International news brief: Singapore monitoring XBB Covid strain closely; Biden to celebrate Diwali and more

Washington, Oct 12: Singapore is watching the XBB strain of Covid-19 "very closely", but there is no evidence that the new sub-variant is leading to more severe outcomes, Health Minister Ong Ye Kung said on Tuesday.

''XBB is demonstrating characteristics that it is dominating over all other sub-variants. It has been detected in many parts of the world but in Singapore is rising very fast - within three weeks from nothing, it is now over half of all the daily cases,'' he said.

''But so far, what is good is that there's no evidence that it leads to more severe outcomes,'' Channel News Asia quoted the minister as saying.

Singapore reported 11,732 new Covid-19 infections on Tuesday but the Ministry of Health (MOH) said it was initiating action against rumours circulating via WhatsApp about a rapid and large increase in severe illness and deaths due to XBB strain, another Omicron subvariant.

Biden to celebrate Diwali at White House on Oct 24; Trump at Mar a Lago on Oct 21

US President Joe Biden plans to celebrate Diwali at the White House on October 24 while his predecessor Donald Trump is working on celebrating the festival of lights at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on October 21.

Biden plans to celebrate Diwali with eminent members of the Indian American community and members of his administration. First Lady Jill Biden will also join the festivities at the White House on October 24.

Details of Diwali celebrations at the White House are still being worked out.

Meanwhile, the Republican Hindu Coalition (RHC) on Tuesday announced that Trump would celebrate Diwali with its members and Indian American community leaders at his Mar-a-Lago resort on October 21.

UK spy chief says rise of China world's top security issue

The head of Britain's cyber-intelligence agency on Tuesday accused China of trying to "rewrite the rules of international security", saying Beijing is using its economic and technological clout to clamp down at home and exert control abroad.

Jeremy Fleming, director of GCHQ, said that despite war raging in Europe since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Beijing's growing power is the ''national security issue that will define our future".

Smashing success: NASA asteroid strike results in big nudge

A spacecraft that plowed into a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away succeeded in shifting its orbit, NASA said Tuesday in announcing the results of its save-the-world test.

The space agency attempted the first test of its kind two weeks ago to see if in the future a killer rock could be nudged out of Earth's way.

"This mission shows that NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a briefing at NASA headquarters in Washington.

The Dart spacecraft carved a crater into the asteroid Dimorphos on Sept 26, hurling debris out into space and creating a cometlike trail of dust and rubble stretching several thousand miles (km). It took days of telescope observations from Chile and South Africa to determine how much the impact altered the path of the 525-foot (160-metre) asteroid around its companion, a much bigger space rock.