SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Shanghai on Friday announced a record 21,000 new cases and a third consecutive day of COVID testing as a lockdown of its 26 million people showed no sign of easing and other Chinese cities tightened curbs - even in places with no recent infections. Beijing authorities intervened in Shanghai after its failure to isolate COVID by locking the city down in stages, and insists that the country stick to its zero-tolerance policy to prevent its medical system from breaking down.

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ABUJA (Reuters) - Nigeria’s separatist leader Nnamdi Kanu should stand trial and answer to charges that include terrorism and broadcasting falsehoods, a High Court judge ruled on Friday. Kanu, a British citizen who leads the banned Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), denies all the charges, which are linked to broadcasts he made between 2018 and last year. A judge on Friday ruled that Kanu will stand trial on seven counts of terrorism out of 15, and stuck out eight of the charges which the government brought against the IPOB leader.

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LIMA (Reuters) - Peru’s government has ordered its armed forces to supervise the country’s highways for the next month, amid crippling protests nationwide over rising food and fuel prices. The country has been beset by road blockades for over a week as anger has flared over rising costs, which have spiked since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Peru is facing its highest inflation rate in a quarter century.

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JOHANNESBURG (AP) — The World Health Organization said that up to 65% of people in Africa have been infected with the coronavirus and estimates the number of actual cases may have been nearly 100 times more than those reported. In a new analysis released Thursday, the U.N. health agency reviewed 151 studies of COVID-19 in Africa based on blood samples taken from people on the continent between January 2020 and December 2021. WHO said that by last September, about 65% of people tested had some exposure to COVID-19, translating into about 800 million infections.

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SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea is demolishing a South Korean-owned hotel at a North Korean resort that was one of the last symbols of inter-Korean engagement, according to Seoul officials who called for the North to stop the “unilateral” destruction. South Korea built dozens of facilities at North Korea’s Diamond Mountain resort to accommodate tourism by its citizens during a high period of engagement between the rivals in the 1990s. But North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in 2019 called the South Korean facilities there “shabby” and ordered them destroyed after months of frustration over Seoul’s unwillingness to defy U.S.-led sanctions that kept the tours from resuming.