MIDDLE EAST

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DUBAI: Nations around the world are lurching into lockdown, steeling themselves for a brutal surge as the Omicron variant spreads like wildfire.

But in Dubai, Donna Sese is bracing for a very different surge: countless restaurant bookings and meter-long drink bills.

"We're back and busy like the way things used to be," said Sese, manager of the Yalumba restaurant at the five-star Le Meridien hotel, where devotees of Dubai's Friday brunch pay $250 for lavish spreads with free-flowing Clicquot Champagne

The globalized city-state appears to be in the midst of a boom season, spurred on by one of the world's highest vaccination rates and government steps to lure businesses and de-escalate tensions with regional rivals.

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CAIRO (AP) — A Libyan parliamentary committee said Wednesday that it has become “impossible” to hold a long-awaited presidential election in two days as scheduled, in a major blow to international efforts to end a decade of chaos in the oil-rich country.

It was the first official statement that the vote would not happen on Friday, although it had been widely expected amid mounting challenges and calls for a delay. For nearly a year, the election was the lynchpin of international efforts to bring peace to Libya, and many have warned that either scenario — holding the vote on time or postponing it — could be a destabilizing setback.

In a letter to Parliament Speaker Aguila Saleh, lawmaker al-Hadi al-Sagheir, head of the committee tasked to follow the electoral process, said the group found “it is impossible to hold the election as scheduled on Dec. 24.” He did not specify whether another date had been set for the voting, or if it had been cancelled altogether.

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WASHINGTON, Dec 21 (Reuters) - The United Nations is proposing to pay nearly $6 million for protection in Afghanistan to Taliban-run Interior Ministry personnel, whose chief is under U.N. and U.S. sanctions and wanted by the FBI, according to a U.N. document and a source familiar with the matter.

The proposed funds would be paid next year mostly to subsidize the monthly wages of Taliban fighters guarding U.N. facilities and to provide them a monthly food allowance under an expansion of an accord with the former U.S.-backed Afghan government, the document reviewed by Reuters shows.

The plan underscores the persisting insecurity in Afghanistan following the Islamist Taliban’s takeover in August as the last U.S. troops left, as well as a dire shortage of funds hampering the new government because of a cutoff of international financial aid.

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The French army said Boura was killed on December 20 in an air strike carried out by "Operation Barkhane" anti-terror forces north of Tillabéri, in northwestern Niger. 

The IS group militant was a key suspect in the August 2020 murders of six aid workers, aged between 25 and 31, and their two local guides while they were visiting a nature reserve. The jihadist group had claimed responsibility for the killings. 

Colonel Pascal Ianni, the French army's general staff spokesman, told AFP that Boura had filmed the execution of the eight victims in August and overseen the publication of the footage. The attackers cut the throat of a young woman in the group, shot the others dead, set fire to their jeep and fled.

French President Emmanuel Macron said at the time that the killings were "manifestly a terrorist attack" and threatened repercussions.

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A parliamentary committee voted to approve a health ministry recommendation putting the United States on Israel's "red list," along with Italy, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Morocco, Portugal, Switzerland and Turkey, committee spokeswoman Ronit Gal said in a statement.

The ban comes into affect Wednesday and will remain in force for at least a week, Gal added.

The United Kingdom, France and Spain were among the countries already on the red list, as well as the United Arab Emirates and much of Africa.

Adding the US to the red list was a significant move for Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's government, as hundreds of thousands of Israelis hold US citizenship.

The designation means that Israeli passport holders and residents cannot fly to the US without permission from an exemptions committee.

The highly transmissible Omicron variant accounted for 73.2 percent of new cases in the US over the week that ended Saturday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The latest Israeli restrictions were approved as the health ministry reported that as of Monday there were 826 confirmed or suspected Omircron cases, among them 480 from abroad.

More than half the cases were among vaccinated people.

The Omicron cases were part of an upward trend of coronavirus infections. On Monday 1,306 cases were recorded, a level last seen in October.

Israel blocked nearly all foreign visitors last month after Omicron was detected in South Africa, just weeks after permitting tourists to enter for the first time since the pandemic began.

Health expert Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute said on public radio that preventing Israeli citizens and residents from travel was only a partial solution.