The world reported the highest global tally of COVID-19 cases last week, and while the omicron variant spreading like a tsunami may appear milder, it hospitalizes and kills people, the World Health Organization chief said Thursday.

WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus said at the organization's first webinar of 2022 that "while omicron does appear to be less severe compared to delta, especially in those vaccinated, it does not mean it should be categorized as 'mild.'

"Just like previous variants, omicron is hospitalizing people, and it is killing people," Tedros noted.

He said the "tsunami of cases is so huge and quick" and it is overwhelming the world's health systems.

During the week from Dec. 27, 2021 to Jan. 2, 2022, following a gradual increase since October, the global number of new cases jumped up by 71% compared to the previous week, while the number of new deaths decreased by 10%, according to WHO. This corresponds to just under 9.5 million new cases and over 41,000 new deaths reported during the last week.

To end the acute stage of the pandemic, countries need to share highly effective scientific tools fairly and quickly with the world, he urged.

"Vaccine inequity and health inequity overall were the biggest failures of last year," said Tedros and noted that on current trajectories that 109 countries will miss the WHO's target of fully vaccinating 70% of the world's population by mid-2022 said Tedros.

'Vaccine inequity kills'

"Vaccine inequity is a killer of people and jobs, and it undermines a global economic recovery."

The essence of the disparity is that some countries are moving toward vaccinating citizens a fourth time, while others have not even had enough regular supply to vaccinate their health workers and those at most risk, said the WHO head.

He had asked everyone to make a New Year's resolution to get behind the campaign to vaccinate 70% of people worldwide by the middle of 2022.

The WHO chief said cases reported worldwide last week were an underestimate because the numbers do not reflect testing backlogs from burdened surveillance systems, holidays in many parts of the world, and positive self-tests that were not registered.

The WHO's coronavirus technical lead, Maria Van Kerkhove, said: "The vaccines that are available for COVID-19 work against all variants that are circulating.

She cautioned against people who speculate that the omicron would be the last coronavirus strain.

"Unfortunately, omicron will not be the last variant, the virus continues to evolve," she said.

WHO has so far confirmed over 296.4 million coronavirus infections globally and registered more than 5.46 million deaths since the disease came to the fore two years ago after being discovered in China./aa

Iran said Thursday South Korea is "obliged" to release its frozen assets, and that US sanctions cannot justify debt nonpayment.

Ali Bagheri, Iran's deputy foreign minister, made the remarks on Thursday during a meeting with his South Korean counterpart Choi Jong-kun on the sidelines of the ongoing nuclear deal talks in Vienna, according to state-run media, citing the Foreign Ministry in Tehran.

Bagheri, who is heading Iran's 40-member delegation in Vienna talks, told the senior South Korean diplomat that they are obliged to release the blocked money "irrespective of the outcome" of ongoing nuclear deal talks.

Relations between the two countries have frayed in recent years, with Tehran accusing Seoul of freezing more than $7 billion in foreign exchange reserves under US pressure.

South Korea's Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that a delegation led by Choi Jong-Kun, vice minister of foreign affairs, was traveling to Vienna to "explore ways to resolve the issue of frozen Iranian assets in Korea."

Later, in a tweet, Choi declared that his government will "render diplomatic assistance as a custodian of the frozen funds, a defender of NPT (nuclear non-proliferation treaty), and the nation seeking complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" during the talks in Vienna.

Dark point’ in bilateral ties

Bagheri, in his meeting with Choi at the Iranian Embassy in Vienna, said Seoul's "illegal and unjustifiable refusal" to repay its debt to Iran will be a "dark point in the history of relations" between the two countries.

According to sources in Vienna, Bagheri used "tough language" in talks with his South Korean counterpart, and called for the return of Iran's assets "without further delay."

Iranian officials say the meeting was "not directly related" to ongoing negotiations between Iran and the P4+1 (Russia, China, France, the UK, and Germany) aimed at reviving the 2015 nuclear deal and de-escalating tensions between Tehran and Washington.

Thursday's meeting between the sides came two months after Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian raised the issue with his South Korean counterpart Choun Yunyong, criticizing Seoul for not unfreezing the country's assets.

South Korea’s top diplomat in turn expressed concern over Iran's ban on imports of Korean home appliances, and called for resolving the issue in a friendly manner.

Choi also met the US special envoy for Iran, Robert Malley, as well as European Union representatives currently participating in the Vienna talks.

Separately, Abdollahian described the ongoing Vienna talks as "proceeding in the right direction."

He said his country's initiatives "brought the talks back on track," calling the atmosphere of the talks "constructive."/aa

Turkiye's first mini satellite Grizu-263A, designed by the Grizu-263 Space Team comprising students from the Engineering Faculty of Zonguldak Bulent Ecevit University (BEU), will be launched into space on Jan. 13 with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

Bulent Ekmekci, the counselor to the Grizu-263 Space Team, told the media that the team has achieved significant successes at the national and international levels during the process.

“We are happy that years of hard work will now come to fruition. Our mini satellite has been designed, integrated into the rocket, and is now awaiting launch,” he said, adding, “We look forward to the new horizons that will open for our team and our city with the success of this project.”

Established in 2016 by the BEU students in the Black Sea province of Zonguldak, Grizu-263 aims to work on space and satellite technologies and participate in international competitions.

The team was named after a firedamp explosion that killed 263 miners in the Kozlu district in 1992. The Turkish word for firedamp is grizu.

The project is carried out with the technical support of the Istanbul Technical University Space Systems Test Laboratory, as well as the Amateur Satellite Technologies Association of Turkiye and TU Delft University.

The space team members are looking forward to the day when the cube satellite of 5x5x5 centimeters (2x2x2 inch), which they prepared with the "Turkiye's first pocket-cube satellite" project, will be launched into space.

The satellite is designed to operate in a low earth orbit of roughly 525 kilometers for four years and eight months.

PocketQubes minimize rocket launch costs, production time, and potential satellite damage, offering the producer an advantage in space technologies.

In its inaugural year, the eight-person team participated in the American Astronautical Society's CanSat model satellite competition, which was sponsored by NASA, Lockheed Martin, Kratos Space, Praxis Inc, Siemens, and the US Naval Research Laboratory.

Grizu-263 finished 25th out of 96 teams in the competition, which is regarded as the most prestigious student competition in the model satellite field worldwide.

Grizu-263 finished second in their second attempt at CanSat.

In addition to CanSat, the team created a unit with some members to compete in the Teknofest Turksat Model Satellite Competition in Turkiye, where they placed first. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan presented them with the award at Teknofest./aa

A Russia-led military alliance on Thursday sent its peacekeeping troops to Kazakhstan, where massive riots stemming from nationwide protests over high fuel prices have led to a state of emergency and the resignation of the government.

The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) said in a statement that the organization decided to send the peacekeeping forces to Kazakhstan to stabilize and normalize the situation in the country.

Underlining that these forces consist of military units from Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, it said there are military units of the Russian Airborne Forces among the peacekeeping forces of the CSTO.

It added that the peacekeeping forces were sent by the Russian Air Force planes.

Earlier, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev requested help from the CSTO, a military alliance that brings together six former Soviet republics and Russia to put an end to the riots in the country, which he described as “a terrorist threat.”

The European Union noted Tokayev’s decision on asking “assistance from the heads of CSTO to send peacekeeping forces to Kazakhstan for a limited period of time in order to stabilize the situation,” Nabila Massrali, the spokeswoman for the EU diplomatic service said on Thursday at the European Commission’s daily news conference.

At the same time, she reminded that “such an intervention should respect the sovereignty and the independence of Kazakhstan.”

In a statement released on Wednesday, the bloc called on all sides involved in the unrest in Kazakhstan to show restraint and responsibility.

Belarusian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that they support the efforts of the Kazakhstan administration to restore normal life in the country. Belarusian soldiers are being sent to Kazakhstan within the CSTO peacekeeping force, it said.

"Belarus is fully ready to provide assistance to the friendly Kazakh people and will fulfill its alliance obligations," it stressed.

Protests in former Soviet country

The protests broke out on Jan. 2, when drivers in the city of Zhanaozen in the country’s oil-rich Mangystau region staged demonstrations against huge price hikes for liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), which later spread to the city of Aktau.

Supportive protests in the western cities of Atyrau, Aktobe, and Oral, where the country’s petroleum and natural gas reserves are located, spread to other corners of Kazakhstan and turned into public demonstrations.

As the protests spread across the country, Tokayev declared a state of emergency in the city of Almaty and the Mangystau region for Jan. 5-19 to maintain public security. He also imposed a curfew in Almaty, the country’s former capital, where thousands of people had taken to the streets.

While police used stun grenades and teargas to disperse the protesters, they responded with stones. Clashes were also reported between the police and demonstrators.

Tokayev accepted the government’s resignation in a presidential decree. Later, demonstrations reached a nationwide level, followed by a countrywide state of emergency.

The government also decided Wednesday to introduce price controls on LPG, gasoline, diesel fuel, and basic food products for 180 days./aa

The number of COVID-19 cases has increased by 100% over the past seven days compared to the previous week in Europe, where the new omicron variant of the coronavirus has gradually increased its impact.

At the end of last year, Tedros Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization chief, said he was very concerned about the "tsunami effect" of the omicron variant.

Tedros warned that the number of cases worldwide would increase due to the rapid contagiousness of omicron while the delta variant is circulating simultaneously.

According to the Worldometers website that compiles COVID-19 data from around the world, the total cases across Europe have increased by 65% compared to the previous week.

While Greece was one of the countries with the highest increase rate by 199%, the total number of infections over the last seven days in the country was 253,596.

In Finland, more than 50,280 cases were detected last week, with a 231% rise. France recorded over 1.38 million cases with an 88% increase rate.

There was a slight rise in the number of weekly fatalities in Europe. The fatality rate increased by 132% in the UK, where 1,195 people died in the past seven days.

The rise in fatalities compared to the previous week was 14% in France, 28% in Spain, 5% in Bulgaria, and 62% in Finland.

Also, COVID-19-related deaths in Germany, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium decreased compared to the week before.

Since December 2019, the pandemic has claimed over 5.46 million lives in at least 192 countries and regions, with more than 297.95 million cases reported worldwide, according to the US’ Johns Hopkins University./aa

Late politician Dr. Sadik Ahmet, who fought for democratic fights of the Western Thrace Turkish minority in Greece for years, is commemorated on his 75th birth anniversary.

Ahmet was born on Jan. 7, 1947, in Gumulcine (Komotini) of Western Thrace and served there for years both as a doctor and community leader.

Once his medical training in Ankara and Thessaloniki was over, he completed his mandatory military service as a Greek citizen, which lasted for about three years.

Ahmet started to serve as a medical doctor in 1978, then stepped into action to draw attention to the political pressure on the Turkish minority of Western Thrace at a time when Turkish-Greek relations were strained due to the Cyprus issue.

In 1985, he launched a petition to make the Turkish minority to be heard by the international community, but he was sentenced to prison.

Ahmet was closely monitoring many problems faced by the Turkish minority in the Western Thrace region of Greece.

The Greek government did not recognize the Turkish identity of the minority and instead used the term "Muslim minority" to define them, and further stripped the citizenship of tens of thousands of people under the pretext of Article 19 of the constitution. He was then elected the first independent lawmaker in 1989 with votes of Turks of the Western Thrace, but his lawmaker status was annulled within a few months.

Ahmet served two months in prison for referring to the minority as "Turkish" during his speeches in 1990, while he was elected a lawmaker for the second time the same year. In 1991, he founded the Friendship, Equality and Peace Party -- the first and to date the only political party of Greece’s Turkish minority.

Greece then changed the electoral system and introduced a %3 threshold, which stipulated that an independent candidate had to receive 3% of the total votes across the country, not just in the region.

Given Greece has a population of some 11 million, it was no longer possible for the Turks in the Western Thrace to have another independent lawmaker apart from Sadik Ahmet as they have a population of 150,000.

On July 24, 1995, the anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne -- the agreement which guarantees the rights of the Turkish minority in Greece -- Ahmet was killed in a suspicious car crash at the age of 48.

Starting in the early 1990s, the persecution of the Turks of Western Thrace has gradually softened, and there have been significant advances towards restoring their rights as citizens.

However, Greece still denies the ethnic Turkish identity of the minority in Western Thrace, and bans all associations that include the word "Turkish" in their name./aa

ExxonMobil made two oil discoveries in the prolific Stabroek block offshore Guyana, increasing the already existing 10 billion oil-equivalent barrels of resources in the region, the company announced in a statement Wednesday.

The discovery at the Fangtooth-1 well, drilled at a water depth of 6,030 feet (1,838 meters), consists of high-quality, oil-bearing sandstone reservoirs while the Lau Lau-1 well was drilled at a depth of 4,793 feet (1,461 meters) in high-quality hydrocarbon-bearing sandstone reservoirs.

The company said the new projects would drive investment in the country, with more than 3,200 Guyanese supporting project activities on and offshore.

Together with its key contractors, ExxonMobil has spent more than $540 million with more than 800 local companies since 2015.

“The Fangtooth discovery is a successful result of our strategy to test deeper prospectivity, and the Lau Lau discovery adds to the large inventory of development opportunities in the southeast part of the Stabroek block,” said Mike Cousins, senior vice president of exploration and new ventures at ExxonMobil./aa

Oil prices fell on Thursday after a massive increase in US gasoline inventories signaled a shrinking demand in the world’s largest oil-consuming country.

International benchmark Brent crude was trading at $80.06 per barrel at 1223 GMT with a 0.92% fall after closing the previous session at $80.80 a barrel.

American benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) traded at $77.11 per barrel at the same time for a 0.95% loss after it ended the previous session at $77.85 a barrel.

The downward price movement of Brent came after the benchmark rose to $81.50 a barrel during the previous session after a surprise rise in US gasoline stocks.

US gasoline inventories increased by 10.1 million barrels during the week ending Dec. 31, posting the biggest one-week surge since April 2020.

Helping to cap further price declines, crude oil inventories fell by 2.1 million barrels to 417.9 million barrels, far below the market expectation of a 3.4 million-barrel drop.

The price slump on Thursday followed the decision made on Tuesday by the 23-members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies, known as OPEC+, to extend the current plan to increase output by 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) through February.

In their Joint Technical Committee (JTC) meeting on Monday, OPEC+ countries issued positive projections over the course of the pandemic with expectations that its impact would be mild and short-lived, as the world becomes better equipped to manage COVID-19 and its related challenges.

Tuesday’s decision cemented the positive outlook of the group in relieving concerns over the supply and demand balance in the market./agencies

Raids by armed extremists have forced the closure of more than 3,000 schools in Burkina Faso, affecting thousands of students and teachers, the government said Wednesday.

The Ministry of National Education, Literacy, and the Promotion of National Languages said that as of Dec. 31, 2021, 3,280 schools had been closed.

The figure accounts for 13.09% of the country's schools or 511,221 students and 14,901 teachers.

"This is very impressive and there are reasons for concern," government spokesman Alkassoum Maiga said at a press briefing.

However, 205 schools involving 39,812 students and 1,099 teachers have been reopened and 25 schools have also been relocated, according to Maiga.

"This allows us to meet the education imperative, especially for those in exam classes," he said, pointing to the re-enrollment of 135,981 students whose parents are internally displaced persons (IDPs).

In May 2021, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) noted that closures affected 304,450 students, including 156,456 boys and 147,994 girls, and 11,068 teachers, including 7,259 men and 3,809 women, noting "a fairly turbulent security situation."

The West African country has been the target of recurring terrorist attacks since 2015.

After “the first Burkinabe school attacks were recorded in 2017, the number and severity of these attacks have been on the rise,” according to Human Right Watch.

"School attacks and disruptions to schooling have reduced the quality of education provided and caused many students to fall behind academically," the organization noted.

Terrorism has also caused the internal displacement of more than 1.4 million people and food insecurity for more than 2.8 million people, OCHA reported./agencies

  With the number of daily new COVID cases exceeding the level of 1,000, steps have been accelerated to contain the new omicron variant, and prevent its spread in the country. These steps include suspending social events, working on the possibility of giving the fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to specific groups, and continuing to urge citizens who are abroad to return to the country, reports Al-Rai daily. The Cabinet, during its meeting held on Monday, decided to temporarily suspend all social events of all kinds that are held in closed places, starting from Sunday, January 9 until February 28.

It also decided to obligate all those coming to the country to undergo a PCR test within 72 hours prior to arrival to determine the passenger is free of COVID-19 infection, as of Tuesday. Previously, the period for the PCR test was set at 48 hours. In parallel with the ongoing third dose campaign, informed sources revealed a tendency to start providing the fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to specific groups, including people with weak immunity, and some others who are most at risk of infection.

They indicated that this step is similar to what some countries have started doing. According to a recent announcement issued by the Pfizer CEO Albert Borla, a fourth dose may be needed, after preliminary research showed that the omicron variant could undermine the antibodies produced by the COVID-19 vaccine. The Ministry of Health has decided to postpone the convening of the specialized committees for overseas treatment starting from next Sunday until further notice, and until the global epidemiological situation improves, except for critical cases for which the treating authority decides there is no treatment inside Kuwait.

These measures were decided after the daily numbers recorded a significant jump in the number of infections, which reached 982 on Monday, which is an increase of 62 percent compared to the rate on Sunday, which was 609 cases, and reached 1,482 cases on Tuesday. However, the clinical situation remained stable, as no new deaths were recorded. The number of cases in intensive care reached 8 on Monday and 9 on Tuesday. With the continued deterioration of the health situation in various countries, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and embassies have been urging citizens who are abroad to return to the country. After such calls were made to citizens who are in the United Kingdom, France and Germany on Sunday, similar calls were made on Monday to those in Spain, Ukraine, Italy, Cyprus, Turkey and Morocco./ arabtimesonline