JAPAN
Foreign arrivals suspended
Japan is barring entry of all nonresident foreign nationals as a precaution against a new and potentially more contagious strain of COVID-19 that has spread across the UK. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the entry ban would start today and last through Jan. 31. Last week, Japan banned nonresident foreigners coming from the UK and South Africa after confirming the new strain in seven people — five from the UK who tested positive at airports and two others in Tokyo. Japan is also suspending the exemption of a 14-day quarantine for Japanese nationals and resident foreigners in a short-track program that began last month. The entrants now must carry proof of a negative test 72 hours prior to departure for Japan and self-isolate for two weeks after arrival. Japan has confirmed a total of 217,312 COVID-19 cases including 3,213 deaths, up 3,700 from the previous 24-hour period.
PHILIPINES
UK flight ban extended
President Rodrigo Duterte extended a ban on flights from the UK by two weeks, saying that he is open to reinstating tighter movement curbs if COVID-19 infections spike. Returning to some form of a lockdown “is a possibility if the severity in numbers will demand that we take corrective measures immediately,” Duterte said at a meeting of the nation’s task force handling the COVID-19 pandemic on Saturday. The Philippines is facing Southeast Asia’s second-worst COVID-19 outbreak, with more than 469,000 cases as of Satuday. The suspension of flights from the UK, which was due to end on Thursday, would be extended for two weeks, and travelers who transit through the UK where a more infectious COVID-19 strain has recently been found would face 14 days in quarantine upon arrival, according to the transcript of the meeting. Duterte also called on the US to provide his country with at least 20 million vaccines immediately, saying that he would terminate the Philippines-US Visiting Forces Agreement if Washington fails to deliver the doses. “No vaccine, no stay here,” Duterte said of the military deal the US has sought to extend.
PAKISTAN
Military chopper crash kills 4
A military helicopter has crashed in mountainous northern Pakistan, killing four soldiers including the two pilots, the army said. The chopper crashed in the Gilgit-Baltistan region on Saturday “due to technical reasons.” Pakistan has a checkered military and civilian aviation safety record, with frequent plane and helicopter crashes in the past few years. Pakistan International Airlines this year came under heavy scrutiny after one of its planes came down among houses in the country’s largest city of Karachi, killing 98 people.
IRAN
Avalanches kill 10 people
A series of avalanches killed 10 people in a mountainous area north of Tehran, state TV reported yesterday. The report said that rescue teams were searching for a number of missing people after the avalanches struck in four different areas. State TV broadcast footage of a helicopter rescue operation on the Tochal and Kolakchal peaks of the Alborz mountain chain overlooking the capital showing Red Crescent personnel carrying a body on a stretcher along a snowy mountainside. A member of the Red Crescent team said that the rescue mission was complicated by “bad weather and snow.” The incidents happened on Friday following strong winds and snowfall a day earlier. The Alborz mountain range is popular on weekends for hiking.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country