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Episode details

World Service,29 Jul 2020,53 mins

Annual Hajj pilgrimage scaled back due to coronavirus

Newsday

Available for over a year

The annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia is beginning - with drastically reduced numbers because of the coronavirus pandemic. This year only around ten thousand Saudi residents will perform the five-day ritual. The US state of Texas has been one of the worst affected by COVID 19, with a record number of deaths documented in the past week alone. At one community hospital in the state’s largest city, Houston, a new experimental treatment cocktail is claimed to be saving patients. The drug lord known as El Mencho, is on a list of the world's most wanted men. Now it’s emerged that he has built his own hospital in western Jalisco state to attend to the illnesses that he apparently suffers from.

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