Europe

MADRID, Dec 19 (NNN-AGENCIES) – Spanish Health Minister, Salvador Illa said yesterday that vaccinations against COVID-19 will begin in Spain on Dec 27.

The first vaccinations will use the BioNTech Pfizer vaccine, which will arrive in Spain on Dec 26.

“If Europe agreed that vaccination begins in a coordinated manner, in Spain, we are going to start the first possible day,” Illa said, at a press conference.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The United States is halting work at two consulates in Russia, the State Department said, citing safety and security issues at the facilities where operations had been curtailed over COVID-19.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in consultation with Ambassador John Sullivan decided to shut the consulate in Vladivostok in the far east and suspend operations at the consulate in Yekaterinburg, a State Department representative said in a statement emailed to Reuters on Saturday.

LISBON (Reuters) - Portugal’s Prime Minister Antonio Costa will self-isolate for 14 days, spending Christmas at his official residence, after meeting earlier this week with French President Emmanuel Macron, who is infected with coronavirus.

Lisbon’s regional health authority ARSLVT said in a statement cited by Lusa news agency that a working lunch between the two leaders on Wednesday was considered a “high-risk exposure” to the coronavirus.

BERLIN, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday praised Germany as a "force for peace" during a speech at the Bundestag, Germany's parliament.

"I experience how Germany plays a leading role in the world every day with a deep sense of history and responsibility," Guterres said in his speech, which the polyglot delivered in German.

"Germany is facing the great challenges of our time," stressed Guterres, who visited the country's capital Berlin as part of a series of events marking the founding of the United Nations 75 years ago.

ROME (AP) — An author of a withdrawn World Health Organization report into Italy’s coronavirus response warned his bosses in May that people could die and the U.N. agency could suffer “catastrophic” reputational damage if it allowed political concerns to suppress the document, according to emails seen by The Associated Press.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Sweden is tightening nationwide coronavirus restrictions by requiring many people to work from home and reducing the number who can gather in restaurants, shops and gyms starting next week, but the government decided against ordering the country’s first full lockdown to control a recent spike in virus cases, the prime minister said Friday.

GENEVA (AP) — The World Health Organization program to help get COVID-19 vaccines to all countries in need has access to nearly 2 billion doses of “promising” vaccine candidates, officials said Friday.

None of the agreements include the vaccines by Moderna, which took one stop closer to approval in the U.S. on Thursday, or Pfizer-BioNTech, which is already in use in the U.S., Canada and Britain and nearing approval in the European Union.

PARIS (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday blamed his COVID-19 on a combination of negligence and bad luck, urging his compatriots to stay safe as critics called out slip-ups in his behavior to prevent infection, from a close-quarters handshake to repeated big-group meals over the past week.

MOSCOW, December 18. /TASS/: State trials of Russia’s latest armored vehicle, Atlet, will begin in the spring of 2021 and continue until late summer, Military Industrial Company CEO Alexander Krasovitsky told TASS on Friday.

"By now, Altet has fully completed preliminary trials and is about to enter state trials. They will begin in the spring of 2021 and will continue until late summer of the same year," he said.

Russian Army Commander-in-Chief Army General Oleg Salyukov told the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper on December 9 that Atlet state trials will be completed next year.

MOSCOW, December 18. /TASS/: Russian President Vladimir Putin would be unable to work from a secret bunker, considering his potency, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the Komsomolskaya Pravda radio station Friday, adding that there is no bunker under the president’s countryside residence.

"There are no bunkers," the spokesman said. "No head of state, especially as vigorous as Putin, would be able to hunker down in any bunker."

Commenting on rumors that the president works from this kind of isolation, Peskov called it fiction and a "complete nonsense."