China’s aggressive pursuit of covid-zero has revved into high gear against omicron, locking down whole cities for weeks, closing factories, and throttling ports, raising concerns that China’s efforts to control omicron’s runaway transmissibility will prolong or worsen manufacturing and shipping delays for the battered global supply chain. This week, Toyota said that operations had come to a halt at its factory in Tianjin, the Wall Street Journal reported, after the city imposed mandatory testing after detecting two cases of the omicron variant. This week, Tianjin, a city near Beijing with the largest port in northern China, began mass testing for its population of 14 million, which required the port to temporarily close. The city is home to the port of Yantian, one of the world’s largest container ports, whose month-long shutdown due to a positive covid case last May snarled the global supply chain for weeks.

Just two days before it was meant to stop accepting Visa credit cards in the UK, Amazon has made a U-turn. Widely considered pressure tactics to get better rates, Amazon’s attacks on Visa credit cards have been unrelenting and universal. It’s given customers in Australia and Singapore similar monetary incentives to move away from Visa credit cards, and imposed a surcharge for Visa credit cards in both countries. In the US, Amazon is debating ditching Visa as a partner for its Prime Rewards credit card.

Transport Canada, the country’s transportation authority, said it was investigating the conduct of the passengers, who could face fines of up to $5,000 for violating Canada’s Covid restrictions, which forbid passengers from traveling without masks. Sunwing Airlines, which flew the group to Cancún on Dec. 30, said it canceled the return flight to Canada after an internal investigation found that the passengers “exhibited unruly behavior and did not respect aviation or public health regulations.”“To the extent that we can identify the passengers who were part of the group, we are denying boarding to ensure the safety of other passengers and our crews,” Air Canada said. Air Transat, another Canadian airline, said on Twitter that it refused to take the passengers back home after they tried to book a flight through the airline.

The Biden administration and its allies are assembling a punishing set of financial, technology and military sanctions against Russia that they say would go into effect within hours of an invasion of Ukraine, hoping to make clear to President Vladimir Putin the high cost he would pay if he sends troops across the border. The plans the United States has discussed with allies in recent days include cutting off Russia’s largest financial institutions from global transactions, imposing an embargo on American-made or American-designed technology needed for defense-related and consumer industries, and arming insurgents in Ukraine who would conduct what would amount to a guerrilla war against a Russian military occupation, if it comes to that. Russian officials are expected to press their demands for “security guarantees,” including prohibiting the deployment of any missiles in Europe that could strike Russia and the placement of weaponry or troops in former Soviet states that joined NATO after the fall of the Berlin Wall. To underscore the potential pain for Russia, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, spoke with his Russian counterpart two weeks ago and delivered a stark message: Yes, he said, you could invade Ukraine and probably roll over the Ukrainian military, which stands little chance of repelling a far larger, better armed Russian force.

A German court has convicted a former Syrian secret police officer of crimes against humanity for overseeing the abuse of detainees at a jail near Damascus a decade ago. The Koblenz state court concluded that Anwar Raslan was the senior officer in charge of a facility in the Syrian city of Douma known as Al Khatib, or Branch 251, where suspected opposition protesters were detained.A junior officer, Eyad al-Gharib, was convicted last year of accessory to crimes against humanity and sentenced by the Koblenz court to 4 years in prison. Victims and human rights groups have said they hope the verdict will be a first step toward justice for countless people who have been unable to file criminal complaints against officials in Syria or before the International Criminal Court.

Houthis, a Yemen-based rebel group which claimed responsibility for the explosions in Abu Dhabi which killed two Indians on Monday, have carried out drone strikes on the UAE and Saudi Arabia earlier as well. Though a Houthi attack on UAE is a rare instance, the rebel group has carried out many cross-border missile strikes on Saudi Arabia. Even when the Houthi group carried out suspected drone attacks in the UAE, the authorities have generally denied that they took place. In July 2018, Houthi-run media said the group launched a drone attack, a claim which the UAE turned down.