Europe

BOVENKARSPEL, Netherlands (Reuters) - A blast struck a coronavirus testing centre north of Amsterdam before sunrise on Wednesday, shattering windows but causing no injuries in what police called an intentional attack.

An explosives team visited the site in the town of Bovenkarspel, 55 km (35 miles) from the capital, where police said a metal cylinder involved in the explosion had been recovered.

It “must have been placed” there, police spokesman Menno Hartenberg told Reuters. “Something like that doesn’t just happen by accident.”

MINSK, March 2. /TASS/: Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko thinks that the merger of Belarus and Russia to create integrated governance bodies is unviable, the BelTA agency reported.

MOSCOW, March 2. /TASS/: All existing vaccines will also work against the so-called British strain of the coronavirus, Russia’s former chief sanitary doctor Gennady Onishchenko, currently first deputy chairman of the State Duma (lower house) Committee on Education and Science, said.

MOSCOW, March 2. /TASS/: Russia’s national payment system Mir has conducted its first test transactions with Mir cards in Dubai. The Network International group of companies, which provides services in the e-commerce market in the Middle East and Africa, acts as the local partner of Mir in the UAE, the press service of the payment system told TASS.

MOSCOW, March 2. /TASS/: A 60% level of herd immunity against coronavirus, which is necessary for fully lifting restrictions, may be developed in Russia as early as in August if vaccination remains at the same pace as now, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova told TASS.

This could happen earlier if the vaccination pace is stepped up, she said.

YEREVAN, March 2. /TASS/: Armenian President Armen Sarkissian has decided not to sign Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s motion to dismiss Chief of the General Staff Onik Gasparyan and to turn to the Constitutional Court to review the law of military service of 2017, the presidential office said on Tuesday.

GENEVA, March 2 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The number of reported coronavirus infections around the world is once again on the rise after six straight weeks of decline, the head of the World Health Organization said.

“This is disappointing, but not surprising,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva, noting that the upward trend was taking place everywhere apart from Africa and the Western Pacific region.

“Some of it appears to be due to relaxing of public health measures, continued circulation of variants and people letting down their guard,” he said.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union’s joint vaccine procurement has not unravelled, a spokesman for the European Commission said on Tuesday when asked about individual countries getting jabs from Russia or China that do not have the bloc’s authorisation.

“It’s not that the strategy unravelled,” Commission spokesman Stefan de Keersmaecker said, adding that EU countries have the right to seal their contracts of their own with producers beyond those the Commission agrees on for the bloc.

DUBLIN, March 1 (Xinhua) -- Bank of Ireland, one of the largest commercial banks in Ireland, confirmed on Monday that it will close 103 branches in Ireland and Northern Ireland of Britain starting from September 2021.

The branches to be closed include 88 in Ireland and 15 in Northern Ireland, according to a detailed list of the impacted branches unveiled by the Bank of Ireland on its official website.

MOSCOW, March 2 (Xinhua) -- Russia is working to decrease dependence on the U.S. dollar and strengthen its ruble, Russian Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko said Tuesday.

"Both the Central Bank and the government have been pursuing a policy of de-dollarization as instructed by the president in recent years," Matviyenko told RIA Novosti news agency in an interview.