Month: August 2021

Britain will begin offering a booster dose of a COVID-19 vaccine to 32 million Britons starting in early September, The Telegraph reported Sunday. The shots will be available in as many as 2,000 pharmacies with the goal of getting them into arms by early December.   The government has been preparing since at least June, when the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) called for a plan to offer the third shot to people 70 years old or older, care home residents and those who are vulnerable for health reasons.   At least 90% of British adults have received …

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Rescue ships picked up more than 700 people trying to cross the Mediterranean in makeshift vessels this weekend, mainly off the coasts of Libya and Malta, a migrant aid group said Sunday.The latest figures came as United Nations migration officials repeated their calls for a fairer mechanism to share the responsibility of caring for them, rather than leaving it to the Mediterranean countries.SOS Mediterranee said that its vessel, the Ocean Viking, had carried out six operations in international waters since Saturday.  In the last intervention, it rescued 106 people off the Maltese coast after being alerted by German aid group …

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Kosovo’s president on Sunday awarded a medal to the late son of U.S. President Joe Biden for his service in building the country’s justice system after war ended more than two decades ago.Beau Biden worked in Kosovo after the 1998-1999 war, helping to train local prosecutors and judges for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The former Delaware attorney general died in 2015 of cancer aged 46.“Beau’s work in Kosovo was heartfelt; he fell in love with the country,” President Biden said in a pre-recorded video message played during the ceremony in Pristina on Sunday.“Beau could see what …

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Thousands of Turkish firefighters are battling for a fifth day against raging fires that are threatening some of Turkey’s main tourist resorts. Six people have  already died in the fires.A child cries fire, fire, as a family drives through the night trying to escape the surrounding inferno in Turkey’s Marmaris region. The video has gone viral in Turkey.   Firefighters backed by helicopters are battling raging fires across Turkey’s Mediterranean and Aegean regions, home to some of Europe’s most prominent tourist resorts. Record high temperatures and powerful dry winds are hampering their efforts. Authorities have issued evacuation orders for tourists …

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After a slow start, the European Union has now overtaken the United States in vaccinating its citizens against COVID-19. Anti-vaccine resistance remains, including in France, where officials estimate more than 200,000 people joined demonstrations this weekend to protest a mandatory health pass.Brandishing banners proclaiming “freedom” and “pass of shame,” tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Paris and other French cities Saturday against government measures to fight the coronavirus pandemic, and the disease it causes, COVID-19.While many of the protests were peaceful, several police officers were wounded trying to keep order in Paris. In the southern city of Marseille, demonstrators …

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A protest about an armed attack that killed seven members of a Kurdish family was held Saturday in the Turkish city of Van in the country’s central Konya province. Relatives of the slain family say the attack Friday was racially motivated.”This was an entirely racist attack,” Abdurrahman Karabulut, the family’s lawyer, told Arti TV.Karabulut and the pro-Kurdish opposition party said the family had been previously targeted for being Kurdish. Gunmen attacked the family in May and the family was worried about being attacked again.Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said calling the attack a racist crime was “a provocation.”The Associated Press …

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Authorities said Saturday that 10 suspects had been detained in the killing of seven people from an ethnic Kurdish family in Turkey’s central Konya province.The members of the Dedeoglu family were killed in a brutal gun attack Friday. Officials said they had not yet apprehended the gunman. A statement from the Konya prosecutor’s office said initial evidence pointed to an ongoing fight between two families who lived in the same area.But the family’s lawyer and the pro-Kurdish opposition party said the killings were ethnically motivated. After an attack in May, one member of the family — who was among Friday’s victims …

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The Russian hackers behind the massive SolarWinds cyberespionage campaign broke into the email accounts of some of the most prominent federal prosecutors’ offices around the country last year, the Justice Department said.The department said 80% of Microsoft email accounts used by employees in the four U.S. attorney offices in New York were breached. All told, the Justice Department said, in 27 U.S. attorney offices at least one employee’s email account was compromised during the hacking campaign.The Justice Department said in a statement Friday that it believes the accounts were compromised from May 7 to Dec. 27, 2020. Such a timeframe …

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The Ocean Viking on Saturday rescued 196 migrants off Libya, the humanitarian ship’s operator said.It first picked up 57 people in an inflatable dinghy struggling in international waters off the North African country, SOS Mediterranee said.In the afternoon, the ship’s crew carried out two additional rescues in the same area, plucking 54 people from a dinghy and 64 others from a wooden vessel.In their latest operation, they saved 21 people from a wooden vessel.The total rescued included at least two pregnant women and 33 minors, 22 of them unaccompanied.According to the International Organization for Migration, at least 1,146 people died …

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