tests. london s high court orders the ruler of dubai to pay more than $700 million in a divorce settlement to his ex wife, princess haya ofjordan. and, we take you back to a time when mobile phones looked like this, to explain why the first ever text message has just been sold, for $120,000. hello and welcome to our viewers in the uk and around the world. within the past few hours, president biden has been setting out his plans to step up the fight against the 0micron variant in the us. the federal government will distribute 500 million free covid tests in the new year, something it s never done. it s also drafting in military personnel to support hospitals which are already feeling the pressure, as the 0micron variant takes hold. president biden again implored americans to get vaccinated but he said lockdowns are not yet on the horizon. we start our coverage of covid with this report from our washington correspondent gary 0 donoghue. more than two million people a day are tr
Of independent states. | day broke slowly over lockerbie, over the cockpit of pan am s maid of the seas, nosedown in the soft earth. you could see what happens when a plane eight storeys high, a football pitch wide falls from 30,000 feet. christmas has returned to albania after a communist ban lasting more than 20 years. thousands went to midnight mass in the town of shkoder, where there were anti communist riots ten days ago. this is newsday on the bbc. i m karisma vaswani in singapore. 0ur headlines: president biden announces new measures to tackle the 0micron variant, promising free testing and 10,000 new vaccination sites. new covid guidance comes into force across england with quarantine for infected people being reduced from ten days, to seven.
Happen so fast in a dynamic and fluid situation. we would have to say that globally right now 0micron is in control that the coronavirus has taken control over travel again. you mentioned of course that this is the peak season so looking at the year end christmas and new year bookings. if we could go back slightly to october and november you would remember that some countries in the region were starting to open more liberally. thailand, singapore was scaling up its vaccinated travel lanes. cambodia and the philippines, they wanted to open and they were looking at the peak season but also, of course, the lunar new year period at the beginning of february which is an important travel period across the asia pacific. that looks as if it will not happen in any numbers at all right now. countries have reinstalled travel barriers and mechanisms such as an increase in quarantine, ramping up testing for people when they return to their own countries little and
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