Submit your Article

A journalist has been shot dead in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, the fifth killed in the country this year, state authorities said.

Heber López, director of the online news site Noticias Web, was killed leaving a recording studio in the port city of Salina Cruz, said an official with the Oaxaca state security agency, who requested anonymity.

Oaxaca state prosecutor, Arturo Peimbert Calvo, told Milenio TV that two suspects in the killing were in custody.

López’s murder follows those of four journalists in January.

On 31 January, Roberto Toledo, a camera operator and video editor for the online site Monitor Michoacan, was shot by assailants as he prepared for an interview in Zitacuaro, Michoacan.

In the border city of Tijuana, reporter Lourdes Maldonado López was found shot to death inside her car on 23 January, and six days earlier crime photographer Margarito Martínez was gunned downoutside his home in the same city.

Reporter José Luis Gamboa was killed in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz in an attack on 10 January.

Over 12 million children in the US have tested positive for COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic, according to the latest report of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children's Hospital Association. 

A total of 12,042,870 cases of COVID-19 in children had been reported across the country as of February 3, and children represented 18.9 percent of all confirmed cases, according to the report published late Monday. 

COVID-19 cases among children have spiked dramatically across the U.S. during the Omicron variant surge. 

Almost 4.2 million child cases were reported since the beginning of January. For the week ending February 3, nearly 632,000 additional child COVID-19 cases were reported, according to the report. 

Over 1.4 million child cases have been added in the past two weeks. 

This marks the 26th week in a row child COVID-19 cases in the U.S. are above 100,000. Since the first week of September, there have been nearly 7 million additional child cases, according to the AAP.

Source(s): Xinhua News Agency

Nepal logged 1, 128 new Covid-19 cases and 14 deaths on Friday. 

With this, the country's active caseload mounted to 1,100,114. Similarly, the death toll has climbed to 11,878. 

According to the Ministry of Health and Population, 17,447 swab samples were tested in the RT-PCR method, of which 666 returned positive. Likewise, 3, 542 people underwent antigen tests, of which 1,128 tested positive.

The Ministry said that 2,215 infected people recovered from the disease in the last 24 hours.

As of today, there are 932, 822 active cases in the country.

The Ministry said that 27, 441 infected people have recovered from the disease so far.

Meanwhile, 203 cases are reported in Kathmandu, 45 in Lalitpur and 17 in Bhaktapur.

Hong Kong on Friday extended a ban on incoming flights from eight countries, including the United States and Britain, and imposed one on Nepal until March 4, with the government citing concerns over a growing COVID-19 outbreak, Reuters reported.

The other countries are Australia, Canada, France, India, Pakistan and Philippines.

Flights to Hong Kong are down 90% and hardly any are allowed to transit as the financial hub isolates itself from the world in the hope it can contain a coronavirus outbreak, even though new infections are overwhelmingly local transmissions.