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.

The New York Times said in a report on Wednesday that in the lawsuit filed in New Jersey federal court and amended last month, BAPS has been accused 'of luring labourers from India to work on temples near Atlanta, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles, as well as in Robbinsville, New Jersey, paying them just $450 a month'.

A technical advisory group of the UN health agency which met on Tuesday has sought "additional clarifications" from Bharat Biotech for Covaxin to conduct a final "risk-benefit assessment" for Emergency Use Listing of the vaccine.

'At least we had an asteroid. What's your excuse?'

The technical advisory group will now meet on November 3 for a final assessment.

A technical advisory group of the World Health Organisation was on Tuesday reviewing data on Covaxin for the emergency use listing of India's indigenously-made vaccine and it could pronounce its decision within the next 24 hours or so, a spokesperson said.

Internal documents at Facebook show "a struggle with misinformation, hate speech and celebrations of violence" in India, the company's biggest market, with researchers at the social media giant pointing out that there are groups and pages "replete with inflammatory and misleading anti-Muslim content" on its platform, US media reports have said.

India reported an 18 per cent decrease in the new COVID-19 cases along with a 13 per cent decline in the number of deaths during the week of October 11 to 17, the World Health Organisation has said, highlighting that all the regions globally, except the European region, reported a fall in new weekly cases of the deadly virus.

The World Health Organisation's technical advisory group will meet on October 26 to consider the Emergency Use Listing (EUL) of Covaxin, a vaccine developed by Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech protecting against COVID-19, the global health agency's chief scientist said.

Amid reports of the ongoing coal shortage in the country, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman stressed that there is no shortage and termed these as "absolutely baseless", saying India is a power surplus country. Sitharaman said that Power Minister R K Singh went on record just two days ago when he said absolutely baseless information is floating around that there is probably shortage of coal, shortage of other inventories which will lead to a sudden gap in the supply demand situation in the energy consumption. "Absolute baseless! There is no shortage of anything. In fact, if I recall the minister's statement, every power producing installation has the next four days' stock absolutely available within their own premises and the supply chain has not broken at all," Sitharaman said at Harvard Kennedy School on Tuesday.

India is looking at near close to double-digit growth this year and the country will be one of the fastest-growing economies, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said. The minister also emphasised that she expects the economic growth next year to be in the range of 7.5-8.5 per cent, which will be sustained for the next decade.

The Lakhimpur Kheri violence, in which four farmers were killed, is "absolutely condemnable," Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said, emphasising that there are issues of such nature happening in other parts of India equally which should be raised "when they happen and not when it suits others" because there is a Bharatiya Janata Party government in Uttar Pradesh.

Addressing the UNSC High Level Open Debate on 'Peacebuilding and sustaining peace: Diversity, state building and the search for peace', Muraleedharan said the expectations of the international community on Afghanistan, including on combating terrorism, are set out clearly in the UN Security Council Resolution 2593, that was adopted under India's Presidency of the 15-nation Council in August.

'Using viral genomic sequences from 9,500 COVID-19 patients, the study found an increased number of infections among younger age groups (0-19 years) and women, a lower mean age for infection and symptomatic illness/hospitalisation, higher mortality and more frequent incidences of post-vaccination infections with Delta variant compared to the non-VOC (B.1) variant,' the WHO update said.