December 7, Tuesday, 2021 (1:30 p.m.) Newsline

1. The White House announced a diplomatic boycott on Monday of the Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympics. Government delegates will not attend the Games. But US athletes will still be allowed to compete. Officials in the Biden administration have criticized Chinese leaders repeatedly for abuses of human rights. They say the treatment of Muslims and other minorities in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region amounts to genocide.
2. The International Olympic Committee says it respects the US decision not to send government officials and diplomats to the Beijing Winter Games as it’s a political decision for each government.
3. Nobel Prize laureates who live in the US are being honored close to home. Syukuro Manabe, who was born in Japan, received his medal for the physics prize on Monday at a ceremony in Washington. Manabe helped lay the foundations for research into climate change. He showed how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to global warming.