Testing policy
LONDON/JERUSALEM — Britain and Israel are overhauling their COVID-19 testing policies as governments seek to reduce the burden on laboratories and struggle with tight supplies of kits amid soaring infection rates fuelled by the Omicron variant.
This time last year, vaccines offered hope that the pandemic could be over by now. But Omicron has brought new challenges, including overloading public health systems, even if — as many scientists say — it leads to less severe illness than the earlier Delta variant. Demand for testing kits has squeezed supply. Last week, queues formed outside pharmacies in Spain’s capital Madrid in what has become a common scene since Omicron began driving up infections.
ALMATY – A Russia-led security alliance of former Soviet states will send peacekeeping forces to Kazakhstan, Armenia’s prime minister said on Thursday, after the Kazakh president appealed for their help in quelling violent and deadly protests.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on Facebook that an unspecified number of peacekeepers would go to Kazakhstan for a limited period to stabilise the situation after state buildings were torched and the Almaty International Airport was seized.
Eight police and national guard troops were killed in the unrest on Tuesday and Wednesday, Russia’s state-owned Sputnik agency quoted the Kazakh interior ministry as saying on Wednesday. Russian news agencies, quoting Kazakh media, later said two soldiers had also been killed in what they described as an anti-terrorist operation at Almaty airport.
Initially sparked by anger at a fuel price rise, the protests have quickly spread to take in wider opposition to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s predecessor Nursultan Nazarbayev, who retained significant power despite quitting in 2019 after a nearly three-decade rule.
Mr Nazarbayev, 81, has been widely seen as the main political force in NurSultan, the purpose-built capital which bears his name.
His family is believed to control much of the economy, the largest in Central Asia. He has not been seen or heard from since the protests began.
The Central Asian nation’s reputation for stability under Mr Nazarbayev helped attract hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign investment in its oil and metals industries.