Covid live: Record numbers admitted to US hospitals with coronavirus; Sweden to introduce stricter curbs

Over 132,000 patients currently on US wards with Covid; Swedish measures include work from home mandate

Two of New Zealand’s most prominent Covid-19 experts have warned that the country is unprepared to prevent the health system from being overloaded by an Omicron outbreak, with likely fatal consequences.

Otago University’s Dr Nick Wilson and Dr Michael Baker also said it was only a “matter of weeks” before the highly transmissible variant seeped into the community due to border failures.

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Helen Mirren: is the Israeli icon Golda Meir a role too far for the dame who does it all?

She has played the Queen and a gangster’s moll but her latest casting has sparked controversy

Nobody is quite what they seem. And actors? Well, for actors that’s the job. Dame Helen Mirren, as well as being herself for 76 years, has by now notably been Lady Macbeth, a London gangster’s moll, a thief’s wife, an alcoholic cop, an action hero, Prospero and also a British monarch at least four times. Now she takes on Golda Meir, the late prime minister of Israel, in a new biopic, and the casting has caused controversy.

The choice of a non-Jewish actor to star as a woman with such a prominent place in the history of Israel has prompted irritation on both sides of the argument. Another illustrious dame, Maureen Lipman, was first to raise the issue – or “blast” Mirren, according to some reports last week – and then Dame Esther Rantzen defended the director’s choice. It is the latest instance of a ‘Jewface’ row, a backlash to the assignment of a major Jewish role to someone not from that minority background.

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Palestinian man to end hunger strike after Israel agrees to release

Hisham Abu Hawash, who has been held without charge for more than a year, began refusing food in August

A Palestinian man on a hunger strike in protest against detention without charge has agreed to end his fast after a deal was struck for his release owing to fears of unrest if he died.

Hisham Abu Hawash, 40, a construction worker from Dura in the West Bank, had previously served time in an Israeli jail after pleading guilty to terrorism offences related to membership of Islamic Jihad. He was rearrested and has been held without charge or trial for more than a year, and began refusing food in August.

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Emma Watson pro-Palestinian post sparks antisemitism row

Israeli officials attack actor’s message, and are accused of ‘cynical weaponisation’ of term

Emma Watson has been accused of antisemitism by Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations after she posted a message of support for the Palestinian cause.

Watson, best known for playing Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films, posted an image on Instagram showing a photograph of a pro-Palestinian protest with the banner “Solidarity is a Verb” written across it. It was accompanied with a quote about the meaning of solidarity from the intersectional feminist scholar Sara Ahmed.

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Italy reports record 170,844 cases and 259 deaths; fourth jab gives five-fold antibody boost, study says – as it happened

There were 12,912 people in hospital in Italy; Israel PM says study shows safety of fourth dose and increase in antibodies a week after jab

Over to Europe and Germany is reporting another 30,561 new coronavirus cases and 356 deaths, according to recently released data from the Robert Koch Institute.

South Korea has just released its daily Covid report.

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Covid live news: Boris Johnson warns of pressure on NHS for weeks as Omicron ‘continues to surge’ in UK

Latest updates: UK prime minister warns hospitals will be under ‘considerable’ pressure for the ‘next couple of weeks and maybe more’

Québec, Canada proceeded with the first of three planned closures of non-essential retail stores on Sunday as the provincial government attempts to curb a new Covid wave and strain on hospitals.

Québec premier Francois Legault announced last week that the majority of the province’s stores would be closed for the next three Sundays, with the exception of pharmacies, convenience stores and petrol stations.

The last thing businesses need during these difficult times is additional restrictions. We must leave the choice to businesses to open or close at the time that makes the most sense for them, their employees and their customers.

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German optimism over Omicron as Europe dampens new year revelry

Covid expert hopeful for ‘relatively normal’ winter 2022 but prevalence limits celebrations across continent

Germany’s leading coronavirus expert has expressed optimism that his country could expect a “relatively normal” winter in 2022 as Europe prepared to ring in the new year in muted fashion, with many countries limiting celebrations.

As the highly transmissible Omicron variant fuels a record-breaking surge in Covid infections across the continent, many governments have curtailed mass public gatherings and either closed or imposed curfews on nightclubs.

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Desmond Tutu’s devotion to the planet and to justice for all | Letters

Readers commemorate the late South African archbishop, and the causes of peace, equality and environmentalism that he championed

Your informative obituary of Archbishop Desmond Tutu (26 December) missed an important dimension – his warnings on the need to save the planet. In March 2004, he delivered a lecture entitled God’s Word and World Politics at the United Nations as part of Kofi Annan’s public lecture series on cutting-edge topics in the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences and the arts.

The archbishop said: “Ecological concerns are a deeply religious, spiritual matter. To pollute the environment, to be responsible for a disastrous warming, is not just wrong and should be a criminal offence; it is certainly morally wrong. It is a sin.”
Prof Abiodun Williams
Tufts University

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Australian man ‘cannot leave Israel for 8,000 years’ over unpaid child support

Noam Huppert says he is subject to travel ban until the year 9999 because he owes £1.8m to ex-wife

An Australian national living in Israel has said he is subject to an 8,000-year travel ban unless he pays an outstanding £1.8m in child support payments.

Noam Huppert, a 44-year-old analytical chemist working for a pharmaceutical company, is not allowed to leave Israel until 31 December 9999 owing to a 2013 “stay of exit” order handed down after a family court case was brought by his ex-wife, according to news.com.au.

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Flames over Syrian port after reported Israeli airstrike – video

An Israeli airstrike hit Syria’s Latakia port before dawn on Tuesday, the second such attack on the cargo hub this month, Syrian state media reported. Since the outbreak of Syria’s civil war in 2011, Israel has routinely carried out airstrikes on its neighbour, mostly targeting Syrian government troops. The Israeli military has in the past defended the strikes as a necessary measure to prevent its enemy Iran from gaining a foothold on its doorstep

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Israeli airstrike sets port of Latakia ablaze, says Syrian media

Second attack on cargo hub this month reported to have caused ‘significant material damage’

An Israeli airstrike hit Syria’s Latakia port before dawn on Tuesday, sparking a fire that lit up the Mediterranean seafront in the second such attack on the cargo hub this month, Syrian state media reported.

Since the outbreak of Syria’s civil war in 2011, Israel has routinely carried out airstrikes on its neighbour, mostly targeting Syrian government troops as well as allied Iran-backed forces and Hezbollah fighters.

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Israeli archaeologists find treasure trove among Mediterranean shipwrecks

Hundreds of Roman and medieval coins and artefacts uncovered near ancient city of Caesarea

Archaeologists in Israel have discovered the remnants of two shipwrecks off the Mediterranean coast, replete with a sunken trove of hundreds Roman and medieval silver coins.

The finds made near the ancient city of Caesarea were dated to the Roman and Mamluk periods, about 1,700 and 600 years ago, archaeologists said. They include hundreds of Roman silver and bronze coins dating to the mid-third century, as well as more than 500 silver coins from the middle ages found amid the sediment.

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Covid live: fourth vaccine dose ‘could be needed against Omicron’; France ‘could soon have 100,000 cases per day’

Latest updates: German health minister says ‘offensive booster campaign’ needed to fight variant; French health minister says Omicron will be dominant in early January

Researchers in Melbourne, Australia, have turned one of the world’s most-used blood-thinning drugs into a nasal spray which they hope could prevent Covid-19 transmission.

Northern Health medical divisional director Don Campbell and researchers at Melbourne, Monash and Oxford Universities found that heparin can block the transmission of Covid-19 and prevent infection.

It won’t matter if a new variant comes along, this drug will block that protein from infecting the cells.

I’m very confident that we can demonstrate that it will work, and people will be using this before they go to the shops and before they go to school.”

Due to large-scale flooding near the Port of Vancouver … and the global supply chain crunch caused by the coronavirus pandemic, there are delays in the supply of potatoes.”

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Israeli PM announces fourth Covid jab for over-60s to tackle Omicron

Booster will also be available to medical teams and immunodeficient people four months after third dose

Israel is set to become the first country in the world to offer a fourth dose of Covid-19 vaccines in an effort to protect against the Omicron variant.

People over the age of 60 and healthcare workers will be eligible for a second booster shot, the prime minister, Naftali Bennett, said on Tuesday night, following a recommendation made by Israel’s panel of pandemic experts.

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Trump’s Peace review: dysfunction and accord in US Israel policy

Barak Ravid has written a fascinating account of four chaotic years in which some progress was nonetheless made

Trump’s Peace is a blockbuster of a book. Barak Ravid captures the 45th president saying “Fuck him” to Benjamin Netanyahu and reducing American Jews to antisemitic caricatures. Imagine the Republican reaction if Barack Obama had done that. Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham would plotz. But Trump? Crickets.

Ravid also delivers a mesmerizing tick-tock of the making of the Abraham Accords, the normalization of Israel’s relations with four non-neighboring Arab states.

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UN-backed investigator into possible Yemen war crimes targeted by spyware

Exclusive: Analysis of Kamel Jendoubi’s mobile phone reveals he was targeted in August 2019

The mobile phone of a UN-backed investigator who was examining possible war crimes in Yemen was targeted with spyware made by Israel’s NSO Group, a new forensic analysis of the device has revealed.

Kamel Jendoubi, a Tunisian who served as the chairman of the now defunct Group of Eminent Experts in Yemen (GEE)– a panel mandated by the UN to investigate possible war crimes – was targeted in August 2019, according to an analysis of his mobile phone by experts at Amnesty International and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.

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‘We are family’: the Israelis sharing life and hope with Palestinians

Participants in a West Bank immersive language project tell of the strong bonds being forged that counter the rise in settler violence

In the plywood hut in which Palestinian Iman al-Hathalin and her family have lived since their home was bulldozed by the Israeli authorities in 2014, the warmth from a rickety samovar is welcome. Outside the only window, the winter sky is blinding white: it floods the room with an icy light and sends shadows dancing up the flimsy walls.

Everyone has been ill lately, it seems, including Hathalin’s two-year-old daughter, who sleeps fitfully on her lap, and Maya Mark, her Arabic-speaking Israeli guest. “It is not exaggerating to say Maya is like my sister,” the 28-year-old said. “I was so worried when she was sick. We are family.”

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Israel warns diplomacy proving fruitless in Iran nuclear talks

Officials hopeful that US and European nations will agree Tehran is in breach of its obligations

Tehran’s approach to talks on its nuclear programme in Vienna has become so uncompromising according to Israel’s lead diplomat on Iran, Joshua Zarka, that they “have reached the last stretch of diplomacy”.

Israeli officials said they were hopeful that the US and European nations would agree to put an emergency motion to the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) stating that Iran was in breach of its obligations under the non-proliferation treaty (NPT) and the 2015 nuclear deal.

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Tel Aviv: poverty and eviction in the world’s most expensive city

Residents of Givat Amal Bet neighbourhood forced out to make way for further gentrification

In one of Tel Aviv’s most affluent neighbourhoods, a collection of ramshackle one-storey homes with rusting roofs known as Givat Amal Bet still sits in the shadow of the high-rise towers looming above.

Israel’s economic centre has recently been named the world’s most expensive city to live in, overtaking Paris and Singapore in the 2021 rankings compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). As the Mediterranean city’s reputation as a global tech hub continues to attract foreign investment, however, and prices for goods and services soar as Israel’s economy makes a strong recovery from the pandemic, locals fear the widening gap between rich and poor is pushing out working-class residents and creating damaging new social divisions.

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Israel’s PM, Naftali Bennett, to visit UAE to discuss deepening ties

Talks between PM and crown prince of Abu Dhabi come after full diplomatic links brokered last year

Naftali Bennett is to make the first official visit by an Israeli prime minister to the United Arab Emirates since the two countries established diplomatic ties last year.

On Monday, Bennett will meet Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, to discuss “deepening the ties between Israel and the UAE, especially economic and regional issues,” his office said.

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