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Tennis star held in a Melbourne detention hotel after being denied access amid public outcry over ‘exemption’.
Hello and welcome to Al Jazeera’s live blog on the coronavirus pandemic. I’m Kate Mayberry in Kuala Lumpur.
A summary of the main developments:
- More daily records have been broken, with France reporting more than 332,000 cases on Wednesday in a surge driven by the Omicron variant.
- Novak Djokovic, the world’s top male tennis player, has been denied entry to Australia and is expected to be deported. The unvaccinated player said he had been granted a medical exemption so he could compete in the Australian Open.
Here are the latest updates:
Morrison says Djokovic didn’t have evidence for medical exemption
Scott Morrison has been talking about Australia’s move to bar entry to tennis star Novak Djokovic.
He told reporters at a press conference in Canberra that the Serb failed to provide enough evidence to secure a medical exemption to COVID-19 vaccination.
“All I can say is that the evidence [for] medical exemption that was provided was found to be insufficient,” Morrison said, adding Djokovic had not been “singled out” for scrutiny.
Djokovic has been taken to a detention hotel pending his deportation.
Japan asks US to tighten COVID rules for bases
Japan has asked the United States to strengthen COVID-19 measures at its military sites, including restrictions on people leaving US bases, according to the Kyodo news agency.
Kyodo said the request was made during a phone call between Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Japan has been keeping COVID-19 in check, but the southern island of Okinawa, where there is a large US base, has emerged as a new hotspot.
Read all the updates from January 5 here.
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