Reuters

The European Medicines Agency announced Friday that it is reviewing a possible connection between the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine and blood clots, Reuters reports.

"Four serious cases of rare blood clots with low platelets, one of which was fatal, have been reported after inoculation with J&J’s vaccine from its Janssen unit, the European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) said," Reuters wrote.

A collision between two passenger trains in central Egypt on Friday left at least 32 people dead, the Egyptian health ministry announced. Dozens of ambulances raced to the crash scene in the Tahta district of Sohag province, around 460 kilometres south of the capital Cairo.

"The trains collided while going at not very high speeds, which led to the destruction of two carriages and a third to overturn," a security source told Reuters.

The United States is set to impose sanctions on Russia over the poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny as early as Tuesday, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The sources declined to provide details on specific targets and or authorities involved.

The report, expected to be released later on Thursday, will say that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved "and likely ordered" Khashoggi's killing, four US officials told Reuters news agency.

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Wednesday that Mr Biden would communicate with King Salman, and not directly with the crown prince, who is his son and is considered the de facto ruler in Saudi Arabia. Also, Psaki said, "We've made clear from the beginning that we are going to recalibrate our relationship with Saudi Arabia."

The hedge fund Melvin Capital apparently lost more than half of its assets in January. The reason is the heavy increase GameStop stock which Melvin Capital has short positions on. The news agency Reuters quotes an insider familiar with the company's figures. According to the report, the assets invested by Melvin Capital, which amounted to 12.5 billion dollars at the beginning of the year, had fallen by 53 percent by the end of the month.

Nevertheless, the company ended January with more than eight billion dollars in assets - after hedge funds Point72 and Citadel prevented the collapse of their partner with a financial injection of 2.75 billion dollars.

Messaging applications Telegram and Signal see impressive user growth in the wake of confusion over updated terms of service notification from Facebook-owned encrypted messaging service WhatsApp.

Telegram said on Wednesday it had surpassed 500 million active users globally, while Signal took the number 1 spot on both Google Play Store and Apple App Store's top free apps lists this week.

Brian Acton, who co-founded WhatsApp before selling it to Facebook and then co-founding the Signal Foundation, told Reuters that "We’ve seen unprecedented growth this past week." He also said Signal was working to improve its video and group chat functions, allowing it to compete better with WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, and other conferencing apps that have become vital to day-to-day life over the past year. Privacy advocates have jumped on the WhatsApp changes, pointing to what they say is Facebook's poor track record of supporting consumers' interests when handling their data, with many suggesting users migrate to other platforms.

Reuters reports that Apple is aiming to produce self-driving passenger vehicles, known as "Project Titan", by 2024. The cars are rumoured to include a breakthrough battery technology, sources told Reuters. Apple has declined to comment on the matter.

Reuters is reporting that China plans to vaccinate 50 million people by the Lunar New Year in mid-February, with the Sichuan province starting the vaccination roll-out by early January. High-priority groups will receive the Covid-19 vaccination by Chinese firms Sinopharm and Sinovac Biotech Ltd first, these include health workers, police officers, firefighters, customs officers, cargo handlers, transport and logistics workers.

Reuters reports that the White House is considering lifting travel bans for Brazil, UK, Ireland and numerous European countries. Even though President Trump has not made a final decision on the matter, the White House coronavirus task-force, as well as public health and federal agencies, back the plan to reopen the borders for international travel.

A senior official from Facebook has told Reuters that the Vietnamese government is pressuring the platform to censor more local political content on the social network. If the company does not comply it could face a ban in the country. Vietnam's foreign ministry stated on the matter that "spreading information that violates traditional Vietnamese customs and infringes upon state interests".

The United States have reported 100,233 Covid-19 cases in a 24-hour-period, setting a global single day record, according to Reuters. India previously set a single day record in September with a total of 97,894 cases.

The Lazio region in Italy that includes the capital Rome plans to introduce a curfew from midnight to 5 am to try to reduce the surging Covid-19 infections.

According to Reuters, sources in the regional government said the new rules would be effective from Friday. Also, the source said, the region would introduce restrictions on schools and universities.

The We Company, once known as WeWork, will revert its name back to WeWork.

"We want to be strategic. We want to be innovative. We want to be impactful. We want to be WeWork," so the new CEO of the once and future WeWork, Sandeep Mathrani in the internal memo seen by Reuters.

The "We" brand was first introduced in January 2019 as the parent company of shared office provider WeWork to broaden its brand from shared office spaces to a lifestyle company.

Pakistan officials announced Friday a ban on TikTok after receiving complaints of "immoral and indecent" content on the popular video-sharing app.

In a press release, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority stated that given a "number of complaints from different segments of the society against immoral/indecent content on the video sharing application TikTok, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has issued instructions for blocking of the application."

Reuters quotes an official involved in the decision: "We have been asking them repeatedly to put in place an effective mechanism for blocking immoral and indecent content."

Reuters reports that the Saturday KLM flight from Bucharest to Amsterdam (KL1376) was evacuated before just before the departure on after a bomb threat was received, which later appeared to have been a false alarm.

KLM informed that passengers and crew have been taken off-board of the Boeing 737 and are safe, the flight will departure now on Sunday

Spanish banks CaixaBank and Bankia teams agreed to a merger that would create an entity with total assets of about 665 billion. Reuters reports that sources close to the deal confirmed the main shareholders greenlight the merger, to be signed in the next few days.

The new bank would surpass Santander and BBVA in the Spanish market with a combined market share of around 30%. Both Santander and BBVA would remain bigger globally, but not in Spain.

Journalists working for western media outlets had their accreditations removed on Saturday in Belarus. This comes a day after a German ARD TV crew was arrested in their hotel and later deported. Journalists affected worked for Reuters, Radio Liberty, AFP, AP and BBC, among others.

The authorities of Mauritius arrested Tuesday, the captain of the Japanese vessel MV Wakashio. The ship struck the coral reef off the Indian Ocean island nation on July 25 and caused a massive oil spill.

Inspector Siva Coothen told Reuters: "We have arrested the captain of the vessel and another member of the crew. After having been heard by the court they have been denied bail and are still in detention."

Reuters report that a spokesman for the German government denied that any phone call had taken place between Chancellor Angela Merkel and Belarus's Alexander Lukashenko since the August 9 election.

Earlier Monday Interfax news agency reported Alexander Lukashenko said he received a phone call on Sunday from the German Chancellor.

Reuters reports that, from 2018 to mid-2020, ByteDance censored content in its BaBe app in Indonesia. According to Reuters sources, local moderators were instructed to remove content perceived as critical of the Chinese government.

Articles with references to 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, or to Mao Zedong, the founder of modern China, were among those taken down.

In a statement, BaBe disagreed with the claims: "A cursory search on the BaBe app shows numerous articles and videos that highlight the type of content these claims say we would remove."

ByteDante has previously faced criticism as TikTok, one of their applications, has been criticizes for its alleged data harvesting on behalf of the Chinese state.