Police start arresting protesters in Ottawa

A man is arrested by police as protesters and supporters gather during the agitation against COVID-19 measures in Ottawa, Canada on Thursday. Pic/AFP

Police began arresting protesters Friday in a bid to break the three-week siege of Canada's capital by truckers angry over the country's COVID-19 restrictions.

Some protesters surrendered and were taken into custody, police said. Some were seen being led away in handcuffs.

Police made their first move to take break up the traffic-snarling occupation late Thursday with the arrest of two protest leaders. They also sealed off much of the downtown area to outsiders to prevent them from coming to the aid of the self-styled Freedom Convoy protesters.

The capital represented the movement's last stronghold after three weeks of demonstrations and blockades that shut down border crossings into the U.S., caused economic damage to both countries and created a political crisis for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Over the past weeks, authorities had hesitated to move against many of the protesters around the country, in part for fear of violence. The demonstrations have drawn right-wing extremists and veterans, some of them armed.

Ottawa police made it clear on Thursday they were preparing to end the protest and remove the more than 300 trucks, with Ottawa's interim police chief warning: "Action is imminent." Washington state to lift indoor mask mandate.

Washington's statewide indoor mask mandate, one of the few left in the US, will lift in most places on March 21, including at schools and child care facilities, Gov. Jay Inslee said Thursday. And starting on March 1, vaccine verification or proof of a negative COVID-19 test will no longer be required for attendance at large events.

20,23,138 No. of new cases reported globally in the past 24 hours
41,66,14,051 Total no. of cases worldwide
58,44,097 Total no. of deaths worldwide

S. Korea keeps crowd limits

South Korea will extend restaurant dining hours but maintain a six-person limit on private social gatherings as it wrestles with a massive coronavirus wave driven by the highly infectious omicron variant. The 1,09,831 new cases reported on Friday was another record and about a 25-fold increase from the levels seen in mid-January, when omicron became the country's dominant strain. The more than 5,16,000 infections counted in the past seven days alone raised South Korea's caseload to over 1.75 million. Cases are growing much faster than when the Delta variant struck the country.

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