US stock indexes plummeted Tuesday to close with major losses after the Federal Reserve Chair signaled a faster conclusion of tapering asset purchases against rising inflation. 

The blue chip Dow Jones Industrial Average dove 652 points, or 1.86%, to 34,483, while the S&P 500 fell 88 points, or 1.9%, to 4,567.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq declined 245 points, or 1.55%, to 15,537.

"The economy is very strong and inflationary pressures are high. It is therefore appropriate in my view to consider wrapping up the taper of our asset purchases perhaps a few months sooner," Fed Chair Jerome Powell said earlier during his testimony before the Senate Banking Committee.

Powell said Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) members will discuss the possibility of concluding tapering quicker at their next meeting on Dec. 14-15.

The FOMC announced after the conclusion of its two-day meeting on Nov. 3 that it will start winding down its $120 billion asset purchases this month and it is expected to be concluded by mid-2022.

The faster conclusion of tapering will result in a quick withdrawal of liquidity from the markets, which was abundant during the pandemic and following months.

With heightened risks in liquidity, the VIX volatility index, known as the fear index, jumped 18.5% to 27.21.

The dollar index was down 0.5% to 95.88, while the yield on 10-year US Treasury notes fell 5.9% to 1.439%.

With the potential risk of lower global oil demand due to the new omicron variant, oil prices were down more than 4%. The price of Brent crude fell 4.5% to $69.93 per barrel and US benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude lost 4.5% to $66.81.

Despite earlier gains, precious metals reversed course, with gold losing 0.7% to $1,772 an ounce and silver falling 0.4% to $22.81./aa

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced at a Downing Street news conference on Tuesday that the government will aim to ensure everyone eligible for a COVID-19 booster vaccine receives an offer by the end of January 2022.  

This latest announcement and the news conference itself came in response to increased worries both in Britain and worldwide about the omicron variant of the coronavirus.

Johnson said: “We’re going to be throwing everything at it, to ensure everyone eligible is offered a booster in just over two months.”

“There will be temporary vaccine centers popping up like Christmas trees,” he said.

Age groups will be invited one at a time, starting with the elderly and then working down the age brackets to younger people, Johnson added.

“Right now, our best single defense against omicron is to get vaccinated and to get boosted,” he noted, saying he will get his own booster dose on Thursday.

On Monday, the country's Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation recommended that booster jabs be extended to all adults and that the gap between the second and third doses be reduced from six months to three.

Johnson spoke alongside British Health Secretary Sajid Javid and Chief Executive of NHS England Amanda Pritchard.

Javid said: “We’re now able to put our booster program on steroids, and protect even more people, even more quickly.”

“If we want to give ourselves the chance of a Christmas with our loved ones, the best thing we can do is step up, roll up our sleeves, and get protected when the time comes,” he added.

Pritchard said the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) now had over 3,000 vaccination sites across the UK, and that while the NHS was confident it would meet the January deadline, it could not “happen overnight” due to the stresses the health service is under.

Shortly before the news conference, the UK Health Security Agency announced that the number of confirmed omicron cases across the UK had increased to 22./aa

Three students were killed and six other people were injured, including a teacher, in a shooting Tuesday in the US state of Michigan, authorities said. 

The shooting took place in the afternoon at Oxford High School in Oakland County, Oakland County Undersheriff Mike McCabe said at a press conference.

A 15-year-old sophomore at the school was taken into custody. The suspected gunman, believed to be acting alone, was using a semi-automatic handgun.

"Deputies confronted him, he had the weapon on him and deputies took him into custody," McCabe said, according to Detroit News. "The whole thing lasted five minutes."

The motive for the shooting remains unknown./agencies

India’s economic growth slowed to 8.4% during the July-September period, according to data released Tuesday by the National Statistical Office.

The gross domestic product (GDP) growth is down from the 20.1% record annual increase posted in the previous quarter.

But it is up from a 7.4% contraction that came in the July-September quarter last year during the coronavirus pandemic.

India's GDP contracted 24.4% from April - June in 2020 during lockdowns.

In the latest quarter, the agriculture sector posted a 4.5% growth, while the manufacturing industry showed a 5.5% increase.

Production in eight infrastructure sectors also saw a rapid growth of 7.5% in October, according to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

The eight key industries -- coal, crude oil, natural gas, refinery products, fertilizers, steel, cement and electricity -- represent more than 40% of the country's index of industrial production./aa

Former members of the Daesh/ISIS terror group and their families in camps and prisons of northeastern Syria mean "a ticking bomb" for European security, the EU’s new counter-terrorism chief said on Tuesday.

Speaking for the first time at the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Security and Defense, Ilkka Salmi, the recently appointed EU counter-terrorism coordinator, gave an analysis on the most pressing challenges for European security.

Salmi warned that the bloc had to provide humanitarian aid and support to reduce the radicalization of former Daesh/ISIS fighters and their families who are held in camps and prisons in northeast Syria.

“They're a ticking time bomb for European security if you ask me,” he pointed out.

He also noted that to improve the humanitarian situation, the bloc has to support the reintegration of Syrian and Iraqi camp residents into their local communities.

Salmi, who has just returned from the Balkans where he studied the situation of evacuated Afghans, promised to visit those Syrian camps next spring.

Talking about the consequences of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, he reminded that the EU had to prevent the infiltration of terrorists “through the development of a common procedure for systematic and timely security checks of biographical data, for instance, against all the relevant EU and internal databases.”

He also warned that they “might have a not insignificant number of Afghans” evacuated by the US and waiting now in Kosovo who could pose security concerns for the EU.

In total, there are 430 Afghans in Kosovo processed by NATO and another 2,500 Afghans in Albania who were assisted by US NGOs, he explained.

According to Salmi, it is unclear if the US would grant international protection for all these people or they would leave the Balkans and move forwards to the EU.

In addition to the terrorism threat posed by the camps in northeastern Syria and the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, Salmi mentioned the spread of violent extremist ideologies and the disruptive technologies as key security challenges for the EU./agencies

Goldman Sachs on Tuesday revised Turkey's growth forecast for 2021 upwards by one percentage point.

The American multinational investment bank and financial services company now expects the Turkish economy to expand by 10.5% overall this year.

Goldman Sachs' previous estimate for Turkey's gross domestic product (GDP) was 9.5%. It revised Turkey's 2021 growth forecast upwards to 9.5%, from 7.5%, at the beginning of September.

However, the Turkish economy's growth forecast for 2022 was revised downwards by half a percentage point.

The GDP is now expected to rise 3.5% overall next year, down from a previous estimate of 4%.

Turkey's GDP climbed 7.4% in the third quarter of 2021 from the same period last year, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) announced earlier Tuesday.

Turkey was the second-fastest growing economy in the third quarter of 2021 among the member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development after Chile, the international group said earlier./aa

A Turkish humanitarian aid group announced Tuesday that it will take part in an ongoing relief campaign in Somalia because of a climate change-related deadly drought that has killed at least six people in the past week.

"We are currently planning CR zones. We plan to donate food and water there. We regularly donate meat to the camps in Mogadishu and Baidoa every month," IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation's Somalia representative Hasan Demir told Anadolu Agency.

He said the group is feeding 1,000 families every month in the Horn of the African country.

The Gedo, Lower Juba and Bakol regions are the worst-hit areas as a mother, and five children have died due to lack of food and water, according to officials.

While livestock is dying in the hundreds, pastoralists face huge difficulties as the cattle market in parts of the country has crashed.

If you manage to find a buyer, you will get less than $10 for a sheep or goat and less than $60 for cattle compared to $70 to $90 on average for sheep and goats and $350 to $400 on average for cattle, a community activist told Anadolu Agency.

Somalia has a population of more than 15.8 million, of which 60% live in rural areas as nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists. The climate plays a key role in the nation’s economy and livelihoods as the economy is predominated by agricultural activities, according to the World Bank.

In Somalia, climate change effects from droughts and floods pose the most severe hazards to the country as it is currently battling its worst drought in more than a decade.

The government has already declared a state of humanitarian emergency because of the drought.

President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed earlier this week urged immediate assistance.

The number of people in need of humanitarian assistance is set to rise 30% next year from 5.9 million to 7.7 million, the UN warned earlier this month./aa

An estimated 37% of the world's population, or 2.9 billion people, are still offline, while a record 4.9 billion people have used the internet in 2021, a new UN report said Tuesday.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN agency for information and communication technologies, revealed strong global growth in internet use.

The estimated number of people who have used the internet surged to 4.9 billion in 2021, from 4.1 billion in 2019.

"The latest ITU data show that uptake of the internet has accelerated during the (COVID-19) pandemic," says the annual ITU report.

In 2019, the internet was used by 4.1 billion people, or 54% of the world's population.

Internet users surge

Since then, the number of users has surged by 800 million to reach 4.9 billion people in 2021 or 63% of the global population.

Of the 2.9 billion people still being offline, an estimated 96% live in developing countries, said the ITU.

And even among the 4.9 billion people counted as "internet users," many hundreds of millions may only have access to the internet on a limited basis, said the ITU.

Such online users often connect via shared devices or using connectivity speeds that significantly restrict the use of their connection.

"While almost two-thirds of the world's population is now online, there is a lot more to do to get everyone connected to the internet," said ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao.

While the access divide is close to being bridged, with 95% of the world's population now living within range of a mobile broadband network, important blind spots remain, said Doreen Bogdan-Martin, director of the ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau.

Close to 30% of Africa's rural population still lacks mobile broadband coverage.

"We can't close the digital divide if we can't measure it, and we cannot connect the unconnected if we don't know who they are, where they live, and why they remain offline," said Bogdan-Martin at a UN press conference.

She said even though the vast majority of the world's population could access the internet through mobile broadband, less than two-thirds use it.

Bogdan-Martin said there is a generational divide, with 71% of the world's population aged 15-24 is using the internet, compared to 57% of all other age groups.

"And gender remains a factor: globally, 62% of men use the internet compared with 57% of women.

"While that digital gender divide has been narrowing across all regions, women remain digitally marginalized in many of the world's poorest countries, where online access could potentially have its most powerful effect," said the ITU official.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​/agencies

Facebook's owner, Meta, was ordered Tuesday to sell American online database and search engine Giphy after a decision by a UK antitrust regulator.

The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said Facebook’s acquisition of Giphy, an American online database and search engine, would reduce competition between social media platforms and the deal has already removed Giphy as a potential challenger in the display advertising market.

CMA said Facebook would be able to increase its already significant market power in relation to other social media platforms by denying or limiting other platforms’ access to Giphy GIFs and driving more traffic to Facebook-owned sites, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram that already account for 73% of user time spent on social media in the UK.

Facebook would also be able to change the terms of access by requiring other social media platforms, such as TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat, to provide more user data to access Giphy GIFs.

The British regulator also stressed that the deal would affect the display advertising market, noting "Giphy’s advertising services had the potential to compete with Facebook’s own display advertising services."

"The CMA considers this particularly concerning given that Facebook controls nearly half of the £7 billion display advertising market in the UK," the statement said./aa