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The United States has sanctioned an additional 24 Chinese officials over Beijing’s ongoing crackdown on dissent in semi-autonomous Hong Kong, including a decision to overhaul the city’s electoral system.

The sanctions, announced late on Tuesday, were introduced under the Hong Kong Autonomy Act and list officials who are deemed responsible for eroding the rights and freedoms promised to the people of Hong Kong at the time of its handover from British to Chinese rule.

Last June, Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong following months of anti-government protests, and authorities there have arrested scores of prominent pro-democracy legislators and activists.

The 24 officials sanctioned by the US include Wang Chen, a member of the Chinese Communist Party’s elite 25-member Politburo, and Tam Yiu-chung, the Hong Kong delegate to the Chinese parliament’s standing committee, which drafted the national security law.

Several officers from Hong Kong’s National Security Division were also sanctioned, including Li Kwai-wah, a senior superintendent, as well as Edwina Lau, a deputy commissioner of the Hong Kong police force and the head of the NSD.

“The release of today’s update to the Hong Kong Autonomy Act report underscores our deep concern with the National People’s Congress March 11 decision to unilaterally undermine Hong Kong’s electoral system,” US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in a statement.

He said the changes erode the autonomy promised to Hong Kong at the 1997 handover from the United Kingdom, and deny Hong Kongers a voice in their own governance.

“A stable, prosperous Hong Kong that respects human rights, freedoms, and political pluralism serves the interests of Hong Kong, mainland China, and the broader international community,” he said.

The electoral law changes, which were approved by China’s ceremonial legislature last week, give a pro-Beijing committee power to appoint more of Hong Kong’s lawmakers, reducing the proportion of those directly elected, and ensure that only those determined to be truly loyal to Beijing are allowed to run for office.

Last October, the US had already sanctioned 10 officials including Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam and Deputy Director of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office Zhang Xiaoming.

The latest sanctions come just hours before talks were set to begin between Blinken and Chinese officials in Alaska, the first such meeting since President Joe Biden took office.

The Biden administration has generally backed the tougher approach to China initiated by Trump but has also insisted that it can be more effective by shoring up alliances and seeking narrow ways to cooperate on priorities such as climate change.

Tunisia has fully backed the new Libyan Government as President Kais Saied has visited the country as a form of endorsement following the swearing-in of the new Government of National Unity.

Saied’s office said the visit, the first of its kind since 2012, is to support the democratic path in Libya, which aims to hold national elections in December in a bid to end its decades-long conflict.

The visit also aims to “strengthen cooperation between Tunisia and Libya” and to develop “solidarity” for increased “stability and prosperity”, it added.

No details on Saied’s programme were provided.

Tunisia hosted UN-backed talks between representatives of Libya’s warring factions late last year that helped pave the way for the fragile breakthrough.

Before Libya’s descent into chaos following the 2011 overthrow of longtime ruler Muammar Gaddafi in a NATO-backed uprising, the oil-rich country was a major customer for Tunisian farm produce and building materials as well as migrant labour.

The long years of conflict have resulted in prolonged border closures that have hit the volume of business, particularly in the informal trade in consumer goods that is an economic mainstay in border areas.

Successive Tunisian governments strove to avoid publicly taking sides between Libya’s rival administrations in the east and west that fought themselves to a bloody standstill before making way this week for the new UN-recognised unity government led by Prime Minister Abdelhamid Dbeibah.

The unexpectedly smooth transfer of power is seen as an important step to end the chaos in the oil-rich North African country.

Last year the current Tunisian president had accused the Islamist Ennahdha party, which forms the largest bloc in Parliament, of being too close to the UN-recognised Tripoli administration in its Turkish-backed battle against eastern-based strongman Khalifa Haftar.

The Tripoli administration backed by Turkey was finally able to defeat Haftar forces who aimed to capture territories in western Libya, including the capital city. The reconciliation talks were initiated after the failed bid by Haftar forces last year in April.

The coronavirus pandemic may have indirectly contributed to around 228,000 additional child deaths in 2020, 11,000 maternal fatalities, and 3.5 million unwanted pregnancies in South Asia, the United Nations has said in a report.

The study, commissioned by UNICEF and published on Wednesday, blamed “drastic cuts in the availability and use of essential public health services” because of the pandemic across India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, home to 1.8 billion people.

“The fall-off of these critical services has had a devastating impact on the health and nutrition of the poorest families,” said UNICEF regional director George Laryea-Adjei.

“It is absolutely vital that these services are fully restored for children and mothers who are in desperate need of them, and that everything possible is done to ensure that people feel safe to use them,” Laryea-Adjei said.

The estimates were based on actual observed changes and modelling exercises using data from before the pandemic in South Asia, wherein 2019 alone, 1.4 million children under five died, 63 percent of the newborn babies.

Countries in the region, like elsewhere, imposed stringent lockdown measures to halt the spread of coronavirus. Many restrictions have since been eased although many schools remain shut.

The report said that even where health services were not shut down, the number of people visiting them declined.

In Bangladesh and Nepal, for example, the number of young children being treated for severe acute malnutrition (SAM) fell by more than 80 percent, while child vaccinations fell sharply in India and Pakistan.

With some 420 million children in South Asia out of school due to the pandemic, the report also warned that nine million children were likely never to return to school, the report added.

This in turn is expected to lead to an increase in child marriages, resulting in an additional 400,000 adolescent pregnancies, as well as an increase in the number of maternal and neonatal deaths, and in the rates of children’s growth stunting.

Moderna Inc said it has begun delivering experimental doses of its COVID-19 vaccine to children as part of a study to determine whether it is safe and effective in those as young as six months.

The trial aims to enrol about 6,750 volunteers in the US and Canada. The US’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority are collaborating with the company, Moderna said in a statement.

Aljazeera reports that in the first stage of the trial, researchers will test various doses of vaccine to see which works best. Study participants between the ages of 2 and 11 will receive either 50 or 100 microgrammes per dose, while those ages six months to just under 24 months will get 25, 50 or 100 microgrammes per dose.

All doses will be administered twice, 28 days apart.

For the sake of comparison, each Moderna dose for adults contains 0.5 millilitres of the vaccine, equivalent to 500 microgrammes.

Researchers will analyse the data from the first phase of the trial to determine which doses to give to children and toddlers in the second phase of the study. In that part of the study, participants will be randomly assigned to receive either the vaccine or a saline placebo. Then they will be tracked for a year to see whether the vaccine works better than the placebo.

If it turns out that the risk of developing COVID-19 is significantly lower among children who get the vaccine than among children who get the placebo, the researchers will be able to compare those two groups and calculate how much the risk is reduced by the vaccine. The more the risk is reduced, the more effective the vaccine.

However, COVID-19 is less likely to strike children than adults.

“This paediatric study will help us assess the potential safety and immunogenicity of our COVID-19 vaccine in this younger age population,” Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said.

Although children make up about 22 percent of the US population, they account for just 11.6 percent of COVID-19 cases, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And cases for all age groups, including children, are expected to fall as vaccines roll out to adults and the country gets closer to achieving herd immunity.

Those factors may mean that there will not be enough cases of COVID-19 among clinical trial participants for researchers to make a statistically significant calculation of vaccine efficacy. In that case, the study team will also examine the immune response of children in the trial and compare it to that of adults. If the children generate enough antibodies compared with adults, the researchers will take that as evidence of vaccine effectiveness.

Parents interested in having their children join the trial can find more information about it at www.kidcovestudy.com. The trial is expected to continue through June of 2023.

Pfizer and BioNTech are currently testing their COVID-19 vaccine in children as young as 12. Their initial clinical trial included 16 and 17-year-olds, and the vaccine is currently the only one authorised for use for minors in the US.

Johnson & Johnson plans to test both single and two-dose regimens of its vaccine in children ages 12 to 17, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

The United States has made moves to deepen ties with South Korea, move officials say would help to check both China and North Korea.

Consequently, President Joe Biden’s defence and foreign policy chiefs have arrived in South Korea for the second leg of a regional tour aimed at boosting Washington’s Asian alliances to better deal with growing challenges from China and North Korea.

While in Seoul, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, will meet their South Korean counterparts for separate talks on Wednesday and hold a joint “two plus two” meeting on Thursday, the first such contact between the two countries in five years.

Blinken and Lloyd’s Asian tour is the first overseas trip by top-level members of Biden’s administration. On Tuesday, the pair were in Japan’s capital, Tokyo, where they joined forces with Japanese officials to criticise China’s “coercion and aggression” and reaffirm their commitment to ridding North Korea of all its nuclear bombs.

The latter topic will be a major focus of Blinken and Lloyd’s discussions in South Korea.

US-led diplomacy on the topic has been in limbo since a February 2019 summit between former President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un collapsed over disputes on US-led sanctions. Kim has since threatened to enlarge his nuclear arsenal in protest of what he called US hostility.

Austin, speaking to reporters before meeting his South Korean counterpart, Suh Wook, called the US-South Korea alliance a “linchpin” for peace, security and prosperity in Northeast Asia, and for a free and open Indo-Pacific region and beyond.

“The US-South Korea alliance is ever more important because of the unprecedented threats from China and North Korea,” he added.

For his part, Suh said it was important for the allies to maintain a strong deterrence and joint defence posture against North Korea, and vowed to strengthen the alliance, according to Yonhap.

But he pointedly made no mention of China, according to Al Jazeera’s Rob McBride in Seoul.

“South Korea’s relationship with China is far more nuanced than Japan’s. South Korea relies on China far more for trade and wants to avoid, whenever possible, a head-on clash with Beijing,” said McBride.

He noted that when South Korea allowed the US to install an anti-North Korea missile defence shield on its soil in 2017, it suffered economic retaliation from China, which sees the system’s radar as a security threat.

On Tuesday, Kim Jong Un’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, slammed the United States over its continuing regular military drills with South Korea, which North Korea sees as an invasion rehearsal.

“We take this opportunity to warn the new US administration,” Kim Yo Jong said in a statement. “If it wants to sleep in peace for (the) coming four years, it had better refrain from causing a stink at its first step.”

Some experts say Kim Yo Jong’s statement is a pressure tactic and that Pyongyang may try to further raise animosities with weapons tests to boost its leverage in future negotiations with Washington.

Asked about Kim Yo Jong’s statement during a news conference in Tokyo earlier on Wednesday, Blinken said that he was familiar with the comments and was more interested in hearing from allies and partners.

Blinken said that Washington reached out to North Korea through several channels starting in mid-February, but it has not received any response. He said the Biden administration is looking forward to completing its policy review on North Korea in the coming weeks and was looking both at possible “additional pressure measures” and “diplomatic paths”.

British actor and musician Riz Ahmed has become the first Muslim to be nominated for the Academy Award’s Best Actor category for his role in the movie Sound of Metal. Ahmed, of Pakistani origins, plays a rock drummer who loses his hearing.

Wow! I’m honoured to be nominated by my fellow actors alongside such inspiring performances, and am grateful to the Academy for their support and encouragement. I’m equally thrilled for our visionary writer-director Darius Marder and the brilliant Paul Raci,” Ahmed said through his Twitter handle.

“When you hear your own name, it’s a weird feeling, I just quietly gave thanks and felt some gratitude,” the 38-year-old said after his nomination.

“Everybody in this film was doing it because they wanted to push themselves and go further than they have before. This was all of us trying to see how far could we go.”

Ahmed won an Emmy when he picked up the prize for lead actor in a limited series or movie for The Night Of in 2017.

In the same year, Mahershala Ali became the first Muslim actor to win an Oscar for Supporting Actor in Moonlight. He won the same prize in 2019 for Green Book.

Nine of the 20 acting nominees are people of colour, including a posthumous Best Actor nomination for Chadwick Boseman for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, as well as nods for Steven Yeun for Minari, Viola Davis for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Andra Day for The United States vs Billie Holiday and Supporting Actor nominations for Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield for Judas and the Black Messiah, Leslie Odom Jr for One Night in Miami and Yuh-Jung Youn for Minari.

Netflix Inc led all outlets with 35 nods after a year in which the coronavirus pandemic saw movie studios delay scores of new releases or send them to streaming platforms.

The Oscars will be handed out on April 25 in a ceremony that will take place at both the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood and, for the first time, at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. Neither the form of the ceremony nor a host has been announced.

The late Chadwick Boseman got a first Oscar nod for his final film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom while previous winners Frances McDormand and Viola Davis and Britons Carey Mulligan, Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins were also nominated.

Eleven actors were first-time nominees, including Bulgarian newcomer Maria Bakalova for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Andra Day for her lead performance in The United States vs Billie Holiday and Lakeith Stanfield for Judas and the Black Messiah.

Libya’s new interim Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah was sworn in Monday to lead the war-torn country’s transition to elections in December, after years of chaos and division.

The North African nation descended into conflict after dictator Moamer Kadhafi was toppled and killed in a NATO-backed uprising in 2011, resulting in multiple forces vying for power.

A United Nations-supervised process is aimed at uniting the country, building on an October ceasefire between rival administrations in the country’s east and west.

Dbeibah, selected at UN-sponsored talks in February alongside an interim three-member presidency council, took the oath of office in front of lawmakers in the eastern city of Tobruk.

More than 1,000 kilometres (630 miles) from the capital Tripoli in the west, Tobruk has been the seat of Libya’s elected parliament since 2014.

Dbeibah’s swearing-in comes after parliament last week approved his cabinet, in a move hailed by key leaders and foreign powers as “historic”.

His government includes two deputy prime ministers, 26 ministers and six ministers of state, with five posts including the key foreign affairs and justice portfolios handed to women, a first in Libya.

“This will be the government of all Libyans,” Dbeibah said after the vote. “Libya is one and united.”

Dbeibah’s administration is expected to replace both the UN-recognised Government of National Accord, based in Tripoli, and a parallel cabinet headquartered in the east, under the de facto control of forces of military strongman Khalifa Haftar.

Turkey has backed the GNA, while Haftar’s administration has drawn on support from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Russia.

Outgoing GNA head Fayez al-Sarraj has said he is “fully ready to hand over” power, while Haftar last month offered “the support of the armed forces for the peace process”.

But the new executive faces daunting challenges to unify the country’s institutions, end a decade of fighting marked by international interference and prepare for elections on December 24.

Dbeibah, 61, a wealthy businessman from the western port city of Misrata once held posts under Kadhafi but has shown no clear ideological position.

During Kadhafi’s rule, Misrata underwent an industrial and economic boom, from which the Dbeibah family and many others profited.

Dbeibah is also known to be supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood and is close to Turkey.

He holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto in engineering and his expertise introduced him to Kadhafi’s inner circle and led him to head a company managing huge construction projects.

Dbeibah was considered an outsider compared to other candidates vying for the job, and his election process has been marred by allegations of vote-buying.

But Dbeibah jumped into his role even before his inauguration, including pledging to combat the coronavirus crisis and taking anti-corruption measures by freezing state-owned investment funds.

But after 42 years of dictatorship under Kadhafi and a decade of violence, the list of challenges is long.

The population of seven million, sitting atop Africa’s largest proven crude oil reserves, is mired in a dire economic crisis, with soaring unemployment, crippling inflation and endemic corruption.

Another key task will be ensuring the departure of an estimated 20,000 mercenaries and foreign fighters still in the country, whose presence Dbeibah has called “a stab in our back”.

The UN Security Council on Friday called for all foreign forces to leave “without further delay”.

Iran has told the United Nations that claims of its role in attacks on United States interests in Iraq are “completely baseless and lacking legal credibility”.

In a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the country’s UN envoy Majid Takht-Ravanchi “decisively” rejected claims that Iran-backed paramilitary forces were behind recent attacks against the US.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran has not had any involvement, directly or indirectly, in any armed attacks by any entities or individuals against the United States in Iraq,” he wrote, according to parts of the letter’s text published by state-run IRNA news on Monday.

Aljazeera reports that last month, several rockets hit a military base inside the airport in Erbil, northern Iraq, which killed one foreign civilian contractor and wounded at least nine others, including an American soldier.

Foreign troops deployed as part of the US-led coalition that helped Iraq fight the ISIL (ISIS) armed group since 2014 are stationed at the site.

A shadowy group calling itself Awliya al-Dam – or the Guardians of the Blood – claimed responsibility for the attack and said it would continue to target “occupation” American forces in Iraq.

Several other rocket attacks were launched against the US interests in Iraq in the following weeks.

Most recently, several rockets landed in the Ain al-Asad base in early March.

In January 2020, shortly after the US assassinated Iran’s top general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired more than a dozen rockets at the base in an attack that bore no casualties.

In response to the recent attacks, US President Joe Biden launched the first military operation of his administration, ordering an air attack on facilities in eastern Syria near the border with Iraq, which the US said are used by Iran-backed militias.

The air attack, which Biden said was “proportionate” and aimed at creating “deterrence”, killed 22 people, according to a war monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

In his letter, Iran’s envoy to the UN condemned the air the attack, calling it “illegal”.

The US attacks amount to a “violation of the sovereignty of the region’s countries and a clear symbol of the gross violation of international rights and the UN Charter”, Takht-Ravanchi said.

The representative also said the US moves only destabilise the region further and serve to advance the interests of “terrorist groups”.

He requested the letter be formally recognised as a UN Security Council document.

In late February, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told his Iraqi counterpart, Fuad Hussein, in Tehran that the recent rocket attacks against US positions in Iraq are “suspicious” and the perpetrators must be identified.

The regional conflicts have escalated as Iran and the US continue to be at a standstill over restoring Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.

Carmaker Volkswagen (VW), according to a News Agency report, plans to cut up to 4,000 jobs at its plants in Germany by offering early or partial retirement to older employees in a move that could cost several hundred million euros, the Reuters news agency reported on Sunday citing the company sources.

Volkswagen said in a statement it has agreed on a plan with worker representatives to make partial retirement available to those born in 1964, while offering early retirement to those born from 1956 to 1960.

Volkswagen said it expected up to 900 workers to opt for early retirement, while a number in the low thousands would choose partial retirement, without giving a precise figure.

Two company sources told Reuters that 3,000-4,000 positions would be cut in connection with the programme to be implemented at the six German plants of the main VW brand, which now employ about 120,000 people.

Handelsblatt newspaper, which earlier reported on the plan, had said the company would cut up to 5,000 jobs.

Volkswagen declined to comment on the cost, which will depend on how many employees accept the offer. One source estimated it at close to 500 million euros ($598m).

As the 83-year old firm tries to become more of a tech the company modelled on electric carmaker Tesla, Volkswagen said it was raising its training budget by 40 million euros ($47.8m) to 200 million euros ($238.9m).

VW has set a target of boosting the share of its software that is developed in-house to 60 percent from 10 percent currently. To pull this off, it established a unit – dubbed Car. Software Org – with about 4,000 employees to develop a system that can manage vehicle data flows and connect them to the cloud.

In its latest five-year investment plan, the company doubled spending on digitalisation efforts to 27 billion euros ($32bn), even as the overall budget remained flat. While that represents significant resources, Google parent Alphabet spends almost that much in a year.

Volkswagen said it was also extending a hiring freeze until the end of 2021. It had been due to stay in place until the first quarter. External hires can only be made in areas such as electric cars, digitalisation and battery cell development.

The Volkswagen Group said in January it would cut overhead costs by 5 percent and procurement costs by 7 percent over the next two years.

Iran has charged a French tourist with spying and “spreading propaganda against the system,” his lawyer said; the latest in a series of cases against foreigners at a time of heightened tensions between Iran and the West.

Saeid Dehghan said Benjamin Briere, 35, was arrested 10 months ago after flying a helicam in the desert near the Turkmenistan-Iran border.

“On Sunday, he (Briere) was charged with two counts of espionage and propaganda against the Islamic Republic,” Dehghan told Reuters news agency on Monday, adding that Briere faces a long-term jail sentence. Dehghan also stated the charges against Briere in a Twitter post on Monday.

“His last defence was taken yesterday. His spying charges are because of taking pictures in forbidden areas,” Dehghan told Reuters.

“He is in the Vakilabad prison in the city of Mashhad. His health is good and he has access to his lawyers and also he benefits from consular protection and the French embassy officials have been in regular contact with him,” he added.

Iran’s judiciary was not available to comment. France has yet to comment on Briere’s charges.

Last month, France’s foreign ministry confirmed that a French citizen was being held in Iran and said it was monitoring the situation.

“Although the French government is pursuing Briere’s case, I am concerned that any delay in comprehensive follow-up will further complicate the case,” Dehghan said.

The lawyer said Briere has been charged with “propaganda against the system” because of a post on social media, in which he said “the hijab is mandatory” in Iran but not in other Muslim-majority countries.

“My colleagues and I believe that these charges are false and baseless, but we have to wait for the judge to conduct a full investigation in the next few days and announce his verdict,” Dehghan said.

Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has arrested dozens of dual-nationals and foreigners in recent years, mostly on espionage charges.

Rights activists have accused Tehran of doing so to try to win concessions from other countries. Iran denies it holds people for political reasons and has accused many of those held in its jails of espionage.

On Sunday, British-Iranian dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe reappeared in a Tehran court to face accusations of spreading propaganda after completing a full five-year prison sentence on spying charges. She remains in limbo in Iran awaiting the verdict, unable to fly home to the UK.

The cases come as Iran escalates pressure on the United States and European powers, including France and the United Kingdom, to grant the badly needed sanctions relief the country had received under its tattered nuclear accord with world powers under which it curbed its nuclear programme in return for sanctions being lifted.

While former US President Donald Trump abandoned the landmark nuclear deal with Iran in 2018 and reimposed harsh sanctions on the country, President Joe Biden has offered to join talks towards restoring the deal, so long as Iran returns to full compliance with its terms. But Washington and Tehran have reached an impasse, with each insisting the other move first to revive the deal.