The incident took place early on Saturday, when the statue was defaced by some unknown persons, the Consulate General of India in New York said.

India abstained on the procedural vote taken in the Security Council ahead of a meeting to discuss the tense situation on the Ukraine border.

The report also referred to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Israel in July 2017.

A special Indian team is camping in Manitoba to assist ongoing investigations by Canadian agencies and to render any consular services for the victims.

Shand, a 'suspected smuggler of undocumented foreign nationals', was arrested near the US/Canadian border on January 19 for transporting two Indian nationals, who were illegally present in the US.

Vishal Garg, the Indian-origin CEO of US-based homeownership firm Better.com, who recently fired nearly 900 employees over a Zoom call and triggered widespread outrage, is returning to his position more than a month after "taking time off" from the job.

In its weekly report on the pandemic, the World Health Organisation said on Tuesday that the incidence of COVID-19 has increased globally, initially driven predominantly by transmission of the Delta variant, particularly in the European region.

Hassanain is being charged with Assault in the Third Degree as a Hate Crime, Assault in the Third Degree, and Aggravated Harassment in the Second Degree, and will be arraigned on Saturday, it added.

'In India, a deadly wave of infection with the Delta variant stole 240,000 lives between April and June and disrupted economic recovery. Similar episodes could take place in the near term,' said the report.

"Omicron has been detected in all countries where we have good sequencing and it's likely to be in all countries around the world. It is quickly, in terms of its circulation, overtaking Delta. And so Omicron is becoming the dominant variant that is being detected," Kerkhove said during a virtual questions and answers session.

The incident comes days after an apartment fire in Philadelphia killed 12, with eight children among the dead.

The Sikh taxi driver was assaulted by an unidentified man, who knocked off his turban and also used expletives against him.

In yet another case of suspected hate crime, an Indian-origin Sikh taxi driver in the US has been assaulted by an unidentified man, who knocked off his turban and also used expletives against him outside the JFK International Airport in New York, according to a video on social media.

The number of new COVID-19 cases increased exponentially by 71 per cent globally during the week December 27-January 2 as compared to the previous week, while the number of new deaths decreased by 10 per cent, the World Health Organisation said on Thursday, as the new Omicron variant led the spike.

With his elevation as the CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, in whom co-founder of the microblogging giant Jack Dorsey has "bone-deep" trust, joins the growing power club of Indian-origin executives helming US-based global multinationals. Twitter's outgoing CEO Dorsey announced on Monday that 37-year old Agrawal, an Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and Stanford University alumnus, will be the company's new chief executive as he stepped down after 16 years at the company that he co-founded and helmed. A report in The New York Times said Agrawal will receive an annual salary of $1 million, in addition to bonuses, restricted stock units and performance-based stock units.

Indian-origin technology executive Parag Agrawal has been appointed as the new CEO of Twitter after the social media giant's co-founder Jack Dorsey stepped down on Monday.

The World Health Organisation has said it is 'not yet clear' whether the newly-detected coronavirus variant Omicron is more transmissible or causes more severe disease compared to other variants, including the highly-transmissible and globally prevalent Delta variant.

The WHO has countries to enhance surveillance and sequencing efforts to better understand circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants, submit complete genome sequences and associated metadata to a publicly available database.

The latest variant is the most heavily mutated version discovered so far.

India hit back at Pakistan in the UN Security Council after Islamabad raised the Kashmir issue at the 15-nation Council.