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Al-Monitor – A senior Iranian health official warned that unless measures are tightened it will only be a few weeks before the new coronavirus variant, omicron, dominates the country. Hamid-Reza Jama’ati, who chairs the scientific committee of the National Coronavirus Taskforce, advised the Iranian government to reinstate strict measures for at least four weeks to curb the new variant. Those …

gatestoneinstitute.org – China’s coronavirus has now killed more than 806,400 Americans, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Biden these days sees China merely as a “competitor,” not, more appropriately, as an adversary or enemy. There are Chinese business links with Biden’s family and with members of his administration and doubtless he wants to accommodate campaign donors wishing to …

Al-Arabia – Iran has detected its first case of infection by the new omicron variant of the coronavirus, state TV reported Sunday. The announcement comes as the variant spreads around the globe less than a month after scientists alerted the World Health Organization to the concerning-looking version. Read the latest updates in our dedicated coronavirus section. Iran has vaccinated some …

RFL/RE – Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) kicked off five days of military maneuvers across the country’s south on December 20, state television reported, amid continued tensions with the West over Tehran’s nuclear program. The IRGC’s aerospace division, ground troops, and naval forces joined in the exercises, with maritime forces set to maneuver in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, …

RFL/RE – Iran has executed a Kurdish man convicted of armed rebellion despite international appeals that his life be spared, activists said on December 20. Heidar Ghorbani was executed early on December 19 in Sanandaj prison in western Iran’s Kurdistan Province, the Oslo-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) and the France-based Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) said, adding that neither his family nor his lawyer …