Results for World

New York Times reporting and photos: The athletes marched into the arena masked and waving exuberantly. Dancers in pastel costumes and hats clapped and waved their arms in the air to whip up excitement. But there were no fans and no cheering audience — only row upon row of mostly empty seats stretching into the reaches of the vast Olympic Stadium in central Tokyo.

New York Times reporting: The opening ceremony is Friday and the first competitions are Wednesday. But organizers of the Tokyo Olympics, delayed one year by the pandemic, are struggling to manage public anxiety about the Games after a cluster of coronavirus cases that threaten to overshadow the festivities. As about 20,000 athletes, coaches, referees and other officials have poured into Japan in recent days, more than two dozen of them have tested positive for the virus, including three cases within the Olympic Village.

New York Times reporting: Three days after the emergence of a rare COVID-19 case in Sydney, around 40 friends gathered for a birthday party. Along with cake and laughter, there was a hidden threat: One of the guests had unknowingly crossed paths with that single COVID case, an airport driver who had caught the Delta variant from an American aircrew. Two weeks later, 27 people from the party have tested positive. And the seven people at the gathering who were not infected? They were all vaccinated. By Damien Cave.

New York Times reporting: Fiame Naomi Mata’afa walked toward Samoa’s beehive-shaped Parliament House on Monday morning intending to be sworn in as the first female prime minister in the Pacific Island nation’s 56-year history. What she and her fellow party members found instead were locked doors. The speaker of parliament had issued orders to keep them out. And so deepened a constitutional crisis that has convulsed this long-stable nation and thrown into doubt whether Mata’afa, whose party won the April 9 election, would actually take office.

New York Times reporting: The United States will send 20 million coronavirus vaccine doses in June to countries struggling against the pandemic, answering calls that the Biden administration isn’t doing enough to help countries that face dire shortages of vaccines and other treatments. This was after WHO director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for well-supplied nations to supply harder-hit countries, and for vaccine developers and manufacturers to hasten delivery of hundreds of millions of doses to COVAX.

New York Times reporting: Japan on Friday extended a state of emergency in Tokyo and other regions until the end of May to contain a surge of coronavirus cases, casting further doubt on the country’s ability to safely host the Summer Olympics, which are scheduled to begin in 11 weeks. Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga made the announcement at a meeting of the government’s coronavirus task force, saying that the measures were necessary because infections remain at a “high level, mainly in large cities.”

People who have been vaccinated with a single dose of either the Oxford-AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were 65% less likely to get a new Covid infection, a UK study has found. The chances of becoming infected by COVID (SARS-CoV-2) fell sharply after a first dose. However, some people can still get Covid after being vaccinated but the ongoing transmission is reduced.

New York Times reporting: As of Saturday, Bhutan, a Buddhist kingdom that has emphasized its citizens’ well-being over national prosperity, had administered a first vaccine dose to more than 478,000 people, more than 60% of its population. The Health Ministry said this month that more than 93% of eligible adults had received their first shots. That rate was ahead of those of the United Kingdom and the United States, more than seven times that of neighbouring India and nearly six times the global average. Bhutan’s health minister, attributed its success to “leadership and guidance” from the country’s king, public solidarity, a general absence of vaccine hesitancy, and a primary health care system that “enabled us to take the services even to the most remote parts of the country.”

New York Times reporting: How does a country deal with climate disasters when it is drowning in debt? Not very well, it turns out. Especially not when a global pandemic clobbers its economy. Take Belize, Fiji and Mozambique. Vastly different countries, they are among dozens of nations at the crossroads of two mounting global crises that are drawing the attention of international financial institutions: climate change and debt.