Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Emmanuel Macron has said national divisions during the Covid-19 pandemic have highlighted the need to “beef up” EU powers, as he opened a consultation on Europe’s future at an event that was almost cancelled due to internal squabbling.
Speaking from a TV studio set up in the middle of the hemicycle of the European parliament in Strasbourg, the French president said he hoped the Future of Europe conference, a rolling series of events and online public opinion surveys, would strengthen EU level decision-making.
The mayor of Madrid has appealed for people to behave responsibly after thousands of people greeted the end of Spain’s six-month state of emergency by taking to the streets of towns and cities across the country in spontaneous celebration.
At the end of October last year, the socialist-led coalition government of the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, declared a state of emergency that included a nationwide overnight curfew, restrictions on travelling between regions and a ban on gatherings of more than six people.
Pope Francis has given his backing to the campaign calling for the suspension of coronavirus vaccine patents to boost supplies to poorer countries.
In a video message to the Vax Live event, Francis backed “universal access to the vaccine and the temporary suspension of intellectual property rights”. And he added his condemnation of the “virus of individualism” that “makes us indifferent to the suffering of others”.
A perceived lack of cultural awareness has raised concerns about how the rollout will be received, but islanders are working to overcome the barriers
Disruptions are not uncommon on Badu Island, one of the largest islands in the Torres Strait. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the Torres Strait went into lockdown in line with the rest of the country, and locals were encouraged not to travel between islands.
Charlotte Nona, the director of Queensland Regional Health in the Torres Strait and Northern Peninsula, says there is only one frontline health worker for the entire population on Badu.
Reduced demand comes as Joe Biden has announced a plan to vaccinate 70% of US adults by the Fourth of July
Declining demand for Covid-19 vaccines in the US is causing states across the country to refuse their full allocations of doses from the federal government, despite concerted efforts to raise national take-up rates.
Reduced demand, which is contributing to a growing stockpile of doses, comes as nearly 46% of the US population has received at least one dose of a two-shot vaccine and about 34% are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.
Italy plans to lift quarantine restrictions for travellers arriving from European countries, including Britain and Israel, as early as mid-May to revive the tourism industry, Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio said on Saturday.
After meeting Health Minister Roberto Speranza to discuss the easing of restrictions for countries where vaccination levels are high, Di Maio said, quarantine requirements may also be scrapped for those arriving from the United States from June.
Tourism is an important key to Italy’s restart, and we need to plan the summer well so that health, economy and work are not put in danger.
With Minister Roberto Speranza we had a first confrontation on reopening measures to foreign tourists who want to visit our country this summer.
The German chancellor Angela Merkel said Europeans could forward to travelling this summer if coronavirus cases continue declining on the continent.
While the European Union is developing a vaccine certificate, valid throughout the 27-nation bloc, summer holidays should be possible again for people who haven’t had their shots against the virus, the chancellor said.
Merkel said that Germany also appears to have broken its most recent outbreak.
“Step by step, more will be possible in Germany, too, wherever the incidence drops, and that will hopefully be the case for all of Europe,” she said.
EU leaders have given short shrift to a proposal by Joe Biden and backed by the pope to waive Covid-19 vaccine patents as a way to increase supply, insisting that the White House should instead allow the export of doses and the key ingredients.
At a summit in Porto, a series of European leaders, including those who had previously appeared open to suspending intellectual property rights, said Biden’s idea was not a priority and expressed frustration at the US president’s attempt to claim the moral high ground.
Senior coroner says there needs to be an investigation into what may have been the ‘unnatural’ death of Belly Mujinga
An inquest will held into the death of Belly Mujinga, the railway worker who died with Covid-19 after an alleged incident where she was coughed on and spat at by a customer.
Mujinga, 47, died last April, two weeks after the alleged incident on the concourse at London’s Victoria station where she worked as a sales clerk for Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR).
Here is a recap of the main Covid updates from around the world:
China’s Sinopharm state company has offered substantial support for the Covax programme to provide Covid vaccines mainly to poor countries, a World Health Organization official has said.
As Reuters reports, senior WHO adviser Bruce Aylward said it would be up to Sinopharm to say how many doses of its vaccine it can provide to the programme, but added:
They are looking at trying to provide substantial support, make substantial doses available while at the same time of course trying to serve China’s population.
The government has just announced its green list for quarantine-free international travel into England. The countries on it are Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Brunei, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, Israel, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, and Portugal, including the Azores and Madeira.
Turkey, Maldives and Nepal are expected to be added to a red list while Israel will be among the green list countries, the UK transport secretary, Grant Shapps, announced.
Popular travel destinations France and Spain were not included in the green list announced on Friday, but Shapps assured there would be a review every three weeks.
Portugal and Israel are among a dozen countries which have been placed on England’s first ever “green list”, allowing people to go abroad from 17 May and return home without the need to quarantine.
Announcing the first easing of tight restrictions on foreign travel in months, the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, said people would soon be able to book foreign holidays and make trips to see friends or relatives living overseas. He also announced plans to make digital vaccine passports available.
The pandemic overwhelming the big cities is reaching areas of Bihar where there is one doctor for 40,000 people
In the small rural village of Kathail, in the east of India’s poorest state, Bihar, access to healthcare has always been scarce. But when 34-year-old Umakant Singh fell sick with a cough and fever last week, his brother Mantu Singh did all he could to find help.
For four days Mantu rushed around, collecting the limited medicines he could find for his younger brother and nursing him at home. But he knew what these symptoms meant: Covid-19 had reached their village.
Tens of millions of asylum seekers, migrants, refugees and internally displaced people around the world have been excluded from national Covid-19 vaccination programmes, according to World Health Organization research seen by the Guardian.
The gaps mean that a scattered group numbering at least 46 million people, about the size of the population of Spain, may struggle to get vaccinated even if a global shortage of doses eases.
The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has told a Senate hearing on Covid-19 there are 173 unaccompanied children in India who are trying to return to Australia. More than 9,500 Australians are stranded in the country, 950 of them classed as vulnerable, following a flight ban from India that will end on 15 May. Australian airline Qantas doesn’t take unaccompanied minors, potentially limiting options to come home through Air India or special repatriation flights
Photographer Leysis Quesada Vera describes life during the pandemic in Havana’s Los Sitios neighbourhood. Her work is supported and produced by the Magnum Foundation, with a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.Magnum Foundation is a nonprofit organisation that expands creativity and diversity in documentary photography. Through grant making and mentorship, Magnum Foundation supports a global network of social justice and human rights-focused photographers and experiments with new models for storytelling
Los Sitios lies to the south of Centro, the careworn barrio that gives Havana its coarse voice and whose northern limit is the Malecon, the famous corniche set against the Florida Straits.
The photographer Leysis Quesada Vera describes Los Sitios – her neighbourhood – as home to “people who work with tourists but not in the hotels. They sell cigars, probably illegally, clean the houses where tourists stay, sell souvenirs.”
The Covid-19 inquiry is hearing from Australians stranded in India, including Sunny, who traveled to India in May 2020 because his father was in a critical condition with no support during India’s coronavirus lockdown.
Sunny’s father passed away on 1 June 2020 while Sunny was in hotel quarantine in Dehli. He wants to bring his mother home to Australia with him, but his flights in July 2020 were cancelled due to the Melbourne lockdown.
Sunny said it was “next to impossible” to come back with 10,000 stranded Australians seeking seats on Air India flights and no Qantas repatriation flights until November. He paid $10,000 to fly to Australia from Japan, but was bumped from the flight.
Sunny said the Australian government had been “totally insensitive to stranded Australians” after he suffered “11 months of misery”.
Sunny and his mother live in an area experiencing a “tsunami of infections”, with 60-70% of people on the street infected with Covid-19. He said they lived holed up in the house “in fear for our lives” but worried it was only a matter of time before they were infected.
Sunny quoted the advice of the chief medical officer, Paul Kelly, that the India travel ban could, in the worst-case scenario, result in the death of Australians in India.
He called for a comprehensive schedule of repatriation flights to get all Australians in India and elsewhere home.
Meg, another Australian in India, has told the committee she was stranded in India after she travelled there on holiday in January 2020.
Meg was unable to fly back in October when her Cathay Pacific flight via Hong Kong was cancelled, and she hasn’t been able to get a seat in the “raffle” of respite or charter flights.
She said:
The daily fear of going out and contracting Covid was with us every day and it it still is now, the situation is so bad. The Australian government hasn’t provided any kind of emotional support to those stranded in India. We are part of Facebook and Whatsapp groups – people are depressed about the situation. Emotionally people are so down and depressed.
We haven’t really received anything from the high commission. Every time I’ve called for help, guidance, the phone would just ring out no matter how many times you call.
The website for the new Labor campaign we mentioned earlier is now live. It is seen as a bit of an opening salvo for an election which could be more than a year away.
Germany says waiver would inhibit private sector research
Opposition to Biden plan threatens to deadlock WTO talks
The US and Germany are at odds on the issue of waivers for patents on Covid-19 vaccines, as Berlin argued that a waiver would not increase production and would inhibit future private sector research.
The disagreement is the first major rift between the two economic powers since Joe Biden took office, and threatens to deadlock discussions at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and sour relations within the G7 group of major industrialised democracies.
Foreign ministry responds to west’s human rights claims, saying countries should ‘face up to their own problems’
China has rejected accusations of human rights abuse and economic coercion, made by G7 foreign ministers, accusing them of “blatantly meddling” in China’s internal affairs, calling their remarks groundless.
“Attempts to disregard the basic norms of international relations and to create various excuses to interfere in China’s internal affairs, undermine China’s sovereignty and smear China’s image will never succeed,” said the foreign ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin. “They should not criticise and interfere with other countries with a superior mentality, and undermine the current top priority of international anti-epidemic cooperation.”