World News: 14 March 2023

Lahore is most polluted city, Chad worst among countries - survey
China’s Hotan followed Lahore with PM2.5 levels of 94.3 while next two cities were Bhiwadi at 92.7 and Delhi followed close behind at 92.6.
While Chad had an average level of 89.7, Iraq, which had the second most polluted air for a country, averaged 80.1.

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Saudi Arabia’s golf case threatens to spill kingdom secrets
The case matters beyond the world of golf. Saudi Arabia has been assertive in U.S. business investments and political relationships and could now face court demands for greater transparency and accountability.
The insistence by Saudi officials that U.S. courts have little or no say over their actions is especially sensitive. Last year, the kingdom, with legal backing from the Biden administration, successfully argued that American courts had no authority to try the prince in a lawsuit over the 2018 killing of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

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China to reopen to tourists, resume all visas Wednesday
Foreigners holding visas issued before March 28, 2020, that are still valid will be allowed to enter China. Visa-free entry will resume for foreigners entering Guangdong in southern China from Hong Kong and Macao. The notice didn't specify whether vaccination certificates or negative COVID-19 tests would be required, but Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin told reporters on Tuesday that China had “optimized measures for remote testing of people coming to China from relevant countries", allowing pre-boarding antigen testing instead of nucleic acid testing.

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India plans new security testing for smartphones, crackdown on pre-installed apps
The new rules, details of which have not been previously reported, could extend launch timelines in the world's No.2 smartphone market and lead to losses in business from pre-installed apps for players including Samsung, Xiaomi, Vivo, and Apple.
The IT ministry is considering these new rules amid concerns about spying and abuse of user data, said a senior government official, one of the two people, declining to be named as the information is not yet public.

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Lula meets with Indigenous in Brazil’s Amazon, pledges lands
While declaring that no one has the right to cut down centuries-old trees in the Amazon, Lula added that the government is working hard to establishing meetings with the Presidents of Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia to “definitively discuss how we’re going to take care of the forests and transform the richness of the Amazon biodiversity to the benefit of the millions of people who live there.”

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Scientists say climate change goosed New Zealand storm fury
A flash study Tuesday by 23 scientists from around the globe found that global warming from the burning of fossil fuels added to the downpours from Cyclone Gabrielle that included at least six hours of deluges of nearly an inch per hour (20 millimeters per hour) of driving rain. But normal methods to quantify how much climate change added to the disaster weren’t conclusive enough for scientists because weather records there don’t go back very far, the area affected was relatively small and the region is subject to naturally high weather variability.

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