Portal:Current events/2022 January 3

January 3, 2022 (Monday)

Armed conflicts and attacks

Colombian conflict
- 2022 Arauca clashes
  - Clashes between the revolutionary far-left armed groups ELN and FARC dissidents in Arauca Department leave 23 people dead near Colombia’s border with Venezuela. (Al Jazeera)
Syrian civil war
- Five soldiers are killed and 20 more are injured during an Islamic State rocket attack on a military transport bus in the Syrian Desert. (Al Jazeera)
Spillover of the Somali Civil War
- Six men are killed by suspected al-Shabaab militants in a village in Lamu County, Kenya, near the border with Somalia. (Reuters)
Yemeni Civil War
- Houthi forces capture a United Arab Emirates-flagged cargo ship, the Rwabee, off Al Hudaydah, Yemen. The UAE government says that the vessel was carrying equipment from a closed coalition field hospital on Socotra while the Houthis say that the vessel was carrying military equipment. (MSN)

Business and economy

Evergrande liquidity crisis
- Chinese property developer Evergrande Group suspends trading of its shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange ahead of a planned restructuring of the firm. (BBC News)

Health and environment

COVID-19 pandemic
- COVID-19 pandemic in Asia
  - COVID-19 pandemic in India, COVID-19 vaccination in India
    - India begins administering COVID-19 vaccines for children between the ages of 15 and 18 years using the domestically produced Covaxin vaccine manufactured by Bharat Biotech. (Hindustan Times)
  - COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines, COVID-19 vaccination in the Philippines
    - The Metro Manila Council passes a resolution imposing a lockdown on all unvaccinated and partially vaccinated residents and minors due to an increase in the number of cases of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant. (Rappler)
  - COVID-19 pandemic in South Korea
    - South Korea reports its first confirmed deaths related to the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant in two people in their 90s who died last week at a senior care hospital in Gwangju. (Yonhap News Agency)
  - COVID-19 pandemic in Taiwan
    - Taiwan reports its first two locally transmitted cases of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant. (Taiwan News)
- COVID-19 pandemic in Europe
  - COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom
    - COVID-19 pandemic in Scotland
      - Scotland reports a record 20,217 new cases of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours. (The Independent)
  - COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium, COVID-19 drug development
    - The Belgian government finalizes an agreement to buy 20,000 courses of Pfizer's Paxlovid COVID-19 drug and Merck & Co.'s Molnupiravir COVID-19 drug. (The Brussels Times)
  - COVID-19 pandemic in France
    - France begins to require children over the age of 6 years to wear masks while indoors and also reduces the self-isolation period for fully vaccinated people to seven days and five days if a person has received a negative PCR or antigen test due to a record number of COVID-19 cases driven by the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant. (The Hill) (Politico.eu)
- COVID-19 pandemic in Mozambique
  - President Filipe Nyusi and his wife Isaura test positive for COVID-19. (News24)
- COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, COVID-19 vaccination in the United States
  - The Food and Drug Administration authorizes the use of the Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine as a booster dose for children between the ages of 12 and 15 years, becoming the world's first vaccine to be authorized as a booster shot for this age group. (ABC News)

Science and technology

Cyberwarfare and Iran
- The website of Israel's Jerusalem Post newspaper is hacked by suspected Iranian hackers. The website's content was replaced with a threat targeting the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center and an apparent reference to Qasem Soleimani, who was assassinated exactly two years earlier in Baghdad, Iraq. (Reuters)