Calling him a "clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman," Time magazine has named Tesla CEO Elon Musk as its Person of the Year for 2021.

Musk, who is also the founder and CEO space exploration company SpaceX, recently passed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the world's wealthiest person as the rising price of Tesla pushed his net worth to around $300 billion. He owns about 17% of Tesla's stock, which sold for almost $1,000 each on Monday.

Workers, volunteers and members of the National Guard fanned out in areas of Kentucky slammed by a series of tornadoes to begin the long process of recovery, including replacing thousands of damaged utility poles, delivering bottles of drinking water and continuing to search for the dead.

The tornado outbreak Friday that killed at least 88 people in five states — 74 of them in Kentucky — cut a path of devastation that stretched from Arkansas, where a nursing home was destroyed, to Illinois, where an Amazon distribution center was heavily damaged.

Pfizer said Tuesday that its experimental pill to treat COVID-19 appears effective against the omicron variant.

The company also said full results of its 2,250-person study confirmed the pill's promising early results against the virus: The drug reduced combined hospitalizations and deaths by about 89% among high-risk adults when taken shortly after initial COVID-19 symptoms.

The omicron variant appears to cause less severe disease than previous versions of the coronavirus, and the Pfizer vaccine seems to offer less defense against infection from it but still good protection from hospitalization, according to an analysis of data from South Africa, where the new variant is driving a surge in infections.

While the findings released Tuesday are preliminary and have not been peer-reviewed — the gold standard in scientific research — they line up with other early data about omicron's behavior, including that it seems to be more easily transmitted.

A person who was on Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's flight back from the United Arab Emirates has tested positive for COVID-19, the prime minister's office said Tuesday.

Bennett returned to Israel on Monday from a historic two-day trip to the Gulf Arab state, the first by an Israeli leader to the country, which recently normalized ties with Israel.

Israel's intelligence minister said Tuesday that Syria cannot be allowed to obtain chemical weapons, after a report emerged that Israel targeted the country's chemical weapons facilities.

In an interview with Israeli Army Radio, Elazar Stern would not directly comment on the report in the Washington Post that said that Israel struck Syria on two occasions — once this year and once last year — in a bid to block attempts to rebuild its chemical weapons stockpile. But Stern, a retired military general, hinted that Israel could not accept such weapons in the hands of its enemy to the north.

Hamas officials buried three of their members Tuesday who were killed by gunfire in a tense Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon days earlier. The militant group accused members of a rival faction of the deadly shooting.

Ayman Shanaa, an official with the militant group, told mourners that Fatah militia members were behind the shootings, which he called a "heinous and cowardly crime."

Protestors blocked roads Tuesday in Beddawi, Tripoli with trucks to object against an unprecedented LBP collapse, worsening inflation and people’s despair.

Later in the day, demonstrators blocked the Khalde highway that links Beirut to the South and the vital Corniche al-Mazraa road in the capital.

Turkey and Armenia will appoint special representatives to discuss steps to normalize their ties, Turkey's foreign minister said.

Speaking in parliament during a debate over his ministry's budget late Monday, Mevlut Cavusoglu also said charter flights between Istanbul and Yerevan would restart soon.

Geneva prosecutors have fined a Swiss bank for failing to alert money laundering authorities about a portion of more than $100 million from Saudi Arabia that went to former Spanish King Juan Carlos and his ex-lover, but dropped possible charges against his associates in the case.

The Geneva prosecutor's office, in a statement Monday, said it partially dropped an investigation opened three years ago of five people for alleged money laundering, while deciding that the Mirabaud bank had failed to properly communicate with the Swiss money laundering office.