Reuters World News Summary

Germany alarmed by threat posed by coronavirus deniers Germany is facing a growing threat of attacks by right-wing militants who deny the existence of the coronavirus pandemic and its health risks, a senior security official said on Monday.

Following is a summary of current world news briefs. India's Punjab warns farm protesters against telecom mast attacks

India's major grain-growing state of Punjab on Monday asked police to crack down on farmers and sympathisers vandalising telecommunication masts as they intensify their weeks-long protests against farm deregulation. Protesters have attacked hundreds of masts of companies such as oil-to-groceries conglomerate Reliance Industries Ltd that they believe have profited from the farm reforms at their expense. Mexico electricity outage leaves 10.3 million temporarily without power

An outage in Mexico's electricity network left 10.3 million users without power for up to two hours on Monday, the national electricity utility (CFE) said. The National Center of Energy Control (CENACE) said the network lost 7,500 megawatts because of "an imbalance between load and power generation." Banks reopen in Ethiopia's Mekelle for first time since war broke out

Banking services have resumed in the capital of Ethiopia's northern Tigray region for the first time since war broke out there on Nov. 4, state-affiliated Fana TV said on Monday, as the government seeks to restore normality. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government declared victory after seizing Mekelle from the former local ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), on Nov. 28. Honduran environmental activist killed in front of family

Masked men armed with guns and machetes killed a Honduran environmentalist activist in front of his family, police said on Monday, the latest in a string of such attacks in the Central American country. Felix Vasquez, a defender of environmental and human rights, died on Saturday night after the attack in the village El Ocotal, in central Honduras. EU's marathon COVID vaccination drive off to uneven start

The EU's campaign to vaccinate Europeans against COVID-19 has got off to an uneven start in what will be a marathon effort to administer shots to enough of the bloc's 450 million people to defeat the viral pandemic. In one mishap, eight workers at a care home in Stralsund on the north German coast were injected with five times the recommended dose of the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech. Four were hospitalised. China jails citizen-journalist for four years over Wuhan virus reporting

A Chinese court on Monday handed down a four-year jail term to a citizen-journalist who reported from the central city of Wuhan at the peak of this year's coronavirus outbreak on the grounds of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble", her lawyer said. Zhang Zhan, 37, the first such person known to have been tried, was among a handful of people whose firsthand accounts from crowded hospitals and empty streets painted a more dire picture of the pandemic epicentre than the official narrative. Germany alarmed by threat posed by coronavirus deniers

Germany is facing a growing threat of attacks by right-wing militants who deny the existence of the coronavirus pandemic and its health risks, a senior security official said on Monday. "The apocalyptic thinking of conspiracy myth supporters is mixing with right-wing extremism," Burkhard Freier, head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in North Rhine-Westphalian state, told Tagesspiegel newspaper. Saudi court jails women's rights activist, posing challenge for Biden

A Saudi court on Monday sentenced prominent women's rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul to nearly six years in prison, her family said, after her conviction in a trial that has drawn international condemnation. The verdict and sentence pose a challenge to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's relationship with U.S. President-elect Joe Biden, who has criticised Riyadh's human rights record. Russia gives Kremlin critic Navalny an ultimatum: Return immediately or face jail

Russia's prison service on Monday gave Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny a last minute ultimatum: Fly back from Germany at once and report at a Moscow office early on Tuesday morning, or be jailed if you return after that deadline. Navalny, one of President Vladimir Putin's leading critics, was airlifted to Germany for treatment in August after collapsing on a plane in what Germany and other Western nations say was an attempt to murder him with a Novichok nerve agent. Ethiopian police arrest Reuters cameraman

A Reuters cameraman, Kumerra Gemechu, was arrested in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on Thursday and will be kept in custody for at least two weeks, his family said. He has not been charged. No reason was provided to the family for Thursday's arrest, and police did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.