Новости за 28.01.2021

Germany will not recommend the use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus on its over-65 population, citing "insufficient data", according to a statement on Thursday from the Robert Koch Institute. The AstraZeneca vaccine, at the centre of a row over supplies to the EU, is expected to be approved by the European Medical Agency on Friday. This decision only applies to Germany. The vaccine is already in use in the UK.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin told the 'virtual Davos' event Wednesday that: "Of course, Western Europe and Russia should be together." They should "get rid of the phobias of the past", he added. "We're ready for it, we want it," he said, amid potential, new EU sanctions over his jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The EU also imposed economic sanctions over Putin's invasion of Ukraine, which he did not mention.

Poland is bringing a divisive anti-abortion law into force, amid escalating EU doubt on the legality of its court system.

US operatives recently recovered a Russian 'Pantsir S-1' anti-aircraft rocket system from Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar and flew it intact to Germany to collect intelligence, British newspaper The Times reported Wednesday. Russia had sold it to the Emirates, who gave it to Haftar. The US went after it amid fears of a repeat of MH17 in 2014, when a rogue Russian system shot down a passenger flight over Ukraine.

The UK is to extradite 'Tai', a Vietnamese man allegedly involved in causing a human-trafficking tragedy, to Belgium on a Belgian European Arrest Warrant issued last month, before the UK's Brexit transition ended, in a test of post-Brexit cooperation. Belgium accused Tai of driving migrants in taxis from Brussels to Bierne on the Belgian-French border, in 2019, before they got on to UK-bound lorries, where 29 of them later suffocated.

Boeing 737 Max planes were again permitted to fly, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (Easa) in Cologne, Germany, said Wednesday, lifting a 22-month ban after two air crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia in 2018. "We have every confidence that the aircraft is safe," Easa director Patrick Ky said. Ed Pierson, a leading US expert on Boeing, testified to Congress two days ago that US and EU re-certification was premature.

EU industry was responsible for almost 80 percent of the world's cross-border movements of 1.8bn live animals in 2019, according to UN statistics cited by The Guardian. EU subsidies promoted exports of European sheep to North Africa, despite there being local alternatives, NGO Animals International noted. Danish exports of three-month old piglets, on eight-hour train journeys, caused heat-stress, suffocation, and dehydration, the Animal Protection Denmark NGO also said.

The City of London was so big a financial centre it should shape EU regulation in future, not the other way around, Catherine McGuinness, the head of the City of London Corporation, its historic governing body, told Reuters. "It's clear that we can't be rule-takers - we must be rule-makers," she said Wednesday. Recent capital flight by some traders to EU financial centres was "not at all catastrophic," she added.

As the EU Commission gets entangled in a dispute with one of the vaccine producers and gets heat for the perceived slow roll-out of the vaccines, we take a look at what the EU has done and not done.

"The view that the company is not obliged to deliver because we signed a 'best effort agreement' is neither correct nor acceptable," said EU health commissioner Stella Kyriakides, after the company's CEO tried to justified delayed deliveries to the EU.

The marketisation of health and long-term care, the push for Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), and the public spending cuts encouraged by EU economic governance processes all contributed to the increased commercialisation, privatisation, and reduction of health and long-term care services.