 Hello and welcome to the International Daily Roundup by People's Dispatch, where we bring you major news developments from around the world. Our headlines, UK Judge denies bail to Julian Assange, US Democrats poised to win Senate election races in Georgia, the Sudanese Professionals Association launches a campaign against notorious RSA of Malaysia, and in our video section, we look at the differences, costs and challenges of the COVID-19 vaccines across the world. In our first story, UK Judge has denied bail to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a hearing handed the Westminster Magistrates Court on January 6th at today. The hearing was presided over by Judge Vanessa Baratza, who had blocked Assange's extradition to the US on Monday. Judge Baratza stated today that Assange could not be released because he had an incentive to abscond during the appeals process. The US is expected to appeal her verdict on extradition. The defense has strongly argued that the denial of the extradition plea had rendered the chance of flight null and void. It had also raised concerns about its health. However, the judge concluded that Assange's mental health is being managed at Belmarsh Prison, where he is lodged now. This is a contradiction of repeated reports of Assange being under physical and mental duties in the prison. Julian Assange's defense team also requested that he be released on bail and have the opportunity to reunite with his partner and two young children. He would have been placed under the conditions of a house arrest with ankle tag in their London home, according to the defense, but the judge rejected his plea. In our next story, the US Democratic Party is poised to win the two Senate seats in the state of Georgia after a runoff election on January 5th. With 98% of the votes counted, Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock has defeated incumbent Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler by a margin of 1.4%. As of 3 p.m. GMT, the second race between Democrat John Ossoff and Republican David Perdue is still too close to call. However, Ossoff is leading by a margin of over 16,000 votes. If Ossoff wins the race, the Democrats and Republicans will each hold 50 seats in the Senate. With Vice President-elect Democrat Kamala Harris breaking the tie, the Democrats will effectively control the 100-member body. The Democratic Party also holds a narrow majority in the House of Representatives. The crucial election saw a voter turnout of nearly 4.5 million people, including over 3 million early voters in maiden ballots. Georgia has been a key battleground state and was subject to President Donald Trump's latest efforts to overturn Joe Biden's victory in the presidential election. A district judge in Georgia on January 5 rejected an emergency motion for injunction filed by President Trump. Trump had filed a suit against Georgia's secretary of state and the governor in a bid to decertify the presidential election results in the state. This was days after the president was found pressurizing and threatening Georgia officials to recount the votes in a way that would swing the election in his favor. Donald Trump is alleged, the voter fraud, but has presented no real evidence to support his claims. Dozens of such appeals have been dismissed by courts across the country. Joe Biden has defeated President Donald Trump by 11,799 votes in Georgia in the 2020 election. This has made him the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since 1992. The U.S. Congress will also convene today for a final tally of the electoral college votes, which will officially conclude the presidential election. However, several Republican lawmakers have declared that they are going to challenge the vote counts. In our next story, the Sudanese Professionals Association, that's the SBA, a trade union coalition, has launched a campaign demanding the dissolution of the notorious militia that affidts support forces. The SBA had led the December 2018 revolution in the country, which ousted the dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Called know-your-right, the campaign came in the backdrop of the torture and killing of yet another young activist, Palahati Noori. On December 21, he was abducted from a busy market near his house in southern Khartoum by armed and civilian-closed members of the RSF's intelligence department. He was forced onto a pickup truck with no number plates and subsequently held at a detention center in the capital, Strin city, Umdurman. His family, which had filed a complaint with the local police, was informed by an unidentified caller the next day that Noori's body was at the Umdurman teaching hospital. Family members reported seeing signs of torture on the body. The report of the second autopsy conducted with the insistence of his family confirmed multiple injuries on his body. In protest on December 24, members of the local resistance committee, a neighborhood youth organization, blocked the main roads around the El-Kalaka Sangat market from where he was abducted. While inquiries are still on, the SPA insisted that those involved in the killing must be tried in court for premeditated murder. It has also demanded the disbanding of the RSF, which has been accused of many massacres since its formation in 2013, including that of over 100 protesters on June 3, 2019. And finally, we look at the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines across the world. Various countries have introduced national vaccination plans prioritizing healthcare workers and elderly citizens. Here is a video feature of the vaccines and the key difference between the variants. The beginning of the new year has brought with it some hope as different countries have started administering vaccinations against COVID-19. This has been the fastest development of a vaccine ever, with a number of research collaborations to make this feat possible. A number of these vaccines have also gotten approval by regulatory agencies. The main ones include vaccines developed by Oxford University in AstraZeneca, Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergent Infectious Diseases in the US, the Sputnik 5 vaccine developed by Rasheer's Gamalaya Institute, the vaccine developed by Sinofarm Group, a Chinese government-owned pharmaceutical company. Dozens of nations have started administering shots of these vaccines to their populations, starting with the elderly and healthcare workers. The United Kingdom was the first to start the rollout of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on 8 December. It also became the first to start inoculating people with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine on 4 January. The US has so far administered over 4.6 million shots using the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines. The Pfizer vaccine is also being used in Canada, Germany, Spain, Mexico, among other countries. The Sputnik 5 vaccine has been approved in Argentina, Bolivia, Serbia, Venezuela, Belarus, among other places. Russia has been administering this vaccine since September last year. Meanwhile, thousands of Chinese citizens, including frontline health workers, teachers and public transport workers, have already received a Sinofarm vaccine under an emergency use authorization. This vaccine has also received emergency use authorization in the UAE and Bahrain. So why are there so many vaccines and how are they different from each other? Given how dangerous the novel coronavirus has turned out to be, governments, research organizations and pharmaceuticals across the world have been trying to develop a vaccine that can work against it. The general sense behind this is that the more vaccines we have to deploy, the better. All these vaccines have displayed varying rates of effectiveness, but all of them are much about the 50% rate mandated by the FDA for emergency use for vaccines. These vaccines also employ different methodologies for building immunity against the virus. For instance, both the Pfizer-BioNTech and the Moderna vaccines rely on genetic instructions known as messenger RNA or mRNA. This prompts cells to make a protein that can train the immune system to recognize SARS-CoV-2 virus. This is the first time mRNA vaccines have been approved for any disease. Whereas the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine works using a virus that causes the common cold in chimpanzees. This virus is modified so it cannot spread and cause disease in the body. It is then loaded up with a gene for the coronavirus spike protein. When this vaccine is injected in the human body, it starts to produce the spike protein. The immune system detects this protein and produces active bodies. These active bodies would also then be effective against the real coronavirus should the person get infected. Russia's Sputnik 5 vaccine also uses this adenovirus vector method. This is the more conventional approach of producing vaccines. Other vaccines are also taking such conventional approaches. The Sinopharm vaccine contains a chemically inactivated version of the entire virus. The vaccine developed in India by Bharat Biotech called Covaxin also works in a similar manner. At the moment, the Pfizer vaccine is being used in the most countries. However, it requires to be stored in ultra-freezing temperatures, making it still a very expensive and difficult in remote areas. At 20 to 25 years, dollars the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are also priced much higher than the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, which costs three to four dollars a shot. The Oxford vaccine can also be stored in normal refrigerators for six months, making it the cheaper and more convenient option. The vaccines approved until now require the administration of two shots within a gap of a few weeks. Several countries are now debating whether to give just one shot for now in order to provide some immunity to a greater number of people. The UK, for instance, has approved delaying the second shot of the vaccine to 12 weeks after the first one. The WHO has called this a risky move, saying there is no scientific evidence for a delay of more than six weeks in administering the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. In India as well, health authorities are in a rush. The indigenously developed vaccine called Covaxin has been approved without data available on its effectiveness. Scientists are worried that this disregard of scientific and regulatory processes will dilute the overall potency of the vaccinations and also feed into anti-vaccine anxieties. Vaccines also still remain inaccessible for many countries. Apart from a few rich nations and countries with indigenous capabilities, most others may not be able to significantly vaccinate their populations until the next couple of years. So while there is some hope that we may start to recover and protect ourselves from this virus, many challenges remain for this immunity to reach all people.