Europe

PARIS (Reuters) - France accelerated plans on Thursday to make it compulsory to wear protective face masks in enclosed public spaces because of concerns about COVID-19, and the Mayenne region made it obligatory immediately in several places.

President Emmanuel Macron said on Tuesday mask-wearing would be mandatory in places such as shops from Aug. 1 because of signs the new coronavirus was “coming back a bit”.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia’s central bank will consider cutting interest rates next week, but it has already used much of its room to ease policy and foresees limits to what it can do in the future, Deputy Governor Alexei Zabotkin told Reuters.

The central bank slashed its key rate by 100 basis points, the biggest cut in five years, to a record low of 4.5% at its last meeting. It was the third reduction this year as it copes with a contracting economy and low inflation.

WARSAW/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU countries nudged towards an agreement on a mass stimulus scheme to kickstart economies hammered by the coronavirus but disagreements persisted over the scale and access to funds before Friday’s summit.

The 27 national EU heads will meet face-to-face for the first time since COVID-19 pushed Europe into a sweeping lockdown. They will haggle over their next budget proposed at 1.074 trillion euros ($1.22 trillion) for 2021-27 and an attached recovery fund of 750 billion euros in grants and loans.

PARIS (Reuters) - Back at the start of France’s COVID-19 crisis in February, epidemiologist Cyrille Delpierre encountered a problem when trying to find out what groups of people were falling sick.

While other nations had data showing a worryingly disproportionate infection rate among ethnic minorities, France had no such information due to a long-standing taboo on compiling citizens’ race intended to prevent discrimination.

16 July 2020; MEMO: Shamima Begum, a UK woman who joined Daesh in 2015 as a teenager, has today won her appeal to be allowed to return to the UK.

Dubbed a “Daesh bride” for having left the UK to marry a member of Daesh, British-born Shamima was 15 years old at the time of her departure. She was stripped of her British citizenship on national security grounds four years later.

LONDON (AP) — An artist has erected a statue of a Black Lives Matter protester atop the plinth in the English city of Bristol formerly occupied by a statue of a slave trader.

Marc Quinn created the life-size resin and steel likeness of Jen Reid, a protester photographed standing on the plinth after demonstrators pulled down the statue of Edward Colston and dumped it in Bristol’s harbor on June 7.

(AP) --- Nearly impossible without man-made global warming, this year’s freak Siberian heat wave is producing climate change’s most flagrant footprint of extreme weather, a new flash study says.

International scientists released a study Wednesday that found the greenhouse effect multiplied the chance of the region’s prolonged heat by at least 600 times, and maybe tens of thousands of times. In the study, which has not yet gone through peer review, the team looked at Siberia from January to June, including a day that hit 100 degrees (38 degrees Celsius) for a new Arctic record.

MOSCOW, July 15. /TASS/: Currently 26 variants of a vaccine against the coronavirus infection are being developed in Russia and the research results give assurance that their use will begin in the near future, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova reported on Wednesday.

MOSCOW, July 15. /TASS/: First driverless taxis can start operating in Moscow in 2024, Russia’s Deputy Transport Minister Alexei Semyonov said on Wednesday.

"If we efficiently start implementing the plan we are developing on the basis of our stakeholder authorities and key companies - these are the Transport Ministry, the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Industry and Trade, then, I believe, the year of 2024 is the period when we can launch driverless taxis in a certain regime, as I believe," the official said.

MOSCOW, July 15. /TASS/: Russian President Vladimir Putin will take part in the keel-laying ceremony for warships in Crimea’s Kerch on July 16, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Wednesday.

"The president will work in Crimea tomorrow. He will take part in the keel-laying ceremony for warships," Peskov said. He explained that the ceremony would take place at the Zaliv shipyard in Kerch.