World

After collecting billions of dollars in U.S. coronavirus aid, many of the nation’s wealthiest nonprofit hospitals are now tapping into disaster relief funds that critics say they don’t need.

The massive, year-end catchall bill that President Donald Trump signed into law combines $900 billion in COVID-19 aid with a $1.4 trillion omnibus spending bill and reams of other unfinished legislation on taxes, energy, education and health care.

South Korea on Tuesday reported 40 new coronavirus deaths, a record daily toll, bringing the total death tally to 859, as the country grapples with a third wave of infection centred around nursing homes and a prison in the capital Seoul.

A confrontation in which a man said a woman tackled his 14yearold Black son in a New York City hotel lobby as she falsely accused the teen of stealing her phone is under investigation, city prosecutors said Monday.

Oil steadied on Monday as optimism over the U.S. stimulus package and the start of a European vaccination campaign was balanced out by weak demand and the prospect of higher OPEC+ output.

Switzerland will return $150 million from blocked Swiss bank accounts by the end of the year to the United States to be given to victims of convicted Ponzi scheme con artist Robert Allen Stanford, the Federal Ministry of Justice said on Monday.

Burkina Faso President Roch Marc Kabore vowed on Monday to bring together the West African nation torn by violent Islamist militant attacks as he embarks on his second and final fiveyear term.

Russia's first big international shipment of its coronavirus vaccine 300,000 doses sent to Argentina last week consisted only of the first dose of the twoshot vaccine, which is easier to make than the second dose, sources told Reuters.

International visitors will be barred from entering Indonesia for a twoweek period to try to keep out a new potentially more contagious variant of the coronavirus, its foreign minister Retno Marsudi said on Monday.

Saudi Arabia's interior ministry on Monday extended a ban on entry to the kingdom by air, land and sea for another week amid concerns over a fastspreading variant of the new coronavirus, the state news agency SPA reported.

Reuters rounded up their most popular posts on Instagram, where they have millions of followers, based on likes and comments. Here are their most unforgettable pictures from 2020.

A Chinese court handed a fouryear jail term on Monday to a citizenjournalist who reported from the central city of Wuhan at the peak of last year's coronavirus outbreak, on grounds of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble," her lawyer said.

A magnitude 5.2 earthquake hit central Croatia on Monday with an epicentre some 50 kilometres southeast of the capital Zagreb, Croatian state television reported citing data from the European Mediterranean Seismological Centre.

A Reuters cameraman, Kumerra Gemechu, was arrested in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on Thursday and will be kept in custody for at least two weeks, his family said. He has not been charged.

Britain on Monday urged businesses to prepare for Brexit, just days before a transition period designed to smooth the UK's departure from the European Union comes to an end.

FBI agents investigating the Nashville motor home explosion have visited a real estate agency where a person of interest in the bombing had worked on computers, local media reported on Sunday.