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Covid-19 upsets status quo in Europe, hope and challenges ahead
A brief recovery in the summer turned out to be more fragile than it looked, while the emergence of the more transmissible Omicron variant has made people realise that the pandemic may be far from over. Despite rising infections and inequity in vaccine access, however, people across the continent hope that more stringent measures, new drugs and vaccines would eventually rein in the raging pandemic, which has threatened to stifle an early economic recovery, Xinhua news agency reported.
US reports over 7.5mn child Covid-19 cases
A total of 7,565,416 child Covid-19 cases had been reported across the country as of December 23, and children represented 17.4 per cent of all confirmed cases, according to the report published on Monday. The overall rate was 10,052 cases per 100,000 children in the population, Xinhua news agency reported. Covid-19 cases among US children are "extremely high and increasing," according to the report.
Taliban directive not to show heads of female mannequins in shops
He said that looking at the face of such mannequins is against the Sharia law, the report said. The instruction comes a day after the group in Kabul issued a guidance advising taxi drivers not to offer drive to unveiled women without close male relatives. A number of shopkeepers in Herat raised concerns against such an instruction and said that Taliban are making life more difficult for them each passing day.
Omicron may do good by replacing Delta from world: Experts
Omicron, first detected from southern Africa in late November, has become dominant in several countries including the US and the UK, outpacing the previously dominant Delta variant, which was considered to be the dominant strain in many countries until recently. While Omicron is known to cause only mild disease, Delta has been more lethal leading to increased hospitalisation with drop in oxygen levels, pneumonia, and death.
Some US hospitals can overrun' due to Covid, says President Joe Biden
Biden also stressed that hospitals in some places could be overrun both in terms of equipment and staff. The US President made these remarks during a virtual meeting held by the White House with several state governors and top health advisors. Earlier on Sunday, the White House also promised to quickly resolve the Covid-19 test shortage that the US is facing.
Ex-Afghan Prez Ghani runner-up in most corrupt list headed by Belarus Prez
"Ghani certainly deserves an award, too. He was breathtaking in both corruption and gross incompetence. He deserted his people, leaving them to misery and death so he could live among the corrupt former state officials in the moral cesspool that is the UAE," said OCCRP. "It was a banner year for corruption, but Lukashenko stood out from the crowd," said Drew Sullivan, a co-founder of OCCRP who served as a judge on the panel.
China holding thousands of people under secret residential surveillance system
"These high profile cases obviously attract a lot of attention, but they shouldn't detract from the fact that there's no transparency. Collecting data that is available and analysing the trends, the estimate is that every year 4,000 to 5,000 people are disappeared into the RSDL system alone," said Michael Caster, a co-founder of Safeguard Defenders, Al Jazeera reported.
China slams Elon Musk over near satellite collision in space
According to a document submitted by China earlier this month to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), the satellites from Starlink Internet Services, a division of Elon Musk's SpaceX aerospace company, had two "close encounters" with the Chinese space station on July 1 and October 21, reports BBC.
December snow in Sierra Nevada breaks records
At the CSSL near Donner Pass in northern Sierra Nevada with an elevation of 2,100 meters, 492 cm of snow has piled up in the final month of 2021, Xinhua news agency quoted the scientists as saying.
North Korea slams US' state sponsors of terrorism list
Earlier this month, the State Department unveiled its annual Country Reports on Terrorism 2020, which kept the North on the list, along with Iran and Syria, reports Yonhap News Agency. In a post on its Foreign Ministry website, Pyongyang criticized Washington for posing as the "judge of terrorism", cataloguing a number of past US-involved wars and lambasting them as "large-scale acts of state terrorism".
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