
Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro on Monday denounced international sanctions against his country, saying they have limited the government’s ability to fight the health and economic effects of the COVID-19 crisis. European Union foreign ministers on Monday imposed new sanctions on 19 leading Venezuelan officials.

Drug maker Pfizer announced it expects to deliver more than 13 million doses of its Covid-19 vaccine per week to the United States by the middle of March, more than doubling its shipments from early February, a top Pfizer executive said in prepared testimony ahead of a Tuesday congressional hearing.

There is no chance at the moment that France will ratify a free-trade deal between the European Union and the Mercosur group, an official at the presidential palace in Paris said on Monday.

The European Union on Monday imposed sanctions on 19 senior Venezuelan officials, lawmakers and members of the security forces in response to December's legislative election that the bloc said was rigged in favor of President Nicolas Maduro.

Boeing has called for the grounding of 128 of its 777 planes across the world as US regulators investigated a United Airlines flight whose engine caught fire and fell apart over a suburban area of Denver in Colorado State.

Russia approved a third coronavirus vaccine for domestic use, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said on state TV, though large-scale clinical trials of the shot, labeled CoviVac and produced by the Chumakov Centre, have yet to begin.

Members of Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) are set to take part in legal action challenging part of Brexit, the party said on Sunday. DUP opposes the Northern Ireland protocol, which covers post-Brexit trade between Britain and Northern Ireland, because it creates barriers between the British region and the rest of the UK and has caused disruptions.

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.