WORLD

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday a deal to supply India with S-400 air defence missile systems was being implemented despite what he said were U.S. efforts to undermine the accord.

Speaking at a news conference in India, Lavrov said India had made clear that it was a sovereign country.

The deal with Moscow puts India at risk of sanctions from the United States under a 2017 U.S. law aimed at deterring countries from buying Russian military hardware.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday (December 6, 2021) will host Russian President Vladimir Putin for the 21st India-Russia Annual Summit in New Delhi.

This is the first face-to-face meeting between the two leaders after their rendezvous on the side-lines of the BRICS Summit in Brasilia in November 2019.

During the meeting which is likely to take place at 5:30 pm at the Hyderabad House in the national capital, the two leaders will review the state and prospects of bilateral relations and discuss ways to further strengthen the strategic partnership between the two countries. 

The European Union's public health agency said on Thursday that the Omicron variant could be responsible for more than half of all Covid-19 infections in Europe within a few months, but no cases of severe disease had yet been identified in the region.

The estimate could lend weight to preliminary information about the very high transmissibility of the Omicron variant, above that of the Delta variant, which before Omicron was considered the most contagious of the main coronavirus strains.

"Based on mathematical modelling conducted by ECDC, there are indications that Omicron could cause over half of all SARS-CoV-2 infections in the EU/EEA within the next few months," the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said in a statement.

The new Omicron coronavirus variant has been confirmed in 23 .countries and their number is expected to rise, Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday.

Tedros said the emergence of the Omicron variant has understandably captured global attention.

"At least 23 countries from five of six WHO regions have now reported cases of Omicron and we expect that number to grow. WHO takes this development extremely seriously," Tedros during a press conference.

WHO takes this development extremely seriously, and so should every country. But it should not surprise us. This is what viruses do. And it's what this virus will continue to do, as we long as we allow it to continue spreading,"he added.

Barbados ditched Britain's Queen Elizabeth as head of state, forging a new republic on Tuesday with its first-ever president and severing its last remaining colonial bonds nearly 400 years after the first English ships arrived at the Caribbean island. The decision means the number of Commonwealth realms—sovereign states with the British monarch as its head—has decreased to 15.

The island nation located between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean has a population of 97000 and depends primarily on the tourism sector.

The nation ‘down-under is the sixth-largest country in the world in terms of size and has a population of over 2.5 crore.