CAIRO — An Egyptian court has overturned the sentences of two young women who were convicted and imprisoned last year on charges of “violating family values” and “inciting debauchery” after they gained fame on TikTok, according to state-run media. The case drew widespread attention as Egyptian prosecutors waged a far-ranging legal battle last year against what they considered public immorality in social media. The two women were among a handful of social media influencers, including a female pop star and a belly dancer, to come under scrutiny for their posts in recent years. As their social media followings and, in some cases, income earned through videos have grown, young female influencers have faced a conservative backlash in a country where activist lawyers and prosecutors take it upon themselves to enforce strict social norms for women.

The administration should first focus, experts say, on fixing the hodgepodge of state and local vaccination centers that has proved incapable of managing even the current flow of vaccines. President Biden’s goal of one million shots a day for the next 100 days, they say, is too low and will arguably leave tens of millions of doses unused. About 1.1 million people received shots last Friday, after an average of 911,000 people a day received them on the previous two days. An efficient vaccination regimen could deliver millions more shots.

Mr. LaPierre’s three decades of authority over the N.R.A. There were revelations about hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on Mr. LaPierre’s suits at a Zegna store in Beverly Hills, and travel on the N.R.A.’s dime to locales like the Bahamas; Palm Beach, Fla.; Reno, Nev.; and Lake Como in Italy. Last August, Ms. James, whose office has jurisdiction over New York charities, sued the N.R.A., seeking its closing along with tens of millions of dollars in restitution from Mr. LaPierre and three other executives. of widespread corruption, she said that it paid a personal travel consultant for Mr. LaPierre $13.5 million, largely through no-bid contracts, and detailed private flights chartered for Mr. LaPierre’s wife and his niece, according to the complaint.

As European countries brace for a potential surge of coronavirus cases linked to the new variants, countries have reimposed strict lockdown measures, and some have made “medical” grade masks mandatory in some areas.“We have to slow the spread of this variant. Effectively, the German authorities are trying to buy time by slowing the spread of the new variant long enough for the weather to warm and for the number of people vaccinated to increase, Ms. Merkel said. Global context: The more contagious variant discovered in Britain has been found in 60 countries, but it remains unclear how it spreads, and whether it has already contributed to countries’ surges.

ROME — A Vatican court on Thursday convicted a former senior official at the Vatican bank and his lawyer of embezzlement and money laundering, sending a strong signal that the church was determined to get its financial house in order. The defendants — Angelo Caloia, the president of the Vatican bank for two decades, and his onetime lawyer Gabriele Liuzzo — had been accused of embezzling millions of euros through shady real estate deals between 2002 and 2007. Sentenced to eight years and 11 months in prison apiece, the defendants were ordered to pay the Vatican bank damages of more than €20 million, or $24 million. The court also ordered “the confiscation of sums totaling approximately 38 million euros” from the defendants, the Vatican said in a statement accompanying the sentence, which the press office of the Holy See released shortly after the court ruling.

Often, youth hockey development happens relatively close to home. Canadian teenagers typically live with billet families when they start to play in one of the three regional major junior leagues that make up the Canadian Hockey League. Top United States prospects may aim for a well-established hockey prep school, often in their home region, with their sights set on joining the national team development program in Plymouth, Mich., at age 16. In Europe and Russia, many players climb a ladder within one organization, playing youth hockey, under-20 and men’s league on affiliated teams, often in their home regions.

Scientists in Brazil have downgraded the efficacy of a Chinese coronavirus vaccine that they hailed as a major triumph last week, diminishing hopes for a shot that could be quickly produced and easily distributed to help the developing world. Officials at the Butantan Institute in São Paulo said on Tuesday that a trial conducted in Brazil showed that the CoronaVac vaccine, made by the Beijing-based company Sinovac, had an efficacy rate just over 50 percent. That rate, slightly above the benchmark that the World Health Organization has said would make a vaccine effective for general use, was far below the 78 percent level announced last week.A senior official in Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China that had already ordered CoronaVac, said on Wednesday that an advisory panel would strictly review the vaccine based on clinical trial data before it was rolled out there.

In addition to displaying advertising on their own platforms, such as Google’s search engine and Facebook’s home page, websites, app developers and publishers rely on the companies to secure advertising for their pages. In the milliseconds between a user clicking on a link to a web page and the page’s ads loading, bids for available ad space are placed behind the scenes in marketplaces known as exchanges, with the winning bid passed to an ad server. Seeing a potentially significant loss of business to header bidding, Google developed an alternative called Open Bidding, which supported an alliance of exchanges. While Open Bidding allows other exchanges to simultaneously compete alongside Google, the search company extracts a fee for every winning bid, and competitors say there is less transparency for publishers.

LONDON — Britain’s Glastonbury festival, one of the world’s most prominent pop music events, was canceled on Thursday for a second year in a row because of the coronavirus — sparking fear that large music festivals in Europe will not go ahead this summer.“In spite of our efforts to move Heaven & Earth, it has become clear that we simply will not be able to make the Festival happen,” Michael and Emily Eavis, the festival’s organizers, said in a joint statement on Thursday. Glastonbury is Britain’s largest pop event, held each June at the Eavis’s farm in Pilton, southwest England. The announcement came as coronavirus deaths were soaring in England, which is in its third national lockdown.

TORONTO — For years, Peter Nygard presented himself as a rags-to-riches story: a multimillionaire who built a fashion empire from nothing, hobnobbed with Canadian prime ministers and traveled between his luxurious homes on a private jet, surrounded by women a fraction of his age. But in a Manitoba court this week, his lawyers presented a very different picture of the 79-year-old inmate, now facing extradition to the United States and seeking to be released on bail: He was old, sick, broke, lonely and likely to die in jail, where he has languished for more than a month and where the coronavirus is raging. In his own affidavit, Mr. Nygard said that since his arrest, “I am getting weaker everyday. He added that the jail food, full of sugar and carbohydrates, which he had cut from his diet, had made him “violently sick.”

An unusual experiment to prevent nursing home staff members and residents from infection with the coronavirus has succeeded, the drug maker Eli Lilly announced on Thursday.A drug containing monoclonal antibodies — laboratory-grown virus-fighters — prevented symptomatic infections in residents who were exposed to the virus, even the frail older people who are most vulnerable, according to preliminary results of a study conducted in partnership with the National Institutes of Health. The researchers found an 80 percent reduction in infections among residents who got the drug, compared with those who got a placebo, and a 60 percent reduction among the staff, results that were highly statistically powerful, Eli Lilly said. The data have not yet been peer-reviewed or published.

LONDON — As a new and more contagious variant of the coronavirus pounds Britain’s overstretched National Health Service, health care workers say the government’s failure to anticipate a wintertime crush of infections has left them resorting to ever more desperate measures. Hundreds of soldiers have been dispatched to move patients and equipment around London hospitals. Doctors have trimmed back the level of oxygen being given to patients to save overloaded pipes. Most vexing to doctors and nurses is that Britain’s government and state health system, hammered by the virus last spring, failed to heed a cascade of warnings in the following months about needing to plan for a wintertime wave of infections, leaving hospitals unprepared as patients began arriving.

Demand for vaccines is skyrocketing as the United States grapples with a record death toll from Covid-19 and the threat of new, more contagious variants. After a slow start in December, many states and cities have quickly ramped up vaccine delivery, widening access to larger groups of people and setting up mass testing sites. But now there’s a new wrinkle: Some mayors and governors say they have run out of available vaccines, and have had to cancel appointments. There are simply not enough doses of authorized vaccines to meet the enormous demand.

Alors, quand M. Johnson est mort fin septembre, vraisemblablement d’une septicémie suite à une blessure à la jambe, d’après des amis, tout le monde était au courant à Oluti , un quartier animé de la plus grande ville du Nigeria, où il vivait. La pandémie qui s’est propagée à travers le monde en 2020 a mis en lumière le fait que la majorité des morts dans la plupart des pays d’Afrique ne sont jamais officiellement enregistrés. Vue la difficulté à obtenir des données fiables sur les décès d’un pays et sur leurs causes, les gouvernements peuvent facilement passer à côté d’une nouvelle menace sanitaire — qu’il s’agisse du virus Ebola ou du coronavirus — et doivent souvent concevoir leur politique de santé à l’aveugle. Mais comme pour les autres maladies, son véritable bilan ne sera probablement jamais connu ici, en partie parce que des taux de mortalité élevés ne peuvent pas servir de référence, contrairement à ailleurs.

MOSCOW — Russia’s government is threatening Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty with multimillion-dollar fines and possible criminal charges against its employees, raising the possibility of the American-funded news organization being pushed out of Russia just as President Biden seeks to reorient the U.S. relationship with the Kremlin. RFE/RL, one of the biggest online news outlets in Russia that does not toe the official line, says the government in recent weeks has notified it of dozens of individual violations of newly restrictive requirements that it label all of its content as being produced by a “foreign agent.” Its editors say that unless the Kremlin changes course, they will be forced to shut down their official presence in the country for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union.“It is very clear that the Russian government seeks, in no uncertain terms, our withdrawal from Russia.”The Kremlin in recent days pledged to ignore Western calls to free the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, who was arrested immediately on his return to Russia on Sunday, and said that Russia would withdraw from a treaty that allows countries to fly military surveillance planes over each other’s territory.

We’ve seen the internet magnify the best and the worst of ourselves. Governments in the region regularly shut down internet access or manipulate online conversations to control dissent — Uganda did both ahead of last week’s presidential vote. Shira: Why did Uganda cut off internet access?It was an excuse for an internet blackout that many people expected.

season will begin Wednesday with some drastic modifications to its format and at least one delayed opener because of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly said Monday that he did not expect the league to have access to vaccines for players, staff members and other personnel this season. Commissioner Gary Bettman said Monday that he expected losses from a lack of attendance to exceed $1 billion and for the league to lose more money than if it had canceled the season, though the player agent Allan Walsh called that characterization “a deliberate and intentionally misleading statement.” Attendance, Bettman said, accounts for about 50 percent of N.H.L. Bettman said Lake Tahoe would host the league for the first time — with two games against a backdrop of snowy mountains, a gleaming lake and zero spectators.

The start of 2021 has been rocky for Britain. More than four million people in Britain have been partially vaccinated against the coronavirus, a promising pace of inoculation. Investors looking to ride a wave of optimism about a vaccine rollout have turned to Britain’s stock market, which has posted a strong start to the year, jumping more than 6 percent in the first week. In the first two and a half weeks of January, the FTSE 100, Britain’s benchmark stock index of large companies, gained 4.3 percent — outstripping the S&P 500 index, which rose 2.6 percent, and the Stoxx Europe 600 index, which was up 3 percent.

NAIROBI, Kenya — President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda has blocked Facebook from operating in his country, just days after the social media company removed fake accounts linked to his government ahead of a hotly contested general election set to take place on Thursday. In a televised address late on Tuesday night, Mr. Museveni accused Facebook of “arrogance” and said he had instructed his government to close the platform, along with other social media outlets, although Facebook was the only one he named.“That social channel you are talking about, if it is going to operate in Uganda, it should be used equitably by everybody who has to use it,” Mr. Museveni said. The ban on Facebook comes at the end of an election period that has been dogged by a crackdown on the political opposition, harassment of journalists and nationwide protests that have led to at least 54 deaths and hundreds of arrests, according to officials.

LONDON — As a new and more contagious variant of the coronavirus pounds Britain’s overstretched National Health Service, health care workers say the government’s failure to anticipate a wintertime crush of infections has left them resorting to ever more desperate measures. Hundreds of soldiers have been dispatched to move patients and equipment around London hospitals. Doctors have trimmed back the level of oxygen being given to patients to save overloaded pipes. Most vexing to doctors and nurses is that Britain’s government and state health system, hammered by the virus last spring, failed to heed a cascade of warnings in the following months about needing to plan for a wintertime wave of infections, leaving hospitals unprepared as patients began arriving.

LONDON — The international art trade’s hopes of returning to some kind of in-person normality were set back Thursday when Art Basel announced that its flagship fair in Switzerland, scheduled for June, would be postponed until September. Because of the “ongoing impact of the pandemic and travel restrictions worldwide,” the fair has now been rescheduled for Sept. 23-26, Art Basel said in a statement.“While the first phase of Covid-19 vaccination programs started in many parts of the world last month, 2021 is a year in which planning remains complex,” said Marc Spiegler, Art Basel’s global director. In 2019, sales from the world’s art fairs were estimated at $16.6 billion, generating more than 40 percent of dealers’ turnover, according to the 2020 Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report.

The exchange will be led by Michael Darling, who announced his departure this week as chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.“We want to help museums develop a broader picture of what contemporary art looks like by having access to different parts of the country.”Museum acquisition budgets have rarely been large enough to allow institutions to compete on the open market against wealthy collectors. Yet donors, though often motivated by the tax deductions that come with museum gifts, have been upset to see their gifts sometimes shunted aside — so upset, in fact, that some owners of the most prized collections have been able to get museums to sign agreements committing to exhibit the donated art.

Demand for vaccines is skyrocketing as the United States grapples with a record death toll from Covid-19 and the threat of new, more contagious variants. After a slow start in December, many states and cities have quickly ramped up vaccine delivery, widening access to larger groups of people and setting up mass testing sites. But now there’s a new wrinkle: Some mayors and governors say they have run out of available vaccines, and have had to cancel appointments. There are simply not enough doses of authorized vaccines to meet the enormous demand.

The San Diego Padres, long one of Major League Baseball’s quietest teams, jolted the sport this week. Padre,” Gwynn has spent most of his life in the area, watching his father, playing with the team himself and now working as a broadcaster for the club. He watched the 2020 Padres become one of the most electrifying teams in an M.L.B. Realmuto — and teams are confronting the dire financial consequences of the pandemic, the Padres have already added roughly $100 million in salary commitments over the next few years.

Gagosian, the global gallery known for ambitious exhibitions, has added a 32-year-old director and curator, Antwaun Sargent, whose first show will examine what he calls “notions of Black space.”Sargent has lectured and participated in public conversations with artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Brooklyn Museum, as well as at Harvard and Yale universities. He wrote the book “The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion,” and edited the book “Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists.”“It’s a wonderful platform,” Sargent said on Wednesday of Gagosian, where he will be one of about 30 directors worldwide.

Speaking at the Reuters Next conference on Wednesday, Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said that the company has made significant changes to how it handles political ads and election misinformation around the election, but acknowledged that more work was needed. In the weeks after the Nov. 3 election, Mr. Trump’s channel was filled with videos showing him and his supporters challenging the outcome. Last month, after most states certified their election results, YouTube said it would start removing videos that misleadingly said there had been widespread voting fraud or voting errors. YouTube said it had removed thousands of videos spreading misinformation about the 2020 election.

Peloton’s relentlessly positive Instagram posts usually attract enthusiastic responses from its 1.2 million followers, who love the company’s charismatic instructors and its $1,900-plus bikes and treadmills.“I know a good Peloton goal…deliver my mom’s bike that was supposed to be here December 21st!” snapped one person in response to a post about New Year’s goals.“What we’re finding is that Peloton the idea has grown faster than Peloton the company,” said Simeon Siegel, a retail analyst at BMO Capital Markets. Right now, the hype surrounding Peloton is like no other.”

Ms. Gilbert’s path to QAnon began in 2016 when WikiLeaks posted a trove of hacked emails from the Clinton campaign. Pizzagate primed Ms. Gilbert for QAnon, which she discovered through the YouTube videos of a British psychic. Like many QAnon die-hards, Ms. Gilbert has a purely virtual attachment to the movement. She said she had never attended a QAnon rally, or even met another QAnon believer in person.

More Americans may soon be able to take more than three months of paid leave from work for sickness or to care for children and family members during the pandemic, if Congress approves a plan proposed by President-elect Biden. Mr. Biden proposed offering paid leave to people who are:Analysts said the plan would cover 106 million more workers than last year’s paid leave plan, which excluded those at companies with more than 500 employees; many of those at companies with fewer than 50 employees; and some health care and government workers. Paid leave expired just as the pandemic became even harder on American workers.

The Bigelows’ interest in consciousness grew after the 1992 death by suicide of their 24-year-old son, Rod Lee, father of a baby son and as-yet-unborn daughter. His sister, Mr. Bigelow’s granddaughter, Blair, has worked with his aerospace and realty companies and may eventually take them over, Mr. Bigelow said.)Seeking comfort after their son’s death, the Bigelows held sittings with the renowned medium George Anderson. Finding few researchers seriously studying afterlife experiences, the couple in 1997 endowed the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada Las Vegas with a $3.7 million gift.