Europe

MOSCOW, October 14. /TASS/: Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced the registration of the second Russian vaccine against coronavirus and the coming registration of the third candidate.

"I would like to begin with pleasant news that the Novosibirsk-based Vector center has registered a second Russian coronavirus vaccine EpiVacCorona," the Russian president said at a meeting with cabinet members on Wednesday.

"As far as I know, we have a third candidate vaccine from the Chumakov center of the Russian Academy of Sciences," Putin said.

PARIS (Reuters) - The European Union should press ahead with plans for a bloc-wide digital tax in case global talks at the OECD to rewrite international tax rules fail, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Wednesday.

“We think that Europe should set the example,” Le Maire told reporters after an online meeting with his G20 counterparts gave its support to continuing the OECD talks until mid-2021.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - European Central Bank board member Yves Mersch said on Wednesday he had yet to be convinced that the ECB, currently in the middle of rewriting its inflation target and how to achieve it, needed a new strategy at all.

“I’m still one to be fully convinced of a new strategy which would be yielding superior results to what our existing strategy has yielded up to now,” Mersch told an online event.

PRAGUE/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European nations are closing schools, cancelling operations and enlisting legions of student medics as overwhelmed authorities face the nightmare scenario of a COVID-19 resurgence at the onset of winter.

With new cases hitting about 100,000 a day, Europe has by a wide margin overtaken the United States, where more than 51,000 COVID-19 infections are reported on average every day.

Most European governments eased lockdowns over the summer to start reviving economies already battered by the pandemic’s first wave.

LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday resisted a short lockdown for all of England but said he ruled nothing out in the face of calls to shut the country down for two weeks as a “circuit breaker” in order to save lives.

With cases rapidly rising, the British government opted this week for a three-tier system of local measures. The Liverpool area in the northwest became the first part of the country in the highest category, requiring bars, gyms and other businesses to shut, perhaps for months.

BRUSSELS, Oct. 13 (Xinhua) -- The European Union (EU) member states on Tuesday adopted a common color code to define the level of risk related to the coronavirus outbreak, region by region, a move to avoid fragmentation and disruption.

MOSCOW, Oct. 14 (Xinhua) -- The Novosibirsk Vector research center has registered the second Russian coronavirus vaccine, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced during his online meeting with members of the government on Wednesday. 

BERLIN (AP) — Scientists say a comparison of 21 developed countries during the start of the coronavirus pandemic shows that those with early lockdowns and well-prepared national health systems avoided large numbers of additional deaths due to the outbreak.

In a study published Wednesday by the journal Nature Medicine, researchers used the number of weekly deaths in 19 European countries, New Zealand and Australia over the past decade to estimate how many people would have died from mid-February to May 2020 had the pandemic not happened.

BERLIN (AP) — Germany has agreed to provide more than a half billion euros to aid Holocaust survivors struggling under the burdens of the coronavirus pandemic, the organization that negotiates compensation with the German government said Wednesday.

The payments will be going to approximately 240,000 survivors around the world, primarily in Israel, North America, the former Soviet Union and Western Europe, over the next two years, according to the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also referred to as the Claims Conference.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Norway’s foreign minister said Russia is behind a break-in into the Norwegian Parliament’s email system in August, calling the intrusion “a serious incident that affects our most important democratic institution.”

“It is our assessment that Russia is behind this activity,” Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Soereide said.

Prime Minister Erna Solberg told the Norwegian news agency NTB on Wednesday that it was “important for the government to give a clear message to the Russians that we do not accept this.”