Category Archives: World News

Coronavirus live news: French fire service suspends use of Oxford vaccine; Netherlands reports 10 cases of side effects

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French firefighters in southern region won’t get AstraZeneca jab; Dutch watchdog says possible thrombosis among cases

Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceutical Co Ltd has said it has signed an agreement with contract manufacturer IDT Biologika GmbH to manufacture Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose Covid vaccine, according to Reuters.

Reuters reports:

Firemen in France’s southern Bouches-du-Rhone region have suspended the use of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine for their staff after signs of negative side-effects, reported BFM TV and AFP, fuelling concerns related to the product.

France and Germany have decided to continue administering the shot while other European countries, including Ireland, Norway and the Netherlands, have suspended its use on safety grounds.

Related: Why some countries have suspended the AstraZeneca vaccine and what it means for Australia – explainer

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Cheese sales soar in French lockdown – but an Italian is biggest winner

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Consumption at home rose sharply last year, with mozzarella up 21% and raclette machines in high demand

How did the French keep smiling through the Covid lockdown? Not by saying “cheese” but by eating it, figures suggest.

Researchers say cheese consumption at home soared last year as the confined sought comfort food. And in a nation that boasts 246 kinds of cheese, as the former president Charles de Gaulle once said, it was Italian mozzarella that benefited most, with a 21.2% rise in sales in 2020.

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While We Are Here review – enigmatic study of romance is hard to love

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There is an avant-garde bravery to this international love story – but how can we invest in protagonists we never see?

Here is a thought-experiment of a movie from Brazilian film-makers Clarissa Campolina and Luiz Pretti: it’s a dramatic essay, or docu-fictional romance, or perhaps the cinematic equivalent of an epistolary novel, and it has been much admired on the festival circuit.

Related: Streaming: indie films from Latin America

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Biden urges UK and EU to preserve Northern Irish peace amid Brexit row

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Remarks follow EU formally launching legal action over protocol arrangements in the region

The White House has urged London and Brussels to work together to preserve the peace in Northern Ireland, after the EU formally launched legal action against the UK over Brexit arrangements in the region.

Joe Biden’s spokesperson said: “We continue to encourage both the EU and the UK government to prioritise pragmatic solutions to safeguard and advance the hard-won peace in Northern Ireland.”

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The race to zero: can America reach net-zero emissions by 2050?

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Joe Biden wants zero emissions by 2050, but time is ticking. So how will the country have to change over the next 30 years?

If America finally weans itself off planet-heating emissions, the country will look and feel very different.

Landscapes from coast to coast would be transformed, carpeted in wind turbines and solar panels, with enough new transmission lines to wrap around Earth 19 times. The populace would whiz past in their electric cars, to and from homes equipped with induction stoves and heat pumps. The air would be near-pristine. Hundreds of thousands of people who would have prematurely died from the toxic fossil-fuel age would still be alive.

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Covid cases fall over 80% among US nursing home staff and residents

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Despite vaccine hesitancy, figures show a big drop in infections – giving hope that, after a brutal year, an end is in sight

Joan Phillips, a certified nursing assistant in a Florida nursing home, loved her job but dreaded the danger of going to work in the pandemic. When vaccines became available in December, she jumped at the chance to get one.

Months later, it appears that danger has faded. After the rollout of Covid vaccines, the number of new Covid cases among nursing home staff fell 83% – from 28,802 for the week ending 20 December to 4,764 for the week ending 14 February, data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services shows.

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Why Britain is tilting to the Indo-Pacific region

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Critics warn of imperial fantasy but the economic and political forces pulling the UK back to the region are real

Some will call it a tilt, others a rebalancing and yet others a pivot but, either way, the new big idea due to emerge from the government’s foreign and defence policy review on Tuesday will be the importance of the Indo-Pacific region – a British return east of Suez more than 50 years after the then defence secretary Denis Healey announced the UK’s cash-strapped retreat in 1968.

Boris Johnson and his admirals are billing the focus on a zone stretching through some of the world’s most vital seaways east from India to Japan and south from China to Australia as Britain stepping out in the world after 47 years locked in the EU’s protectionist cupboard. Others warn Johnson is indulging a hubristic and militarily dangerous imperial fantasy.

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What price a child’s life? India’s quest to make rare disease drugs affordable

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Parents whose only hope was finding foreign sponsorship or a clinical trial are now looking for homegrown breakthroughs

For three years, Vidya tried to find the cause of her son’s recurrent fevers and low cognitive development. When she found out, she was devastated.

Vineeth, 10, has an incurable illness – mucopolysaccharidosis type 2 – that affects his organs. Afflicting just one in a million, the enzyme-replacement medication that can help stop the illness getting any worse costs £100,000 a year, far beyond the reach of even a wealthier Indian parent.

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Revealed: seafood fraud happening on a vast global scale

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Guardian analysis of 44 studies finds nearly 40% of 9,000 products from restaurants, markets and fishmongers were mislabelled

A Guardian Seascape analysis of 44 recent studies of more than 9,000 seafood samples from restaurants, fishmongers and supermarkets in more than 30 countries found that 36% were mislabelled, exposing seafood fraud on a vast global scale.

Many of the studies used relatively new DNA analysis techniques. In one comparison of sales of fish labelled “snapper” by fishmongers, supermarkets and restaurants in Canada, the US, the UK, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, researchers found mislabelling in about 40% of fish tested. The UK and Canada had the highest rates of mislabelling in that study, at 55%, followed by the US at 38%.

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‘We won’t give up’: new generation of activists keep Syria’s revolution alive

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In the few areas not retaken by Assad’s forces, people gather to reiterate the same demands protesters made a decade ago

Sarah Kasem was 12 when Arab Spring protesters began to fill the streets and squares of Syria 10 years ago. She remembers the hope and excitement of that time vividly; it seems so divorced from the horrors that followed.

Kasem’s teenage years were spent living under siege in the city of Homs, where friends and relatives disappeared in regime prisons and her family lived much of the time without electricity, struggling to secure food and medicine. All the while, Bashar al-Assad’s air force dropped barrel bombs and cluster munitions on their neighbourhood.

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Netherlands election: Mark Rutte set to win big – but what next?

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Analysis: PM is on course for fourth term in office. What is his secret and how is next coalition government likely to look?

The outgoing prime minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, appears headed for a comprehensive victory and fourth successive term in office as the Dutch go to the polls in national elections on Monday, with voting spread over three days due to coronavirus restrictions.

Polls predict Rutte, who has headed three coalition governments of different political complexions since 2010, and his centre-right People’s party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) will win twice as many parliamentary seats as his nearest rival.

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Spain to launch trial of four-day working week

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Government agrees to proposal from leftwing party Más País allowing companies to test reduced hours

Spain could become one of the first countries in the world to trial the four-day working week after the government agreed to launch a modest pilot project for companies interested in the idea.

Earlier this year, the small leftwing Spanish party Más País announced that the government had accepted its proposal to test out the idea. Talks have since been held, with the next meeting expected to take place in the coming weeks.

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Outrage in Myanmar after activist allegedly tortured to death

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Photographs seen by the Guardian testify to the gruesome death of prominent community leader Zaw Myat Lynn

  • Warning: some readers may find material in this story distressing

Under cover of darkness, the soldiers rolled up outside a school building on the outskirts of Myanmar’s main city, Yangon. It was 1.30am. The military began searching the Suu Vocational College, in the north-west suburb of Shwe Pyi Thar. They moved swiftly from room to room.

They had come to arrest Zaw Myat Lynn, a prominent community organiser and teacher. He was an activist with the National League for Democracy (NLD), the party of Aung San Suu Kyi. In November, the NLD won a landslide election victory. It was in power until last month, when the military abruptly ended civilian rule.

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Coronavirus live news: 4,618 new cases and 52 more deaths in UK; Irish regulator hopes to lift AstraZeneca vaccine pause

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Prof Karina Butler says Irish health authority recommendation after unproven reports of blood clotting is down to ‘an abundance of caution’

Brazil has reported 1,127 further Covid-19 deaths in the past 24 hours and 43,812 new cases of the coronavirus, the health ministry said as the pandemic’s most lethal week for the country comes to an end.

The South American country has now registered a total of 11,483,370 cases, Reuters reports.

France must do everything to avoid another lockdown as pressure on hospitals grows, prime minister Jean Castex has said as the country added more than 26,000 new cases to its tally.

Rather than send the country into a third national lockdown, the French government has implemented a 6pm nationwide curfew and weekend lockdowns in two hotspot regions while shutting shopping centres.

We have to use all weapons available to avoid a lockdown. I’ve never hid it, let’s vaccinate, protect ourselves, get tested,” Castex said on Sunday.

The situation is not getting better, there is a higher and higher number of infections and hospitals are very burdened with many patients, whose average age is getting lower and who don’t always have comorbidities.”

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Cellist Yo-Yo Ma gives impromptu performance at Covid vaccine centre

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Acclaimed musician celebrated receiving his second vaccine dose by performing for those waiting in line

Internationally acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma celebrated receiving his second dose of the coronavirus vaccine by performing an impromptu concert for those waiting in line after him.

Ma, who has won 18 Grammy Awards and sold millions of records during his career, was filmed performing in a mask at the vaccine site in Berkshire Community College, Massachusetts, on Saturday.

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Angela Merkel’s CDU slumps to historic lows in former strongholds

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State election results could be sign tide is turning against conservatives as country gears up for national poll

Angela Merkel’s party has slumped to historic lows in two former stronghold regions at state elections, in a sign that the tide may be turning against Germany’s conservatives just as the country gears up for a national vote in six months’ time.

The incumbent Green premier of Baden-Württemberg and the Social Democrat leader of Rhineland-Palatinate both look certain to retain their offices in the two south-western states, after exit polls showed significant losses for the second-placed Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on Sunday.

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Has the pandemic led to a long-term erosion of the right to dissent?

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Analysis: the police’s handling of the Sarah Everard vigil raises questions over whether authorities are going too far

Defending the Metropolitan police’s handling of Saturday night’s Sarah Everard vigil, assistant commissioner Helen Ball argued the force had to act “because of the overriding need to protect people’s safety” from the threat of coronavirus. Yet last year’s Black Lives Matter protests in some 300 US cities did not cause a spike in cases there, a July report from the National Bureau of Economic Research found. The outdoor air played a part in dispelling the virus and, in cities with big rallies, infections even fell because those who did not take part stayed home instead of shopping or eating out – activities that carry a greater risk.

While not an exact parallel with the Clapham Common event, it suggests even huge and noisy protests, where thousands of people are shouting and chanting, are not necessarily cauldrons for infection. And they can be done safely, according to the human rights organisation Liberty. For example a socially distanced rally was held in Tel Aviv in April last year against the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with thousands of people shouting and waving banners each in their own space, two metres apart.

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Livestreaming bill introduced after Christchurch could criminalise innocent people | Anjum Rahman

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The government’s proposal on criminalising the streaming of offensive content is open to misuse and could lead to unnecessary harassment

Two years on from the horrific mass murders at Al-Noor and Linwood mosques in Christchurch, we know the grief is fresh in the hearts of many. As we think about those directly and indirectly impacted, we must also continue to think about what needs to change.

In December 2020, the report of the royal commission into these events was made public. The findings were a disappointment in not holding any person or agency negligent, though the body of the report detailed a number of failings. The government has committed to implementing the 44 recommendations, with some announcements already made.

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Myanmar’s ‘darkest moment’: death toll rises sharply as junta’s crackdown continues

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Ousted MPs urge citizens to defend themselves after one of deadliest days since February coup

At least 39 people have been killed in one of the deadliest days since Myanmar was thrust back under military rule, as a group of ousted MPs urged citizens to defend themselves during the nation’s “darkest moment”.

Myanmar has been in turmoil since the military forced the civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi from power in a coup on 1 February, triggering a mass uprising that has led to hundreds of thousands protesting daily for a return to democracy.

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Italian ex-prime minister Enrico Letta elected to lead Democratic party

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Letta to lead second largest party in Draghi government as Giuseppe Conte in talks to lead Five Star Movement

A former Italian prime minister, Enrico Letta, has been elected leader of the centre-left Democratic party (PD), the second largest party in Mario Draghi’s government, as another former prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, was in talks to become leader of the Five Star Movement (M5S), its largest.

Letta takes over from Nicola Zingaretti, who abruptly quit the party’s leadership earlier this month over what he called an “unending stream” of criticism, and was elected on Sunday with 860 votes in favour and two against.

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