Bloomberg Iraq will halt border trade with Iran and Kuwait between March 8 and 15 to curb the spread of the coronavirus, the country’s health minister Jaafar Sadiq Allawi said in a televised press conference. Sea- and air-borne trade will continue as long as personnel and goods involved have the necessary paperwork from their originating countries to show that they ...

Bloomberg Hong Kong’s dominant broadcaster cut a current affairs program that had satirised the police amid a citywide shortage of protective gear against the coronavirus, prompting fresh warnings about press freedoms in the former British colony. The broadcaster, Television Broadcasts Ltd, cut local media outlet RTHK’s controversial satire programme “Headliner” — which had earlier prompted a complaint from Hong Kong’s ...

Bloomberg A group of economists have cautioned India’s government against clubbing data collection for its controversial citizens’ register with the census exercise, saying it could have implications for the nation’s statistical system. The census is a basic household and population list based on anonymous data, whereas there are fears the National Population Register could be used to question a person’s ...