BBC在线收听下载:乌干达超百万人感染疟疾

Hello, I'm Tom Watts with the BBC news.

The sister of a high-profile Saudi women's rights activist who's now in detention has tweeted that Loujain al-Hathloul has been offered her freedom if she agrees to say she hasn't been tortured. Here's our Arab affairs editor Sebastian Usher. Lina Alhathloul says she hopes her tweet won't harm Loujain, who's just spent her second birthday in detention. One of the pioneering stars of social media in Saudi Arabia, Loujain al-Hathloul has become the face of women's activism in the kingdom. She and a number of other activists, both women and men, have been charged with conspiring with order referred to as hostile entities by the Saudi authorities and damned as traitors in the Saudi media. Her family says she's been badly tortured and sexually assaulted while in custody. Saudi officials deny this. Oddly, the system of male guardianship which Loujain and other activists have fought to overturn has itself been partially dismantled even as they remain in jail.

India's Supreme Court says it will not intervene to lift restrictions on indian-administered Kashmir for at least another two weeks. Hearing a petition asking it to restore communication links and lift curbs on the movement of people, India's Highest Court said the government needed a reasonable period of time to restore normality. Heavy security remains in place in Kashmir for a ninth day.

The Ugandan Health Ministry says one million people have had malaria in the past two months. Officials say prolonged rainfall in June and a reduction in the use of mosquito bed nets are to blame. Patience Atuhaire reports from Kampala. The Health Ministry says there has been a forty percent increase in reported cases compared with the same period last year. This time of year is normally peak malaria season, but the prolonged June rains seem to have created an even more fertile breeding environment for the mosquitoes that transmit the infectious disease. Officials say there has been a reduction in the use of mosquito bed nets as those distributed in 2017 begin to age. Burundi and other East African country is currently battling a malaria epidemic with nearly six million people affected and more than a thousand dead this year.

Researchers in Britain say a vaccine to protect people against the sexually transmitted infection chlamydia has passed its first human trials. Professor Robin Shattock is one of the team working on the project. You can be treated for chlamydia, but that doesn't prevent you from being reinfected. And it's actually repeated cycles of reinfection that can cause the most damage. Now ideally, a vaccine would give you lifelong immunity. We're not there yet. It's really still very much an early stage. The next stage is then tested in what we call on efficacy trial to see if it actually reduces the rate of chlamydia infection. If the second stage is successful, experts say a vaccine could be available within seven years.

World news from the BBC.