Europe

WARSAW (Reuters) - The European Union has approved a 527 million zloty (115 million euro) scheme by the Polish government to support its economy during the coronavirus pandemic.

The scheme is intended to partially cover interest on business loans and will take the form of direct grants, the European Commission said in a statement on Friday.

KIEV (Reuters) - The head of a 1,000-year-old Orthodox monastery that became a hotspot for coronavirus infections in Kiev said he had underestimated the gravity of the pandemic and that measures had now been introduced to curb the spread of the disease.

Metropolitan Pavel heads the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, the headquarters of the Russian-backed wing of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, often referred to as the Moscow Patriarchate. Its gold-domed towers and labyrinthine caves housing mummified bodies of monks are among the capital’s cultural treasures.

PARIS/TOULOUSE (Reuters) - Airbus (AIR.PA) has shelved plans to create a new assembly line in Toulouse, France, for its A321 airliner as the company wrestles with the coronavirus crisis.

Airbus announced plans for the line in January when its problem was how to meet record demand for the jet from its site in Hamburg, Germany, which has struggled to accommodate the extra hours and complexity involved in making Airbus’s most ambitious single-aisle jet.

BRUSSELS, April 10 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Another horror day of the coronavirus pandemic saw the global death toll pass 94,000, although there were tentative signs of hope that the crisis was peaking in the United States and Europe.

The picture of the unfolding economic catastrophe also became clearer with the IMF warning of a Great Depression and data showing 17 million Americans lost their jobs, but a European Union financial rescue package agreement offered some relief to the barrage of bad news.

OTTAWA, April 10 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Canada’s coronavirus death toll is set to soar from the current 435 to as high as 22,000 by the end of the pandemic, health officials said, while the economy lost a record 1 million jobs last month.

Officials outlined the two most likely scenarios, showing that between 11,000 and 22,000 people would die. The total number of positive diagnoses of COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus, ranged from 934,000 to 1.9 million.

GENEVA, April 10 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Growing numbers of fake medicines linked to coronavirus are on sale in developing countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned.

The WHO said taking these drugs could have “serious side effects”.

One expert warned of “a parallel pandemic, of substandard and falsified products”.

ROME, April 9 (Xinhua) -- The coronavirus pandemic has claimed 18,279 lives in locked-down Italy, bringing the total number of infections, fatalities and recoveries to 143,626 by Thursday, according to the latest data released by the country's Civil Protection Department.

Thursday saw 610 new fatalities and 1,979 new recoveries, raising the total recoveries to 28,470.

LONDON (AP) — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was moved out of intensive care Thursday at the London hospital where he is being treated for the new coronavirus, as his government told Britons to prepare for several more weeks in lockdown.

Johnson had been in the ICU at St. Thomas’ Hospital since Monday after his symptoms of COVID-19 worsened.

Johnson’s office said he was “moved this evening from intensive care back to the ward, where he will receive close monitoring during the early phase of his recovery.”

It said Johnson was in “extremely good spirits.”

NOVO-OGARYOVO, April 9. /TASS/: The current situation with the novel coronavirus requires flexible changes in the area of military-technical cooperation in order to maintain Russia’s leading positions on defense export, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday during a session on military-technical cooperation with foreign states.

He noted that international competition in the sphere of military-technical cooperation is very high, and the spread of the coronavirus infection that affects the global economy creates additional risks.

MOSCOW, April 9. /TASS/: Russia’s Soyuz MS-16 manned spacecraft with three crewmembers docked to the Poisk module of the International Space Station (ISS) in the automatic mode, the State Space Corporation Roscosmos announced in its live broadcast on Thursday.

The spacecraft delivered the members of a new long-term expedition to the orbital outpost: Roscosmos cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner and NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy.