Covid live: WHO names new variant ‘Omicron’; US and Canada bring in travel curbs

A selection of countries in north Africa and the Middle East have joined those imposing restrictions on arrivals from southern Africa. Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Morocco have introduced varying bans on travellers from South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho and Eswatini according to AFP. Iran said it will ban foreign travellers from six countries, including South Africa. Iranians will be admitted after testing negative twice for Covid, state broadcaster IRIB reported. On Friday it reported 86 deaths. Novavax, the US company that is among those to…

Thomas Bach Is Criticized for His Handling of the Peng Shuai Case

“What the I.O.C. established is that quiet and discreet diplomacy gets you better than clashing cymbals,” Pound said. “That’s not the way you deal with any country, certainly not with China.” It is unclear how Bach managed to engineer a call with Peng when the WTA Tour and others had been unsuccessful, though the presence on the call of an I.O.C. member from China, Li Lingwei, offered a tantalizing clue. “The I.O.C. has vaulted itself from silence about Beijing’s abysmal human rights record to active collaboration with Chinese authorities in…

Peng Shuai: the tennis star at centre of China’s biggest #MeToo allegation

After Peng Shuai and Andrea Sestini Hlaváčková won the doubles final at the 2014 Beijing Open, they went to karaoke to celebrate. The fifth-seeded duo had just beaten India’s Sania Mirza and Zimbabwe’s Cara Black, who had never lost a match in the Asia-Pacific region. “She was at the beginning of her comeback and I was happy to be there to play with her,” Hlaváčková recalls, on the phone from Rome. Their victory called for a night out so they went to a big Beijing nightclub. “She was singing a…

Shanghai cancels hundreds of flights, shuts schools over three Covid cases

Hundreds of flights have been cancelled while some schools were shuttered and tour groups suspended on Friday after three Covid cases were reported in Shanghai, as China continues its strict zero-Covid policy. Beijing has largely succeeded in controlling the spread of the coronavirus within its borders through travel restrictions and snap lockdowns, but frequent domestic flare-ups have tested its no-tolerance strategy in recent months. The three positive cases are friends who travelled to the nearby city of Suzhou together last week, Shanghai health authorities said at a press conference Thursday…

Hong Kong Records Two Cases of Variant Detected in South Africa

The Hong Kong government said on Thursday that it had detected two cases of a new variant identified in South Africa, which scientists have warned shows a “big jump in evolution” and could limit the effectiveness of vaccines. The infections were detected in a man who had returned to Hong Kong from South Africa this month, and later in another man staying across the hall in the same quarantine hotel. (Hong Kong requires almost all overseas arrivals to quarantine in hotels for two to three weeks.) The virus’s genetic sequence…