Lebanon's caretaker energy minister cautioned on Thursday that if money to buy fuel for power plants is not secured by the end of the month, the country will be plunged into "absolute darkness."
Since the end of the civil war in Lebanon in 1975, power outages have been frequent, forcing Lebanese to pay a second power bill to private generators for three to 12 hours per day during the outages.
The country is currently experiencing its worst economic downturn in decades, and it is rapidly running out of hard currency to support imports.
According to sources, Turkish police apprehended 18 Chinese nationals who rented nine separate villas in Istanbul's Silivri and Büyükçekmece districts to run a fake cryptocurrency call center and swindle funds.
The raid was carried out after two of the workers, who had been forced to work for the gang, fled the posh villa complex in the two districts and sought assistance from the Chinese consulate.
The two men who made the appeal to the Chinese Consulate in Istanbul, Hongwu Z. (29), and Kang W. (28), told officials that they came to Turkey after seeing a job posting in the financial sector.
The Robert Koch Institute predicts a Germany-wide incidence at Easter that is well above that at Christmas 2020. The reason is the rapid spread of virus variant B.1.1.7.
In the current Covid-19 management report, the RKI writes that the weekly number of cases is growing "very evenly" and that it has doubled about every 12 days in the past few weeks.
"The RKI therefore expects the 7-day incidence to show a significantly steeper increase overall from week 10 [current week, editor's note]." A graphic in the report shows how steep this could be. Up to calendar week 15, i.e. the week after Easter,
The number of Covid 19 vaccination doses administered in Germany has risen to more than 8.86 million. This emerges from the current vaccination rate monitoring by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI).
According to this, the rate of first vaccinations is now 7.35 percent, that of second vaccinations is 3.30 percent - this corresponds to almost 2.75 million fully vaccinated people. The currently vaccinated preparations are only fully vaccinated after two vaccinations.
To do this, the second dose has to be injected about three weeks after the first. The progress of vaccination varies significantly depending on the federal state:
On Saturday (March 13th), Japanese weather authorities are warning of heavy rains in the prefectures of #Saitama, #Chiba, #Tokyo and #Kanagawa.Warnings are also issued against storm conditions in #Miyagi and #Fukushima prefectures.
In response to a request from acting Moldovan Prime Minister Aureliu Ciocoi to Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE's Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, the UAE donated 2,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines
to the Republic of Moldova. Aureliu Ciocoi expressed gratitude to the authorities in Abu Dhabi for their gesture of solidarity, stating that the arrival of the vaccines confirms the Republic of Moldova's good and cooperative relations with the United Arab Emirates.
“The Government of the Republic of Moldova will continue to promote an active dialogue with the foreign partners at bilateral level so as to achieve the strategic objective of ensuring access to COVID-19 vaccines,” says a press release of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
According to the Ministry of Health, the corona "emergency brake" agreed between the federal and state governments in North Rhine-Westphalia should not automatically take effect if the state-wide seven-day incidence of 100 is exceeded.
First of all, it should be checked what circumstances led to the excess, said a spokesman for Health Minister Karl-Josef Laumann of the "Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung".
"If the numbers increase just because of the many additional tests in an otherwise stable infection process, this must be taken into account in further evaluations."