World

The Omicron variant of the coronavirus is spreading significantly faster than the Delta variant in countries with documented community transmission, with the number of cases doubling in 1.5 to 3 days, said the World Health Organization (WHO).

According to Reporter Without Borders’ (RSF) annual round-up published recently, a record number of journalists – 488, including 60 women – are currently detained worldwide, while another 65 are being held hostage.

COVID-19 cases are spiking all over the world, but the Executive Director of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday that despite the rise of the highly transmissible Omicron variant “nationwide school closures should be avoided whenever possible.”

The United States House of Representatives voted on Tuesday to approve a Democratic proposal for a U.S. State Department office to address Islamophobic bias after a Republican congresswoman used an anti-Muslim slur against a Democratic colleague.

Gloria Jean Watkins, a pioneering Black feminist intellectual who wrote more than 40 books and is better known by her pen name, Bell Hooks, has died.

With the total number of recorded cases during the pandemic standing at 8.9 million, Africa recorded more than 196,000 new cases last week, up from around 107,000 in the previous week.

The World Health Organization has warned that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 was spreading at a rate not seen with previous variants and was likely present in most countries.

The world must not forget the roughly one million Rohingya from Myanmar “forced to run for their lives from the military’s genocidal attack against them”, an independent UN human rights expert said on Monday, beginning his first mission to Bangladesh.

The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to halt two decades of global progress towards Universal Health Coverage, according to reports released on Sunday from the World Health Organization (WHO) and World Bank, which reveal more than half a billion people are being pushed into extreme poverty because they have to pay for health services out of their own pockets.

In the four epidemiological weeks (13 November to 4 December, 2021), there was an exponential rise in new COVID-19 cases. The province officially entered its fourth COVID-19 wave on 1 December.

Full text of journalist Maria Ressa's speech at the Nobel Peace Prize awarding ceremony held on Friday, December 10.

A protest was held outside a London court after the United States won an appeal in High Court to have WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange extradited to face criminal charges.