Israel begins COVID-19 inoculation

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu receives a COVID-19 vaccine at Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, Israel, on Saturday. Israel launched on Sunday its COVID-19 inoculation drive. Health workers were the first to get the shots in the campaign that aims at vaccinating about 60,000 people per day, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and the health ministry said.SD-Agencies

New virus strain prompts UK to tighten restrictions

The British Government has introduced tough new measures for some areas of England in response to the fast spread of a new strain of the COVID-19 virus.

As of Sunday morning, the country’s capital London as well as parts of southeastern England will enter a new Tier 4, with restrictions likened to the first nationwide lockdown earlier this year.

The new strain “could increase the R (rate of infection) by 0.4 or more and is up to 70 percent more transmissible than the original disease,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, who warned that it was “spreading very fast.”

France’s Macron tests positive for COVID-19

French President Emmanuel Macron has tested positive for coronavirus, the French presidency said on Thursday, although it was not immediately clear where he had contracted the virus.

“The President of the Republic has been diagnosed positive for COVID-19 today,” his office said in a statement. “This diagnosis was made following a PCR test performed at the onset of the first symptoms.”

Macron’s office said he would isolate for the next seven days and would continue to run the country remotely. A spokeswoman said that all his trips had been cancelled, including a planned visit to Lebanon on Tuesday.

Moderna vaccine arrives across US

Shipments of Moderna Inc.’s vaccine, the second coronavirus vaccine approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Friday, to arrived in states on Monday.

Moncef Slaoui, head of the U.S. COVID-19 vaccine program, said it was most likely the first Moderna vaccine shot would be given starting Monday morning.

The shipping started on Sunday. Distributor McKesson Corp. is shipping doses from facilities in places including Louisville, Kentucky, and Memphis, Tennessee — close to air hubs for United Parcel Service (UPS) and FedEx who are to distribute the doses from warehouses for deliveries to hospitals and other sites.

U.S. frontline essential workers and people aged 75 and older should be next in line to receive the Moderna vaccine, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended on Sunday.

Tigray crisis: 2.3m children cut off from aid

About 2.3 million children in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region are cut off from humanitarian assistance as violence continues, the United Nations warned last week.

“Protecting these children, many of whom are refugees and internally displaced... must be a priority,” said the U.N.’s children’s agency UNICEF.

Despite deals with the Ethiopian Government, humanitarian agencies say they are being denied access to Tigray.

Boko Haram says it took the students

Nigeria-based Islamist militant group Boko Haram said it was behind last week’s kidnapping of hundreds of schoolboys in the northwestern Nigerian state of Katsina.

More than 300 pupils are unaccounted for, but others managed to escape. The authorities had previously blamed “bandits” for the attack.

Boko Haram has been notorious over the last decade for school kidnappings. In an audio message about the abductions, its leader Abubakar Shekau said “what happened in Katsina was our responsibility” and that his group opposed Western education.(SD-Agencies)