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(AP) --- Pfizer is about to seek U.S. authorization for a third dose of its COVID-19 vaccine, saying Thursday that another shot within 12 months could dramatically boost immunity and maybe help ward off the latest worrisome coronavirus mutant.

Research from multiple countries shows the Pfizer shot and other widely used COVID-19 vaccines offer strong protection against the highly contagious delta variant, which is spreading rapidly around the world and now accounts for most new U.S. infections.

UNITED NATIONS, July 8 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A UN Security Council vote on extending cross-border aid into war-torn Syria’s rebel-held northwest has been postponed to try to soften veto-wielder Russia’s stance, diplomatic sources said Wednesday.

“The idea is Friday now,” one diplomatic source said on condition of anonymity, with another source saying postponing would allow for “more time to finish the negotiation.”

The vote originally set for Thursday is on a draft resolution to keep open the only remaining entry point for aid into northwest Syria that bypasses Damascus.

NEW YORK, July 7 (Xinhua) -- A powerful European business lobby group has called on European Union (EU) politicians not to lock out Chinese businesses as advocated by some leaders who are following the United States' lead on limiting commercial ties to China, reported The Wall Street Journal recently.

Members of the European Round Table for Industry (ERT), a trade group of almost 60 chief executives and chairpersons of major Europe-based multinationals, had called on EU leaders to push for better business terms with China and not to turn away, the journal reported on Sunday.

NEW YORK, July 7 (Xinhua) -- A group of Western researchers have said recent studies only bolstered their belief that the coronavirus evolved naturally rather than originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

Though the lab leak theory has been widely discussed in some countries, this eminent group of scientists wrote in The Lancet, a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal, that there's still no evidence for it.

(AP) --- The global death toll from COVID-19 eclipsed 4 million Wednesday as the crisis increasingly becomes a race between the vaccine and the highly contagious delta variant.

The tally of lives lost over the past year and a half, as compiled from official sources by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the number of people killed in battle in all of the world’s wars since 1982, according to estimates from the Peace Research Institute Oslo.

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 07 (APP): The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an independent watchdog body, Tuesday called on the authorities in Indian Occupied Kashmir to cease harassing journalist Siddharth Varadarajan, Editor-in-Chief of The Wire, a news website, and allow journalists to report freely.

NEW YORK (AP) — Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams has won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City after appealing to the political center and promising to strike the right balance between fighting crime and ending racial injustice in policing.

A former police captain, Adams would be the city’s second Black mayor if elected.

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 06 (APP): The UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) President, Pakistani Ambassador Munir Akram, Tuesday underscored the need for a committed multilateral effort to “bounce back and rebuild” the coronavirus-affected countries and to enable them realize the vision of anti-poverty 2030 development agenda.

NEW YORK, July 4 (Xinhua) -- Water leak at one of the control towers at the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on Saturday evening caused the delays or cancellations of hundreds of flights, according to media reports on Sunday.

Nearly 300 flights were reportedly delayed or diverted.

The disruption occurred on the busiest Independence Day weekend for travel since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some 3.7 million Americans would reportedly fly this weekend, a 164 percent increase from last year.

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 03 (APP): The world is in a very “dangerous period” of the coronavirus pandemic compounded by more transmissible variants like Delta — first detected in India — which is continuing to evolve and mutate, the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has warned.

“In countries with low COVID-19 vaccination coverage, terrible scenes of hospitals overflowing are again becoming the norm,” Tedros told his bi-weekly press briefing in Geneva.”But no country is out of the woods yet”, he added.