The hospital authority says the number of patients dying from Covid-19 or serious complications triggered by the cold weather has sharply increased over the past two weeks, putting immense pressure on the mortuary service in public hospitals where storage space has reached capacity. Dozens of bodies are waiting in hospital accident and emergency rooms to be transported to mortuaries, and the health-care system is under enormous stress as workers battle to control a surge in cases. Empty grocery shelves were seen across several supermarkets as residents stocked up on essentials after health secretary Sophia Chan said the government has not ruled out a city-wide lockdown during the mass testing period. Hong Kong has a large proportion of unvaccinated elderly. The government announced that ‘the deaths are mostly among unvaccinated people’. Previously that information would not have been readily given.

Abdullah al-Howaiti was 14 years old when he was arrested in 2017 on charges of murder and armed robbery. The Supreme Court had overturned his original conviction last year. He was first sentenced to death in 2019, after he was convicted by a court in Tabuk province of shooting dead a policeman while robbing a jewellery shop. Five other defendants were handed 15-year prison terms for allegedly aiding and abetting the crimes. All six had pleaded not guilty, telling the judge that interrogators coerced their ‘confessions’ through torture or the threat of it. The judge also ignored CCTV footage showing that Howaiti was not near the jewellers’ shop at the time of the crime. The court of appeal in Tabuk upheld the conviction in January 2021, but the Supreme Court threw it out in November and ordered a retrial.

Joe Biden's first formal State of the Union speech came as only 40.6% of Americans are happy with his job performance. After describing his foreign policies on the invasion of Ukraine, Mr Biden confronted a host of domestic troubles dogging his presidency, from the enduring pandemic to soaring consumer prices, a wave of violent crime, and inflation hitting a 40-year high even though the jobless rate has sunk to 4%. The president sought to empathise with hard-pressed working families, saying ‘I get it.’ He promised a plan for ‘building a better America’ by boosting domestic production of cars and semiconductors, as well as rebuilding the nation’s roads and bridges. Republican response to the speech portrayed a presidency reflecting the late '70s ‘when runaway inflation hammered families, a violent crime wave crushed cities, and the Soviet army was trying to redraw the world map’.

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) reported some truly stunning numbers surrounding its international mission’s efforts, noting impressive increases in baptisms and sharing the Gospel throughout 2020. ‘We’ve seen the Holy Spirit working across the globe in mighty ways,’ said Wilson Geisler of its International Mission Board. There was a 62% increase in new believers between 2019 and 2020, rising from 89,000 to over 144,000. During the same period, baptisms swelled 81% - from 47,929 to 86,587. That is not all: 769,494 people heard the Gospel in 2020, up from 535,325 in 2019, with 18,380 churches planted across the globe in 2020. Most evangelism increases took place in South Asia, where 89% of the baptisms unfolded, and 97% of new churches were planted. These statistics are particularly fascinating amid the backdrop of a pandemic that left many domestic and global churches shuttered, restricted, or otherwise quieted.