
Britain this Monday will call for the United Nations to be given urgent and unfettered access to Xinjiang to investigate reports of abuses in the Chinese region.

By Gwynne Dyer – It seemed innocent enough at the start: just a surge in the number of boys coming to school with notes from doctors saying they were excused from playing contact sports. But pretty soon high schools all over China were having trouble finding enough willing young men to make up a football team.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has pledged that every adult in the United Kingdom should have been offered a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of July. The accelerated vaccine rollout would help protect the most vulnerable sooner and also enable the easing of some restrictions, the prime minister said.

A member of Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, Gertjan Vlieghe, openly supported the use of negative interest rates if the U.K. needs more stimulus, while Deputy Governor Dave Ramsden said the bank still had scope for more quantitative easing. which has been a tried and tested policy.

For a fifth night street protests in Spain on Saturday turned violent following the arrest of Pablo Hasél, a popular rapper, which has triggered a national debate on freedom of expression. But the disturbances have also strained relations inside the country's fragile coalition government.

The World Trade Organization, WTO, chief said that UK and other wealthy nations should send Covid-19 vaccines to poorer countries now rather than waiting for the surplus.

Russia announced on Saturday that its scientists had detected the world's first case of transmission of the H5N8 strain of avian flu from birds to humans and had alerted the World Health Organization.

United States Joe Biden has put the United States back as leader of the free world in a fantastic move that has helped the West to unite, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Friday.

Less than a day after NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover successfully landed on the surface of Mars, engineers and scientists at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California were hard at work, awaiting the next transmissions from Perseverance. As data gradually came in, relayed by several spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet, the Perseverance team were relieved to see the rover’s health reports, which showed everything appeared to be working as expected.

Regional officials on the northeastern Indonesian island of Madura said on Friday at least 45 pilot whales that stranded themselves on a beach there have died, while rescuers managed to push three back out to sea.