COVID battle far from over — experts
South Korea pardons ex-president
SEOUL - South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in granted a pardon to former president Park Geun-hye, who is in prison after being convicted of corruption, the justice ministry said on Friday, amid a tight presidential race.
Park, 69, became South Korea’s first democratically elected leader to be thrown out of office when the Constitutional Court upheld a parliament vote in 2017 to impeach her over a scandal that also landed the heads of two conglomerates, including Samsung Electronics, in jail.
She was brought down after being found guilty of colluding with a confidante to receive tens of billions of won from major conglomerates to help her family and fund nonprofit foundations she owned.
In January, South Korea’s top court upheld a 20-year prison sentence for Park on the graft charges that finalised her downfall, bringing an end to the legal process and for the first time raising the possibility of a pardon.
But Park’s predecessor Lee Myung-bak, who is also imprisoned on corruption charges, was not pardoned.
JOHANNESBURG/LONDON Omicron advanced across the world on Thursday, with health experts warning the battle against the COVID-19 variant was far from over despite two drugmakers saying their vaccines protected against it and signs it carries a lower risk of hospitalisation.
Coronavirus infections have soared wherever the highly infectious omicron variant has spread, triggering new restrictions in many countries and record new cases.
But in another glimmer of hope two days before Christmas, a US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) official said data indicated that both Merck & Co Inc’s and Pfizer Inc’s COVID-19 anti-virals are effective against the variant.
There were encouraging signs too about hospitalisation rates from Britain and South Africa, although the head of a leading African health agency joined the World Health Organization in cautioning that it was too soon to draw broader conclusions.
“Let’s be careful not to extrapolate what we are seeing in South
Africa across the continent, or across the world,” Africa Centres for Disease Control (CDC) chief John Nkengasong said.
Nevertheless, US stock indexes and yields on US Treasuries both climbed on Thursday, partly on new optimism after omicron helped ratchet up market volatility for much of the last month of 2021.
“Today is a very calm day. It’s the relief over omicron apparently not being as bad as we feared,” Ryan Detrick, chief market strategist at LPL Financial, said.
Even as omicron has begun leaving an imprint on parts of the US economy, economists say it so far seems unlikely to prevent a second straight year of above-trend growth.
First identified last month in southern Africa and Hong Kong, omicron is becoming dominant in much of Europe including Britain where daily new infections have soared beyond 100,000.
France had its worst-ever day in terms of new COVID-19 cases on Thursday, with more than 91,000 recorded, while Germany reported its first omicron death.
In Italy, the first Western country to be hit by the pandemic last year, all public New Year’s Eve celebrations were banned, while Greece banned public Christmas festivities.