says

Australia could still buy five US submarines under AUKUS, Defence Minister Richard Marles says Mon 1 Jun 2026 at 9:16am In short: Australia's Defence Minister Richard Marles says the United States remains open to providing up to five Virginia-class submarines under AUKUS. Mr Marles said on the weekend that Australia was planning to buy just three second-hand Virginia-class submarines from the US. The defence minister says the government remains confident it can bridge the gap to Australia's...

England v New Zealand: World Cup 2026 warm-up – live

Pre-World Cup friendly updates from 9pm UK timeWho might England play if they reach final?You can email Scott with your thoughtsLet’s be honest with ourselves and each other: this really doesn’t matter that much. Not only is it a World Cup warm-up game, contested by two teams trying out a few things and making sure nobody pulls up lame, it’s also a World Cup warm-up game between England and New Zealand … and history suggests those two nations aren’t much of a match. But first up, consider...

Five sailors killed as cargo ships struck in Sea of Azov

The cargo vessels Natra and Zirkon — both bearing hallmarks of Russia's shadow fleet and heading to load grain at a port linked to looted Ukrainian supplies — were struck overnight near Taganrog. Five Azerbaijani sailors were reportedly killed after two cargo vessels were hit by drones in the Sea of Azov near the Russian port of Taganrog, Azerbaijan's foreign ministry said on Friday. The vessels, identified as the dry cargo ships Natra and Zirkon, were reportedly travelling from Turkey to...

CREP: Cis-Regulatory Element Predictor Based on Fine-Tuned Enformer

A substantial fraction of disease-associated genetic variants reside in non-coding regions of the genome, where they act by perturbing cis-regulatory elements (CREs) such as enhancers, promoters, and insulators. While recent sequence-based deep learning models, such as Enformer, accurately predict continuous epigenomic signals from DNA sequence, they do not directly provide discrete and interpretable CRE annotations. Here, we present CREP (Cis-Regulatory Element Predictor), a fine-tuned...

UN’s climate crisis vote shows political momentum is growing, say experts

Solomons PM says to review secretive security pact with China

Solomons PM says to review secretive security pact with China CANBERRA: New Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale said on Wednesday (Jun 3) he would review a secretive 2022 security pact with Beijing, which rattled Canberra and Washington by opening the door to Chinese forces in the South Pacific. Asked about that pact alongside Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the Solomons leader - who was elected last month - said he had been "praying and fasting" about the Chinese...