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India registered about 475,000 more total deaths in 2020 than the previous year, government data released months ahead of schedule on Tuesday showed, as the World Health Organization readies its estimates of excess COVID-19 deaths whose methodology New Delhi has opposed, Reuters reported.

Some experts estimate India's actual COVID death toll is as high as 4 million, about eight times the official figure, especially as a record wave driven by the Delta variant killed many people in April and May of last year. The WHO's estimate will be published on Thursday.

Vinod Kumar Paul, a top health official who has overseen India's fight against the pandemic, said there was nothing "dramatic" in the total death data for 2020 and that those were "absolute, correct and counted numbers".

He said the data showing 8.1 million total deaths in India in 2020 was released by the Office of the Registrar General two to three months in advance because of the attention on the country's COVID toll, according to Reuters.

"There is a public narrative in the media, based on various modelling estimates, that India's COVID-19 deaths are many times the reported figure - that's not the case in reality," he told state TV.

"We now have actual data for 2020, there is no need to do any modelling now. We will have actual, robust data for 2021 too. Modelling can lead to overestimation, absurd estimation."

The death count grew slower in the country of 1.35 billion people in 2020 than in the previous two years, the data showed.

India officially reported 148,738 COVID-19 deaths in 2020, with the tally jumping to 523,889 on Tuesday out of more than 43 million cumulative infections. Only the United States and Brazil have recorded more deaths as of Tuesday.

Countries around the world reported only 1.83 million COVID-19 deaths in 2020 but the WHO estimates excess mortality of at least 3 million globally for that year.

India has said it does not agree with the WHO's methodology, though the scientists working on the latest estimates have defended it, Reuters reported.

A hoax bomb call created panic at the Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu on Wednesday morning, promoting the airport officials to halt the flights for an hour.

Passengers were evacuated from the airport soon after the officials received a call from an unidentified person claiming that there was a bomb at the airport's domestic terminal.

Though a joint team from the Nepal Police and Nepal Army carried out a search operation following the information, they did not find any suspicious object.

Now, the situation is under control and the flights have also resumed, an airport official said.

The shockwaves from the leaked Supreme Court draft ruling are reverberating across the US - in both anti-abortion and pro-choice circles, BBC reported.

Since Roe v Wade legalised abortion nationwide in 1973, many women have fought tirelessly to overturn it, believing the life of an unborn child begins at conception.

Others have clung to the hope that America's highest court might uphold the almost fifty-year-old ruling that allows a woman the right to choose.

We asked six women - three from each side of this debate - how they felt after reading the draft majority opinion that suggests the conservative-leaning court is poised to overturn the national right to an abortion (the court has launched an investigation into the leak), according to BBC.

My first reaction to the leaked document was shock that the Supreme Court appears to be overturning Roe v Wade. As a pro-life conservative, I am used to watching the American political spectrum continuously shift farther away from my values, so I was cautiously optimistic about this apparent progress.

However, I did immediately consider the likelihood of Congress reversing this decision by pushing legislation, or states reacting by passing extreme laws in support of things like late-term abortions.

If Roe v Wade is officially overturned I will have two reactions. First, I would be pleased and grateful at the Supreme Court making a decision that upholds the law and protects the sanctity of life.

Second, I would be relieved that the leak of this document did not successfully pressure the court to change its decision, BBC reported.

That is a direct attack on the Supreme Court's credibility and impartiality. I am worried to see the Court's process infiltrated by rogue political agendas.

Personally, I don't believe in abortion, but I think people should have a right to choose. Women should have autonomy over their own bodies, and I thought that legislating abortion was relegated to the past. The people who want to legislate abortion and regulate the matter say that they are pro-life. But they are only talking about the life of the baby before it's born, and not about the life of the baby after it's born. The same people who want to regulate abortion want to defund schools. Here in Missouri, our schools are failing. If you want to be pro-life, then you need to look at life after a child is born.

Even if the decision comes down officially that Roe v Wade is overturned, there will still be people with unexpected pregnancies. 

Whether abortion is legal or illegal, there are going to be a lot of other women who, if they know that help and support are available, will happily choose life. My mission with the San Antonio Coalition for Life has always been to talk to people with an unexpected pregnancy. Our job is to make sure that we can direct them and help them by giving them the resources they need, according to BBC.

Our job doesn't change whether abortion is legal or illegal. 

We are always going to be here whether it is a life that is not quite six weeks or whether it is a life that is 13 weeks or whether it's a life at conception. Our job is to protect all innocent human life.

Growing up in a Catholic family, I thought abortion was wrong and that it was murder. 

But as an adult, I support a woman's right to have one - 100%. Abortion is healthcare. It's a personal decision about a woman's own body, BBC reported.

WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala put forward on May 3 the outcome document that emerged from the informal process conducted with the Quad (the European Union, India, South Africa and the United States) for an intellectual property response to Covid-19.

The  proposal was immediately shared by the new chair of the Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, Ambassador Lansana Gberie of Sierra Leone, with the full membership, after an informal meeting of the Council held this morning where he introduced the highlights of the text, read a statement issued by the World Trade Organization.

After an impasse of more than one year in the TRIPS Council, DG Okonjo-Iweala, working with Deputy Director-General Anabel González, supported an informal group of ministers to come together around what could be a meaningful proposal, without prejudice to their respective positions, that could provide a platform to be built upon by the membership.

In their discussions, the Quad adopted a problem-solving  approach aimed at identifying practical ways of clarifying, streamlining and simplifying how governments can override patent rights, under certain conditions, to enable diversification of production of COVID-19 vaccines, the statement further read.

The proposal will now go for consideration of the 164 WTO members.