Author: Newsdesk

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-Top News Education Health UK News

Boris: Increased Risk of COVID-19 Spread Unavoidable

As millions of children returned to classrooms across England, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that the increased risk of coronavirus transmission is “inevitable”.

“We do accept, of course, there will be increased risk of transmission, that’s inevitable,” Johnson said at a press briefing at Downing Street on Monday.

But he added that “the greater risk is keeping children out of school longer”, reports Xinhua news agency.

As part of Johnson’s long-anticipated “roadmap” to exit the lockdown, schools reopened on Monday morning

The reopening of schools is the first part of the four-step plan, which Johnson said on February 22 was designed to be “cautious but irreversible”.

Under the guidance, two people are allowed for recreation in an outdoor public space such as a park, which means they would be allowed to sit down for a coffee, drink or picnic.

England is expected to see all legal social restrictions being removed from June 21.

At Monday’s briefing, Johnson said the government can take the first step of easing lockdown with “confidence” because a third of the entire British population has now been vaccinated.

“At all times, we will be driven by the data,” he added.

Joining Johnson at the briefing, Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England Jenny Harries acknowledged the impact of opening schools on the virus transmission.

“We do expect there to be an impact on R, but education is of critical public health importance,” she said, referring to the coronavirus reproduction number.

More than 22.3 million people in Britain have been given the first jab of a coronavirus vaccine, according to the latest official figures.

Still, Johnson urged continued vigilance with the public as infections remain high.

“With the number of patients being admitted to hospital with Covid still eight times higher than the lows of last summer, it’s more vital than ever to follow the rules.”

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-Top News USA World

Over 9% of US Vaccinated Against COVID-19

Just 9.2 per cent of the US population has been fully vaccinated with against the novel coronavirys, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said.

Over 116 million vaccine doses had been distributed across the US as of Monday, and more than 92 million doses have been administered, Xinhua news agency quoted the latest CDC data as saying.

About 31 million people have received two doses of vaccines, the CDC data showed.

There are three Covid-19 vaccines currently authorised for emergency use in the US by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The FDA authorized the one developed by American drugmaker Pfizer in partnership with German company BioNTech, and another by American drugmaker Moderna, in December 2020.

Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was approved for emergency use on February 27. It is the first single-dose vaccine authorized in the United States.

The vast majority of people need to be fully vaccinated before Covid-19 precautions can be lifted broadly.

Until then, it is important that everyone continues to adhere to public health mitigation measures to protect the large number of people who remain unvaccinated, said the CDC.

President Joe Biden said last week that the country would have enough Covid-19 vaccine doses for every adult American by the end of May.

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National UK News

Soldier Shot dead during Firing Excercise

A British soldier from the Welsh Guards was accidentally shot dead during a live firing exercise, media reports said.

Sergeant Gavin Hillier, 35, was shot on Thursday during a night-time training exercise, Xinhua news agency quoted Times newspaper as saying in a report on Saturday.

Hillier, from Pontypool, served in the regiment’s motor transport platoon and was due to go Iraq this summer, the Evening Standard newspaper said.

The report adding that he had served in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past.

He was killed at the gunnery ranges at the Castlemartin training area in the Pembrokeshire coast national park.

An army spokesperson said: “The circumstances surrounding this death are being investigated and it would be inappropriate to comment any further.”

Previous incidents at the Castlemartin ranges have claimed the lives of soldiers.

In 2017, Corporals Matthew Hatfield and Darren Neilson of the Royal Tank Regiment died from injuries they suffered after their tank exploded during a training exercise on a firing range.

A 21-year-old soldier, Michael “Mike” Maguire, died at Castlemartin in 2012 after being shot in the head while relaxing at a safe location just outside the training range.

A 2013 inquest into his death heard he was hit in the temple by a single machine gun bullet fired by a fellow soldier during a training exercise.

The inquest jury ruled Maguire, who was a member of the 1st Battalion, The Royal Irish Regiment, had been unlawfully killed.

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-Top News Travel

Train Fares Rise above Inflation

Millions of train passengers in England and Wales will be hit by higher fares from Monday onwards as fares are expected to rise above inflation for the first time in eight years.

Ticket prices will increase by around 2.6 per cent, leading to accusations that the UK government is “pricing the railways out of existence”, Xinhua news agency quoted the Evening Standard newspaper as saying in a report.

The price hike represents the Retail Prices Index (RPI) measure of inflation from July 2020, plus 1 percentage point, according to the newspaper.

Increases in around half of fares, including season tickets on most commuter routes, are regulated by the British, Scottish and Welsh governments, media reports said.

Passengers in Wales face a similar increase, whereas the Scottish government is implementing smaller rises of 1.6 per cent and 0.6 per cent for peak and off-peak travel respectively, the report said.

Examples of the potential fare hikes include a Brighton-London annual season ticket going up by 129 pounds ($180) to 5,109 pounds ($7,154) and a Manchester-Glasgow off-peak return increasing by 2.30 pounds ($3) to 90.60 pounds ($126), said the Evening Standard newspaper.

Fare hikes in England have mirrored RPI since January 2014, but the Department for Transport (DfT) axed the policy due to the “unprecedented taxpayer support” handed to the rail industry during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The British, Scottish and Welsh governments took over rail franchise agreements from train operators in March 2020, following the collapse in demand for travel caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is expected to cost the government alone around 10 billion pounds by mid-2021, said the newspaper.

Fares usually become more expensive on the first working day of every year, but the 2021 rise was deferred due to the pandemic, said the newspaper.

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COVID-19 Culture Travel & Tourism

Pandemic Transformed Social Behaviour

The pandemic has affected tourists’ attitudes and behaviours in unforeseen ways, often subconsciously, said a new study.

The study, published in the journal Annals of Tourism Research, indicated that post-pandemic tourism could curb our motivation for new adventures.

“We found that a Covid-19 threat also made people overestimate the crowdedness of public spaces and feeling uncomfortable in crowded places like restaurants or shopping malls,” said researcher Florian Kock from Copenhagen Business School.

“Understanding the long-term psychological impact of the pandemic will be a crucial success factor for businesses during and long after the Covid-19 era,” Kock added.

For the study, the team implemented two survey-based studies at the start of the pandemic with 960 travellers to understand the deep-rooted changes of travel attitude and behaviour, gathering empirical insights.

They found that feeling vulnerable to Covid-19 activates a so-called ‘behavioural immune system’ that in turn makes people engage in various behaviours that helped our ancestors survive when facing a disease.

In the first study, the authors measured the degree to which individuals perceive a higher infection risk of Covid-19.

They found that those who fear Covid-19 are more prone to being nationalistic and xenophobic, meaning that they favour those who are like themselves and avoid foreigners.

In the second study, they found that those tourists who perceive Covid-19 as a big threat, subconsciously engage in behaviours in order to lower their travel-related risk perceptions.

As such, tourists found strategies to mitigate the travel risk by, for example, travelling in groups, buying travel insurance, and visiting the places they had visited before, thereby increasing destination loyalty.

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Business Technology

Epic Games’ case against Apple in UK rejected

The UK Competition Appeal Tribunal has dismissed Fortnite creator Epic Games’s bid to take Apple to court in the UK over competition law.

Fortnite was removed from Apple and Google’s app stores worldwide after it broke rules about in-app purchases.

Claiming that the rules were unfair, Epic Games had sought permission to take both the US-based tech giants to court in the UK, the BBC reported on Monday.

But the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal gave Epic Games, which is also US-based, permission to pursue only Google.

While saying that the UK was not the right place for the Epic-Apple row, the judge, Justice Roth, did not have the same ruling when it came to Google for complex legal reasons.

Epic Games last week said it has filed an antitrust complaint against Apple in the European Union, expanding the company’s fight to advance what it calls “fairer digital platform practices” for developers and consumers.

The complaint complements legal processes already underway in both the US and Australia, as well as Epic’s filing before the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal.

The complaint, filed with the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition, alleges that through a series of carefully designed anti-competitive restrictions, Apple has not just harmed but completely eliminated competition in app distribution and payment processes.

Apple had earlier denied that its 30 per cent commission was anti-competitive, saying it was Epic Games that violated its contract.

The iPhone maker said that Epic benefited from Apple’s promotion and developer tools.

Categories
Travel UK News

Hotel Quarantining Introduced to Arrivals in UK

All British and Irish citizens and UK residents who arrive in England after being in a high-risk Covid country now have to quarantine in hotels, officials said.

The “red list” of 33 countries includes Portugal, Brazil and South Africa. The new regulations, which aim to stop Covid-19 variants entering the country, apply to arrivals who have been in one of those places in the past 10 days, the BBC reported on Monday.

They will have to pre-book and pay 1,750 pounds to spend 10 days quarantining in the government-sanctioned hotels.

That covers the cost of the hotel, transport and testing.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the emergence of new variants meant the government “must go further” with its travel restrictions.

The government says it has struck deals with 16 hotels so far, providing 4,963 rooms for the new quarantine system, with a further 58,000 rooms currently on standby.

“The rules coming into force today will bolster the quarantine system and provide another layer of security against new variants at the border,” Hancock said.

The health secretary added that the measures were “important to protect our vaccination programme”.

On Sunday, the government announced that more than 15 million people in the UK had received their first coronavirus jab, in what the prime minister described as a “significant milestone”.

Meanwhile, all travellers arriving into Scotland from abroad by air – rather than just those from the 33 “high risk” countries – now have to go into quarantine hotels.

People travelling from red list countries to Wales and Northern Ireland will be required to book and pay for quarantine in England, as neither destination has any direct international flights.

Any passenger required to stay in a quarantine hotel in England needs to reserve a room online in advance using a government portal.

The additional rate for one extra adult or a child aged over 12 is 650 pounds, and for a child aged five to 12 it is 325 pounds.

Those who fail to quarantine in such hotels face fines of 5,000 to 10,000 pounds, while anyone who lies on their passenger locator form about having been in a country on the red list faces a prison sentence of up to 10 years.

A new testing regime for all travellers arriving in England has also started, with two tests required during the quarantine process.

They will be required to get a test on days two and eight of their 10-day quarantine period, whether they are isolating at home or in a hotel. The tests, conducted by NHS Test and Trace, will cost travellers 210 pounds.

Those who do not take the tests could face a 2,000 pounds fine.

On Sunday the government said another 258 people had died in the UK within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19, bringing the total to 117,166. There were another 10,972 confirmed cases.

Categories
World

Trump: COVID-19 Relief Bill needs Ammendment

US President Donald Trump has urged the Congress to amend a $900 billion coronavirus relief bill to more than triple its stimulus payments to Americans.

In a video message posted on Twitter, he said the package “really is a disgrace”, full of “wasteful” items, the BBC reported on Wednesday.

“It’s called the Covid relief bill, but it has almost nothing to do with Covid,” he said.

The $900 billion bill includes one-off $600 payments to most Americans but Trump said the figure should be $2,000.

The Republican president, who leaves office on January 20, had been expected to sign the sprawling legislation into law following its passage through Congress on Monday night.

But in Tuesday night’s message from the White House, Trump baulked at spending in the bill on other countries, arguing that this money should go to struggling Americans.

Combo photo shows U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden (L) and U.S. President Donald Trump attend their respective events on different occasions.

He said: “This bill contains $85.5 million for assistance to Cambodia, $134 million to Burma, $1.3 billion for Egypt and the Egyptian military, which will go out and buy almost exclusively Russian military equipment, $25 million for democracy and gender programmes in Pakistan, $505 million to Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama.”

The president questioned why the Kennedy Center, a performing arts complex in Washington DC, was set to receive $40 million when it is not open, and more than $1 billion has been allocated to museums and galleries in the capital.

Trump concluded: “Congress found plenty of money for foreign countries, lobbyists and special interests, while sending the bare minimum to the American people who need it. It wasn’t their fault. It was China’s fault.”

“I am asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2,000 or $4,000 for a couple.

“I’m also asking Congress to immediately get rid of the wasteful and unnecessary items from this legislation and to send me a suitable bill, or else the next administration will have to deliver a Covid relief package.”

Trump’s statement stunned Capitol Hill, plunging the long-awaited aid bill into turmoil.

If the president vetoes the legislation the US government could shut down on December 29 because the package was attached to a $1.4 trillion spending measure to fund federal agencies for the next nine months.

Republicans and Democrats have been negotiating a coronavirus stimulus rescue since July. Trump largely stayed out of the talks.

On Monday afternoon, congressional leaders unveiled a 5,593-page package and voted on it several hours later.

Several lawmakers protested that they had not been given an opportunity to read the contents.

Nevertheless the bill sailed through the House of Representatives by 359-53 and the Senate by 92-6.