Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Migrant workers on Spanish farms that provide fruit and vegetables for UK supermarkets are trapped in dire conditions under lockdown, living in cardboard and plastic shelters without food or running water.
Thousands of workers, many of them undocumented, live in settlements between huge greenhouses on farms in the southern Spanish provinces of Huelva and Almeria, key regions for European supply chains.
Spain has ruled out any early reopening of its tourism sector and Germany is set to extend a travel warning for all leisure trips outside the country until mid-June, casting further doubt on when would-be holidaymakers will be able to venture abroad again.
With airline fleets mostly grounded, cross-border train traffic slashed and many EU countries, including France, requiring all arrivals bar their own citizens to formally justify their journey, leisure travel within Europe is at a near standstill.
France and Spain have announced detailed roadmaps for gradual, phased exits from their strict coronavirus lockdowns, with restrictions to be loosened progressively and varying from region to region.
The French prime minister, Édouard Philippe, told parliament the decision to confine the population to their homes six weeks ago had saved 62,000 lives but it was now time to start lifting the lockdown to avoid economic collapse.
A steep drop in police reports indicates isolation may be making it harder to get help
It was 2.30am when Daniel Jiménez was woken by his neighbour’s screams. When he went outside his home in the Los Pajarillos neighbourhood of Valladolid in north-east Spain, he saw a woman being dangled from a third-storey window by her husband. Another neighbour rushed out with mattresses to help break her fall but he was too late. She fell to her death.
Although the circumstances of the killing of the 56-year-old woman are still under investigation, the interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, declared it a crime of gender violence, making the woman the third victim of femicide since Spain’s strict lockdown came into force on 14 March.
After 45 days at home, children in Spain up to the age of 13 are allowed to leave their homes for an hour a day. With around 220,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and more than 20,000 reported deaths the country has one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe
Every day, the statistics bring more grim headlines: “Italian death toll passes 20,000”, “Record UK daily death toll”, “Europe’s fatalities pass 100,000”. Across the world, people await national updates on the coronavirus – and compare their country with others.
The comparison game has been especially marked in Belgium, which on paper has the unhappy title of highest number of Covid-19 deaths per capita in Europe. Belgium – population 11.5 million – has counted at least 6,675 deaths since the start of the outbreak, more than Germany, which is nearly eight times more populous.
Children in Spain are to be allowed to take walks outside for the first time in nearly six weeks from Sunday after the government bowed to pressure to go further in its plans to ease lockdown measures.
As EU leaders prepared for a summit to assess the damage Covid-19 has done to economies and agree a plan to revive them, the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, told MPs on Wednesday that any relaxation of the rules would be “slow and gradual”.
Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, from Maida Vale, was one of most wanted militants in Europe
Spanish police have arrested a former British rapper turned Islamic State extremist, Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, one of the most wanted militants in Europe, in a counter-terrorism swoop on Tuesday.
British and other sources confirmed his identity a few hours after the national police agency in Madrid said it had arrested an Egyptian national and two other men in a flat in the southern Spanish city of Almeria.
That coronavirus is colour blind and respects no borders is true enough, although far from being the great equaliser, it forces the poor to bear the brunt. And given the prominent role played by experts in epidemiology who speak in a universalising language of objective science and mathematical curves, attempts at containing or mitigating the spread of Covid-19 sound similar around the world.
Yet the responses differ significantly from country to country, even among richer countries; shaped by historical legacies, political culture and social mores. The Swedish historian Sverker Sörlin, himself a Covid-19 survivor, noted in a recent article that there was never just one global pandemic but many, each shaped by its own national logic. Sörlin was building on William H McNeill and his classic Plagues and Peoplesfrom 1976, in which McNeill tried to show that epidemics mirrored each affected society. There is not a universal biological enemy waging war, these global viruses strike societies, as much as the individuals within them.
A taxi driver in Spain was greeted with a round of applause as doctors at the Centro de Salud Ramón y Cajal in Alcorcón, Madrid wanted to show thanks for his kindness during the coronavirus outbreak. The taxi driver had been taking patients to the hospital without charging them. As a gesture of thanks the hospital gave him an envelope with money as well as the results of his coronavirus test, which were negative
Even faced with another great depression, wealthier EU countries are resisting action on debt that could ultimately keep the union together
Europe’s leaders are worried – and rightly so. The deadly impact of Covid-19 has resulted in a full-scale health crisis. Evidence of the economic consequences of trying to keep populations safe from coronavirus is starting to emerge. The political ramifications are only starting to be assessed – but they could be profound.
The European Union has found itself in some tight spots over the years, but always found a way of muddling through. It survived the financial crisis and will cope with Brexit. But this time things are a lot more serious.
Lockdowns across Europe have had a dramatic impact on air traffic, with 90% fewer flights taking off from the continent’s largest airports compared to a year ago
Wearing face masks, waving black flags and keeping two yards apart, thousands of Israelis demonstrated against prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu under strict coronavirus restrictions on Sunday.
Netanyahu, who denies any wrongdoing, is under criminal indictment in three corruption cases.
Germany has declared its coronavirus outbreak under control as it prepares to take its first tentative steps out of lockdown next week, while several European countries unveiled contact-tracing mobile apps aimed at facilitating a gradual return to a more normal life.
The German health minister, Jens Spahn, said on Friday that the virus was under control in Europe’s largest economy, thanks to confinement measures imposed after an early surge in cases. “The infection numbers have sunk significantly, especially the relative day-by-day increase,” he said.
Kandahar province went into full lockdown on Wednesday morning as Afghanistan reported its second biggest daily rise of new coronavirus cases in a week, triggered by a surge of infections in Kabul.
Afghanistan’s health ministry has reported 70 new positive cases of Covid-19 in the last 24 hours, pushing the total number of infections to 784.
Most of the new cases were in Kabul, which has so far recorded 201 cases, 31 today.
Kabul went into full lockdown last week, as all roads to the city of six million were blocked and 1,600 police officers were appointed to monitor movement inside the city.
Of the new Covid-19 cases, 22 were confirmed in the western province of Herat, the worst affected area in Afghanistan so far with 313 cases.
The southern province of Kandahar went into full lockdown on Wednesday morning in a bid to contain the spread of coronavirus in one of Afghanistan’s most populated areas.
Germany’s government will extend restrictions on movement introduced last month to slow the spread of the coronavirus until at least 3 May, Handelsblatt business daily reported on Wednesday, citing the dpa news agency.
The chancellor, Angela Merkel, is holding a video conference on Wednesday, first with cabinet ministers and later with the leaders of Germany’s 16 states, who will try to agree on whether to ease the measures given some improvement in the situation.
People in Spain were being handed masks at transport hubs on Monday as the government relaxed some tough lockdown measures and a few businesses including from the construction and manufacturing sectors tentatively reopened.
With the country entering its second month of lockdown, firms unable to operate remotely were allowed to resume work, sparking criticism from some regional leaders who fear a resurgence of the coronavirus outbreak.
About half of all Covid-19 deaths appear to be happening in care homes in some European countries, according to early figures gathered by UK-based academics who are warning that the same effort must be put into fighting the virus in care homes as in the NHS.
Snapshot data from varying official sources shows that in Italy, Spain, France, Ireland and Belgium between 42% and 57% of deaths from the virus have been happening in homes, according to the report by academics based at the London School of Economics (LSE).
The US has become the first country to record more than 2,000 deaths from coronavirus in a single day, as its overall toll surpassed that of Italy, making it the worst-hit country in the world.
White House experts said there were some signs the spread of the disease may be levelling off, but the US now has more than half a million confirmed infections and in the last 24 hours 2,108 people died. Hotspots include New York, Detroit, Louisiana and the capital, Washington DC.
The Spanish government has defended its decision to allow some non-essential workers to return to their jobs in factories and construction sites this coming week despite warnings that any relaxation of confinement measures could lead to a rise in contagion.
The World Health Organization has said there could be a “deadly resurgence” of the coronavirus if countermeasures are lifted too soon, while one of the Spanish government’s own experts has said he thought it would have been sensible to keep non-essential workers at home for longer.
The World Health Organization has warned that a premature lifting of restrictions on peoples’ movements by countries fighting the coronavirus pandemic could spark a “deadly resurgence”, as global deaths from the virus passed the grim milestone of 100,000.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the WHO, said it was working with countries on ways in which lockdowns could be gradually eased, but said doing so too quickly could be dangerous.
A messy compromise to unlock €500bn (£438bn) of EU support for countries hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic has been struck after Italy’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, warned that the existence of the bloc was at stake.
EU finance ministers on a video conference call struck a deal late on Thursday after the Netherlands shifted on a demand for “economic surveillance” of countries benefiting from €240bn of credit lines via the European stability mechanism, a bailout fund for struggling member states.