European leaders are establishing an international medical organization to mount a united battle against the coronavirus.In their announcement in The Independent, a British newspaper, they said they are following in the footsteps of “Louis Pasteur, one of the world’s greatest scientists and a mastermind behind vaccines and breakthroughs which have saved millions of lives spanning three centuries.”“Our aim is simple,” the group said, about its goal of raising $8 billion Monday in an online pledging campaign to finance finding a COVID-19 vaccine and treatment.The leaders listed as being responsible for The Independent article are: Giuseppe Conte, prime minister of Italy; Emmanuel Macron, president of France; Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany; Charles Michel, president of the European Council; Erna Solberg, prime minister of Norway; and Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission.“We will all put our own pledges on the table and we are glad to be joined by partners from the world over,” they said. “We support the WHO and we are delighted to join forces with experienced organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust.”U.S. President Donald Trump has suspended payments to the World Health Organization, saying that WHO did not act swiftly enough in alerting the world about the deadly virus.The European leaders said, “Every single euro or dollar that we raise together will be channeled primarily through recognized global health organizations such as CEPI, Gavi, the Vaccines Alliance, the Global Fund and Unitaid into developing and deploying as quickly as possible, for as many as possible the diagnostics, treatments and vaccines that will help the world overcome the pandemic.”“If we can develop a vaccine that is produced by the world, for the whole world, this will be a unique global public good of the 21st century,” the alliance said. “Together with our partners, we commit to making it available, accessible and affordable to all.”There are more than 3.4 million global cases of COVID-19 worldwide, and nearly 244,000 deaths.
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A Bolivian air force plane crashed in the Amazonian region shortly after takeoff Saturday afternoon, killing all those on board.The victims on the twin-engine propeller plane included four Spanish nationals and the two-man crew, an air force captain and lieutenant.The Spaniards were en route to catch a flight back to Spain, the Bolivian Defense Ministry said in a statement.The plane went down in a marshy area on the outskirts of the northeastern city of Trinidad, the statement said.The aircraft was also carrying coronavirus test samples to the city of Santa Cruz.
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A riot broke out Saturday at a prison in the city of Manaus in Brazil’s Amazon state, as inmates protested the suspension of all visits to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.The inmates at the Puraquequara facility held prison guards hostage for more than five hours before authorities brought the situation under control and freed the guards, the state’s public security secretary said in a statement.While inmates took to the roof of the facility, people outside the penitentiary were holding signs in Portuguese reading “Peace, Peace. They just want to be treated with respect” and “They’re already paying for their offenses.”A group of family members, some wearing masks, held a sign saying “Social reintegration? In these conditions it’s not possible.”Relatives said visits at the Puraquequara prison were suspended in mid-March. Rumors that the coronavirus had begun to spread there have been circulating on social media for weeks.Brazil has reported at least 92,000 cases of COVID-19 infections as of Saturday. About 6,500 people have succumbed to the virus.
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With the coronavirus having closed nightclubs across the world, comedians are still managing to get the laughs from people on a pandemic lockdowns all over the world.   VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports on Hollywood’s Laugh Factory and The Stand comedy club in Edinburgh. And she looks at a Japanese comedian who stormed the world with his hit  ‘Pineapple-pen,’ is back with a new message: Wash your hands!
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Iran on Saturday denounced recent U.S. allegations that it was providing covert aid to help Venezuela overcome gas shortages as “baseless” without directly addressing them.  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week said “multiple aircraft” belonging to Iran’s Mahan Air had transferred “unknown support” to Venezuela’s government. He called for a halt to the flights and for other countries to bar overflights by Mahan Air.  The Associated Press reported last month that Mahan Air was delivering key chemical components used for producing gasoline to help revive an aging refinery in the South American country, which is in the grip of a severe economic crisis.Venezuela has been suffering from widespread gasoline shortages despite having the world’s largest oil reserves.Both Iran and Venezuela are under heavy U.S. sanctions, and have had close relations for the last two decades.Iran’s Foreign Ministry tweeted that the “baseless comments were made in order to prepare the ground for mounting U.S. pressure on the Venezuelan government.”Another statement said the U.S. intended to “obstruct the Venezuelan government’s plan for reviving the country’s refineries.” The statements did not directly address the allegations or elaborate on the nature of the cooperation between the two countries.The Trump administration is pursuing a “maximum pressure” campaign aimed at ousting Venezuela’s socialist president, Nicolas Maduro, and considers opposition leader Juan Guaido as the nation’s legitimate leader. The U.S. and a coalition of nearly 60 nations say Maduro clings to power following a 2018 election that critics consider a sham because the most popular opposition politicians were banned from running.The Trump administration imposed heavy sanctions on Iran after withdrawing from Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
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The death toll from a prison riot in western Venezuela has risen to at least 47, with 75 wounded, an opposition politician and prisoners’ rights group said Saturday.”At the moment we have been able to confirm 47 dead and 75 wounded,” deputy Maria Beatriz Martinez, elected from Portuguesa state where the Los Llanos prison is located, told AFP.The Venezuelan Prison Observatory (OVP) rights group also gave the same tally.The initial toll Friday from the riot at the prison in the city of Guanare was 17 dead and nine wounded.
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Inmates at a prison in Manaus, a Brazilian city deep in the Amazon that has been hit hard by the coronavirus outbreak, have taken seven prison guards hostage, the local prison authority told Reuters on Saturday, underlining the endemic violence that has plagued the region’s jails in recent years.The reason for the rebellion at the Puraquequara Penitentiary was not immediately clear, but local television stations cited a video allegedly recorded by an unidentified inmate, who complained of sweltering heat and a lack of electricity in the prison.In a statement, the prison authority in the state of Amazonas, where Manaus is located, said the prisoners were demanding the presence of the press and human rights groups. They had no information on possible deaths.The rebellion came as the coronavirus outbreak has overwhelmed public services in Manaus, with authorities burying victims in mass graves and warning residents of a shortage soon of coffins.Violence is rife in Brazil’s prisons, where organized crime groups often exercise de facto control. Overcrowding is also common, and rights groups call conditions medieval, with food scarce and cells so packed that prisoners have no space to lie down.In January 2017, almost 150 prisoners were killed as organized crime groups battled each other in several prisons in north and northeastern Brazil. In one particularly violent incident in Manaus, 57 inmates were killed, some of whom were decapitated and thrown over prison walls.Last year, over 50 inmates were strangled or stabbed to death as rival gangs battled each other in four separate Manaus jails.Various police units have been deployed and were already beginning negotiations as of Saturday morning, the Amazonas secretary of prisons said in its statement.
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An earthquake struck the Greek island of Crete Saturday.
 
There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage from the afternoon temblor, centered in the Mediterranean Sea.
 
The European Mediterranean Seismological Center reported the quake was of a 6.0 magnitude at a depth of 10 kilometers.
 
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake registered a preliminary magnitude of 6.6 at a depth of 17 kilometers.
 
The German Research Center for Geosciences also reported a preliminary magnitude of 6.6.
 
The quake rocked the island as Greece again confronts the possibility of a deep recession while it grapples with the coronavirus pandemic.
 
Ten years ago, the country was plunged into one of the world’s worst economic crisis in decades.  
 
The economy has since shown signs of recovery, as its gross domestic product grew 1.9% last year and the jobless rate fell more than 10 points over the previous year to 17.3%.
 
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Spaniards spent time outside near their homes Saturday as Spain is starting to reopen after weeks of lockdown triggered by one of Europe’s most deadly coronavirus outbreaks.Parks and gardens are still closed in the capital Madrid, and law enforcement personnel are still keeping people from entering many open spaces for leisure or exercise.
 
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has issued a four-phase plan for easing restrictions to get the country back to “a new normal” following the COVID-19 outbreak.There will be at least two weeks between each phase, as authorities monitor the situation to assess possible adverse consequences of the reopening.As the first phase began Saturday, walks outside for exercise were allowed mornings between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. and in the evening from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. local time.People in capital expressed relief at their partially regained freedoms.”I feel great. There are very strong restrictions, but it is what it is. We have to follow the instructions from health ministry because they know more than us. This feeling of freedom is great. When this gets better, all of us feel even better,” said Manuel Garcia, a 52-year-old trader.”Well, I came to do some exercise, firstly just to walk because it is going to be hard to start straight away running after so much time, but I feel good,” said Angela Arroyo, a 60-year-old teacher, also a Madrid resident.Spain, the second hardest hit country in Europe after Italy, has reported more than 210,000 coronavirus infections and over 24,000 deaths. 
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Former rebel fighter-turned-president Ramzan Kadyrov has made it clear that independent journalism will not be tolerated in Chechnya: a message that appears to come with the Kremlin’s blessing.Irritated at criticism of his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kadyrov in mid-April threatened Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s few remaining independent media outlets that still covers Chechnya, and its reporter Elena Milashina.“If you want us to commit a crime and become criminals, then just say so. Someone will take on this burden, responsibility, and will be punished according to the law, serve time in prison and be released,” Kadyrov said in comments shared on social media.It wasn’t the first time Novaya Gazeta or Milashina have been threatened. In February, Milashina was beaten while in Grozny, and both she and her colleagues have been threatened repeatedly. Six of the paper’s journalists have been killed because of their work, including prominent reporter Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in 2006.But Kadyrov’s latest threat still shocked the paper’s editor and sparked a wave of condemnation, with the U.S. Helsinki Commission, the European Union and the Council of Europe, and international human rights organizations demanding that Moscow take action and offer protection to Novaya Gazeta and Milashina.The Kremlin’s response was to dismiss the threat as “nothing unusual.”“There is nothing forbidden or illegal in this,” Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on April 16, adding that the Kremlin did not consider it necessary to publicly respond to Kadyrov’s threats against Novaya Gazeta or to provide state protection for Milashina.Russia’s media regulator Roskomnadzor also ordered Novaya Gazeta to remove the article. The news website complied.Chechnya: History of media violenceThe Kremlin assessment that this was “nothing unusual” is close to the truth.Kadyrov, who fought against the Russian army at age 18, has ruled the autonomous republic for 13 years. From the start, his government has harassed journalists and human rights activists. And his critics have been attacked, publicly humiliated or even killed.In 2015, Chechen blogger Adam Dikayev criticized Kadyrov for working out in his gym while the song “My best friend is President Putin” played. A few days later Dikayev appeared in a video shared on social media. The blogger was on a treadmill, half-naked and apologizing for his comments.Five years later, residents of Chechnya rarely risk discussing their leadership on social media, and the few journalists who travel to the republic for work can face violence.More recently, in February attackers beat Milashina and lawyer Marina Dubrovina in the capital, Grozny.They were in the city to report on a lawsuit filed against Chechen vlogger Islam Nukhanov, who used YouTube videos to discuss the luxurious lifestyle of Kadyrov’s relatives and inner circle.The attackers filmed their actions, Milashina said, to report back to those who ordered the attack.The journalist reported the attack to police, who said they were investigating.Quitting not an optionThe threats and attack were nothing new for Milashina, who leads Novaya Gazeta’s special projects unit.In 2017, when Novaya Gazeta released her investigation into Chechnya’s repression of the LGBT community, she had to leave Russia because of threats.Milashina told VOA that the only way to ensure the safety of journalists is with solidarity of the media.“Extreme measures taken against journalists, when you kill them, lead to emergence of another journalist, who would keep doing the same,” she said. “The only protection for journalists amid the inaction of authorities is to keep working. Only this would protect us, nothing else would.”Milashina, who has been awarded several prizes, including the U.S. State Department’s International Women of Courage Award, said she has moments of despair.“I have already given up a thousand times, because, frankly, I rarely can boast of any successes there — when I manage to save someone, get someone out [of prison].”She said she did not expect the Russian government to protect her from Kadyrov, because the Kremlin has given the Chechen leader free rein.“Kadyrov is efficient from the Kremlin’s point of view. The Kremlin needs Chechnya to be suppressed, with people who are afraid of [authorities],” she said. “Of course, they handed him a blank check to act with locals without limitations, and neither security forces nor authorities would be punished for overreaching.”Milashina ruled out the possibility of stopping reporting on Chechnya, saying, “Can I abandon the region where 1.5 million people live, who actually do not have a chance to be heard? This is not an option.”Coverage of Chechnya will continueMilashina is not the first Novaya Gazeta staff member to be attacked or threatened for their work.Dmitry Muratov, the paper’s editor-in-chief, still remembers Politkovskaya, who covered human rights violations and the Chechen war.In 2006, Politkovskaya was found shot dead in her Moscow apartment building. Six people have been convicted for their role in her murder.Muratov said he was surprised by the bluntness of Kadyrov’s latest threats.“Like everyone, I was surprised by the frankness, utter sincerity he described with the algorithm we already know about: ‘We’ll kill her, serve some time in jail, having it on our conscience,’ ” he told VOA.“Of course, I was surprised. Still, he is a civil servant, moreover, police general and the head of the region, and he allows himself to say such things,” Muratov said.Muratov noted the willingness of some Chechen authorities to mitigate the attack on the newspaper.“I told Kadyrov’s spokesman that they have the right to answer: the party that felt hurt or unfairly accused of anything has this right even in pre-trial order. And two or three days later, we received a letter from them that we published. I would very much like to consider the conflict settled on this.”He ruled out stopping coverage of the region.“Since Chechnya is the territory of the Russian Federation, and we are a federal media and work throughout Russia, we naturally will continue to cover Chechnya,” he said. “A totalitarian enclave in an authoritarian country.”Sometimes, as in the case of the trial of Oyub Titiev, head of the Chechen branch of the Memorial Human Rights Center, attention is so great that authorities do not impede the work of journalists.Dozens of visiting journalists were allowed into the Titiev trial; TV cameras stood in a line at the Grozny City Hotel.But it was an isolated case. Kadyrov has declared journalists and human rights defenders to be enemies of the nation, Tatyana Lokshina, program director for Russia at Human Rights Watch, said.“Many people remember Kadyrov’s public statements, that the republic will be closed for the human rights defenders after the Titiev trial is over,” she said. “And by ‘human rights defenders’ he also meant all those journalists who are not personally loyal to him.”Lokshina said that in Chechnya, “the concept of freedom of the press does not apply.”“In terms of human rights, Chechnya flouts international law, as well as the Russian constitution. There’s only one law, notoriously known as ‘Ramzan said so,’ ” Lokshina said.Cruel but populist leaderRussian President Vladimir Putin installed Kadyrov, son of assassinated leader Akhmad Kadyrov, as president of Chechnya in 2007. Under his presidency, the region has been relatively stable after two brutal wars, but rights groups have criticized him for serious human rights abuses.Kadyrov is rarely interviewed by Western media. But Gregory Feifer, executive director of the Institute of Current World Affairs in Washington and a former correspondent for RFE/RL, had a chance to interview the leader in 2009.[Editor’s note: Reporter Danila Galperovich, who wrote this story, and Feifer interviewed Kadyrov for RFE/RL in 2009.]“When we recorded the interview with him, not even a month had passed after the murder of Natalya Estemirova, human rights activist. The whole atmosphere of this interview was surreal: after many hours of waiting for the interview, it was scheduled for 2 a.m., and it took place in his huge residence with a personal zoo,” Feifer told VOA.“Kadyrov played pool when we entered his palace and behaved like a frat boy — he sang and cheered himself up with screams. In general, he behaved quite eccentrically, as a person who is slightly out of his mind or prone to emotional outbursts,” Feifer said.He added that Kadyrov demands loyalty from everyone, but also talks about concerns for his people and said in the interview that he had to live in a mansion for security reasons.“Kadyrov is openly cruel, inhuman, and at the same time he is a populist leader. There is much talk that Kadyrov ‘won the Chechen war,’ that he receives money from Moscow, while de facto having real independence from Moscow in exchange for loyalty to Putin. This is partly true, but this is not a problem for Putin. In fact, this is what Putin wants,” Feifer said.However, the more that human rights are violated in Chechnya, the more attention is drawn to Kadyrov from the international community.Since 2013, the U.S. Treasury has imposed sanctions under the Magnitsky Act on Kadyrov and 11 others for human rights violations in the region. The act penalizes human rights abusers by freezing their assets and blocking them from entering or doing business in the U.S.Recently, U.S. lawmakers called on the State Department to remind Middle East countries with ties to Kadyrov that these links could be subject to U.S. sanctions.U.S. Representative Tom Malinowski, who initiated this appeal, told VOA, “The signal to President Putin should be the following: If you act alongside this man, if you use him, then you become an accomplice.”This story originated in the Russian Service of Voice of America. 
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A Pakistan journalist living in exile in Sweden who has been missing since March has been found dead, police said Friday.”His body was found on April 23 in the Fyris river outside Uppsala,” police spokesman Jonas Eronen told AFP.Sajid Hussain, from the troubled southwestern province of Baluchistan, was working part-time as a professor in Uppsala, about 60 kilometers north of Stockholm, when he went missing on March 2.He was also the chief editor of the Baluchistan Times, an online magazine he had set up, in which he wrote about drug trafficking, forced disappearances and a long-running insurgency.”The autopsy has dispelled some of the suspicion that he was the victim of a crime,” Eronen said.The police spokesman added that while a crime could not be completely ruled out, Hussain’s death could equally have been the result of an accident or suicide.”As long as a crime cannot be excluded, there remains the risk that his death is linked to his work as a journalist,” Erik Halkjaer, head of the Swedish branch of Reporters without Borders (RSF), told AFP.According to the RSF, Hussain was last seen getting onto a train for Uppsala in Stockholm.Hussain came to Sweden in 2017 and secured political asylum in 2019.The Pakistan foreign ministry declined to comment when asked about Hussain by AFP.
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In Brazil’s bustling Amazon city of Manaus, so many people have died within days in the coronavirus pandemic that coffins had to be stacked on top of each other in long, hastily dug trenches in a city cemetery. Some despairing relatives reluctantly chose cremation for loved ones to avoid burying them in those common graves. Now, with Brazil emerging as Latin America’s coronavirus epicenter with more than 6,000 deaths, even the coffins are running out in Manaus. The national funeral home association has pleaded for an urgent airlift of coffins from Sao Paulo, 2,700 kilometers (1,700 miles) away, because Manaus has no paved roads connecting it to the rest of the country.  The city of about 2 million people carved from the jungle has been overwhelmed by death in part because it’s the main site where those from remote Amazon communities can get medical services, according to Lourival Panhozzi, president of the Brazilian Association of Funeral Service Providers. As of April 30, Brazil’s Health Ministry said that there were over 5,200 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Amazonas state and 425 deaths, although there are concerns that inadequate testing for the virus has meant that the numbers may be much higher. A funeral worker wearing protection gear prepares a coffin to remove the body of Raimundo Costa do Nascimento, 86, who died at home amid the new coronavirus pandemic in Sao Jorge, Manaus, Brazil, April 30, 2020.Before the outbreak, the city of Manaus, the capital of the state, was recording an average of 20 to 35 deaths a day, according to the mayor. Now, it is recording at least 130 a day, data from the state’s health secretary show. People in the region also have been widely ignoring isolation measures.  There also are signs in the much larger cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo that suggest authorities may not be able to handle a huge increase in the death toll. A field of fresh graves that was dismissed in April by President Jair Bolsonaro as excessive has since been filled.  Latin America’s grimmest scenes occurred last month in Ecuador’s city of Guayaquil, where residents said they had to leave bodies on the street after morgues, cemeteries and funeral homes were overwhelmed. Many in Brazil fear the rising deaths will hit hardest in the favelas, the vast neighborhoods of the poor that are well-known in Rio and Sao Paulo but which also exist in most big Brazilian cities and even in smaller ones. “There is a great fear that uncontrolled contamination will happen there,” said Panhozzi, whose group represents Brazil’s 13,400 private funeral companies. In Rio’s Complexo do Alemao cluster of favelas, the body of Luiz Carlos da Rocha, 36, lay untouched for more than 12 hours Tuesday. Relatives didn’t know why he died but said he had epilepsy. The state’s military police, which normally picks up bodies found outside, no longer does so for nonviolent deaths, said an officer at the scene who would not give his name. He said without elaborating that the policy change was due to the coronavirus. The military police press office did not respond to requests for comment. FILE – Relatives mourn at the site of a mass burial at the Nossa Senhora Aparecida cemetery, in Manaus, Amazonas state, Brazil, April 21, 2020.The next day at Rio’s Hospital Salgado Filho in a lower-middle class neighborhood, Clovis de Castro, whose ailing sister Genina had just died, found himself helping out in the hospital’s morgue. He waited six hours to sort out death certificate paperwork in what he described as a chaotic scene in the morgue, with grieving relatives arriving to identify bodies and only one worker available to move corpses. At one point, he was asked to lend a hand. “I had to help a person to put a body in a coffin,” de Castro said, adding that the experience made him “realize that people need help, the hospital needs help, the country needs help.” De Castro left with a death certificate saying his sister’s cause of death was undetermined. He was angry that no autopsy was conducted that might have confirmed his suspicion she died of COVID-19 or complications from the disease. “Why hide this stuff?” he asked. Sao Paulo director of ambulance services Francis Fuji blamed a recent surge of deaths in homes on coronavirus patients who were discharged from hospitals with mild symptoms, only to have their conditions deteriorate rapidly. FILE – Health professionals hold up photos of people they say were their colleagues who died of COVID-19, as they protest outside “Pronto Socorro 28 de Agosto” Hospital, in Manaus, Brazil, April 27, 2020.Paramedics don’t have the training to identify COVID-19 as a cause of death, he said, and many relatives have lied about their loved ones’ symptoms to avoid the corpses being handled as though they were contagious. “They think that if they get that diagnosis, then their loved one will be removed in a sealed plastic bag, they’ll never see him or her again, and they won’t even have a funeral,” Fuji said. Authorities in Sao Paulo dug hundreds of graves last month in anticipation of a rise in deaths. Bolsonaro has likened the coronavirus to “a little flu” and insists that sweeping state measures to close all but essential business are more damaging than the illness. On April 2, he questioned whether photos by The Associated Press of the new graves were “fake news” or “sensationalism.” By Thursday, all those graves were filled with the dead, as were dozens of other new ones, according to images by the AP photographer who took the original photos and revisited the site on Sao Paulo’s eastern region. Refrigerated trucks to hold overflows of bodies are now seen outside hospitals and cemeteries.  In Manaus early Thursday, Raimundo Costa do Nascimento, 86, died of pneumonia in his home. Funeral workers were so swamped that his relatives had to wait 10 hours for someone to retrieve his body. A week after Panhozzi’s association appealed for the coffins for Manaus, he said the request is still being considered. “That won’t work,” he said. “I need it now.”  
 
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Friday a ban on assault-style weapons following the slaying of 22 people in the worst mass shooting in the country’s history.In his announcement broadcast on Canadian television, Trudeau said the ban applied to 11 categories of assault rifles and other weapons, saying they “were designed for one purpose and one purpose only:  to kill the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time. There is no use and no place for such weapons in Canada.”He said the ban would take effect immediately.The action followed last month’s shooting rampage in Nova Scotia. While government officials said the move had been planned for some time and was not a direct response to that incident, Trudeau mentioned the victims, who included a police officer, in his remarks.“Their families deserve more than thoughts and prayers,” he said, “Canadians deserve more than thoughts and prayers.”Officials said the ban would apply to about 125,000 weapons.
 
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Scotland First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said Friday the country will have the capacity to test 12,000 people for COVID-19 by the middle of the month.Speaking at her regular coronavirus briefing in Edinburgh, Sturgeon said Scotland had exceeded its target for testing, and currently has the capacity to conduct 8,350 tests per day in its labs.Testing is considered crucial in getting coronavirus under control, as it allows cases to be identified and isolated.Sturgeon also confirmed 40 additional deaths from coronavirus from Thursday to Friday, bringing Scotland’s COVID-19 death toll to 1,515.The first minister also reported that 2,659 patients who had tested positive and been admitted to the hospital have been discharged.  Scotland has reported 11,654 positive cases of the coronavirus. 
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The establishment of one-man rule in the heart of Europe has enraged civil libertarians and Hungary’s opposition leaders, who accuse Viktor Orbán of manipulating the coronavirus pandemic to establish what’s effectively an elective dictatorship. Pressure is mounting on the European Union to take action against Hungary for passing sweeping emergency measures that will allow populist leader Orbán to rule by decree indefinitely. Orbán insists the measure is only temporary. And his foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, told CNN that it was “unfair” to say the rule-by-decree measure amounts to a threat to the country’s democracy. Although there’s no deadline on Orbán’s enhanced authority, he said, the parliament can remove his new powers when the virus subsides.”There are many fake news and lies spread about Hungary based on this new law,” Szijjártó said.  Orbán’s foes doubt his good faith. They say his emergency measure fits into a disturbing pattern from Ankara to Beijing and Caracas to Moscow, with authoritarian-minded leaders using the pandemic to consolidate or expand their power.A man sits on a road in Budapest during a demonstration to protest the Hungarian government and its measures to respond to the novel coronavirus pandemic, April 20, 2020.In Hungary’s case, the emergency coronavirus measure cancels the country’s elections, allows eight-year prison sentences for anyone breaking quarantine and gives Orbán  the power to shut down media outlets that spread what is deemed “fake news.””Parliament can, technically vote to end this extra power,” Umut Korkut, a politics professor at Scotland’s Glasgow Caledonian University wrote in a recent commentary. “But Orbán’s party Fidesz has a two-thirds majority. The Constitutional Court can investigate the legality of any governmental decrees Orbán produces, but again, he has made sure it is packed full of judges chosen by his party. It has been a long time since the court last voted against the government.””The legislation therefore effectively delivers the country to Orbán in full, without any checks and balances,” Korkut wrote.Since Orbán’s re-election in 2010, civil libertarians have denounced him for initiating a concerted erosion of democratic checks and balances. They include curbing judicial independence, politicizing the civil service and interfering in media and civil society.”He moved quickly to consolidate power now because the public health crisis provides the perfect opportunity to take advantage of Hungarians’ sense of vulnerability, fear, and anger,” according to Markos Kounalakis, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank on the campus of Stanford University in California. The Hungarian leader has remained undeterred in his shaping of what he likes to call an “illiberal democracy.” His political message has been that national sovereignty is being undermined by globalization, and nation states and their traditional cultures and lifestyles are being weakened by bankers and Eurocrats.Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is seen on a laptop screen in a flat in Budapest as he makes an April 9, 2020, announcement that the government extended the partial curfew for an indefinite time in Budapest.Orbán has at various times cited Russia, Turkey and China as useful models for Hungary and opposed Western sanctions on Russia for its 2014 annexation of Crimea. The European Commission, which has clashed with Orbán before over rule-of-law issues, said it was monitoring developments in Hungary and may now need to take action against Hungary. A spokesman said the commission was carrying out a ”mapping exercise” of member states to examine whether any laws adopted during the crisis comply with EU and international laws.  ”There is particular concern about the case of Hungary, and I can tell you that we will not hesitate to take further action if this is deemed necessary,” said the spokesman, who requested anonymity to speak frankly at a briefing.Donald Tusk, the former European Council president who now heads the largest political grouping in the European Parliament, the center-right European People’s Party, said it should consider expelling Orbán’s Fidesz party as a member once the coronavirus crisis ends.The Fidesz party was suspended last year from the main pan-European center-right alliance as controversy flared over alleged rule-of-law violations in Hungary.”Making use of the pandemic to build a permanent state of emergency is politically dangerous, and morally unacceptable,” Tusk said. As the vote passed on the emergency legislation, Orbán assured the national assembly: “When this emergency ends, we will give back all powers, without exception.” He added: “Changing our lives is now unavoidable. Everyone has to leave their comfort zone. This law gives the government the power and means to defend Hungary.”But Norbert Röttgen, head of the German Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee and a candidate in the race to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor, also condemned the law, writing on Twitter that it “effectively eliminates opposition” and was a breach of basic principles the EU “cannot accept.”Legally the EU could suspend Hungary’s membership of the bloc until it decides Hungary is in compliance. That would require the backing of all member states, however. The EU could also withhold funding and subsidies, which amount to 6   percent of Hungary’s gross domestic product. That, too, needs unanimous consent.There are doubts whether the commission will act decisively, despite mounting pressure. Last week, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, a center-left political group in the European Parliament, issued a statement saying ”Orbán has crossed all red lines” and that ”Hungary is becoming the first dictatorship in the EU.” The parliament’s president David Sassoli has called for ”swift action.” The commission’s formal response, however, has not gone beyond the rhetorical stage. The threats contain no suggestion of possible economic punishment. Brussels has ducked taking sharp action before against Hungary over rule-of-law breaches.The European Commission is the executive arm of the EU and makes recommendations to the heads of national governments. All EU member states are supposed to observe rule-of-law standards and separation of powers. In 2017, for example, the commission brought a case in the European Court of Justice against Poland over laws that allegedly politicized the judiciary.In the past, Orbán has had the support of like-minded nationalist leaders in neighboring states in Central Europe — although this time they have also expressed disapproval at what they see as an over-reach. Othmar Karas, a lawmaker and member of Austria’s ruling conservative OVP party, which has been supportive of Orbán in the past, told reporters that the emergency measure “puts Orbán on the path” of authoritarianism.But Orbán’s defenders say actions under Hungary’s emergency legislation can be struck down both by parliament and the constitutional court, the country’s top tribunal.John O’Sullivan, a former adviser to Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and the president of the Danube Institute, a pro-Orbán think tank based in the Hungarian capital Budapest, says Orbán’s action is no different from other Western leaders during the coronavirus crisis.Writing in the National Review, the U.S. political magazine, he says: “Macron is already ruling by decree, and both Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel are doing the same in effect, through primary and secondary legislation.”Orbán made his name as a young anti-Communist dissident delivering a fiery anti-Russian speech at the 1989 reburial of Imre Nagy, leader of the Hungarian revolt of 1956 against the Soviet Union. But since the 2008 financial crash he has morphed from a libertarian leader into a populist conservative.Last year, Freedom House, a U.S.-based watchdog group, described Hungary as only “partly free,” the first time in history it withheld the designation “free” from an EU member state. It accused the Fidesz-led government of having “moved to institute policies that hamper the operations of opposition groups, journalists, universities, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) whose perspectives it finds unfavorable.”One punitive step the EU could take, said Renata Uitz of the Comparative Constitutional Law program at the Central European University in Vienna, is to block Hungary from accessing a €861 million fund set up to assist with the pandemic.  ”Conditioning access to EU funds based on member states’ respect for the founding values of the European Union has never been more urgent – and has never been more achievable,” Uitz said. “Otherwise,” she said, “the Union will continue to support a regime that has already demonstrated its commitment to abusing the unlimited emergency powers it arrogated.”
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Well-known Mexican protest singer Oscar Chavez has died at the age of 85, one of the latest casualties of the coronavirus pandemic.Mexico Cultural Secretary Alejandra Frausto confirmed Chavez’s death Thursday, just two days after he was admitted the hospital Tuesday, with symptoms of COVID-19.Frausto posted a tweet which said Chavez was worthy of his life’s journey. She also expressed condolences to his family and those who joined in the campaign for personal rights through songs.Chavez last performed in public in 2019.Mexico has confirmed 19,224 coronavirus cases and 1,859 deaths. 
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Argentinians staged loud protests in Buenos Aires on Thursday evening, banging pots from balconies in a show of opposition to the government’s release of prisoners to slow the spread of the coronavirus.The protests across the capital were promoted by lawmakers critical of the government of President Alberto Fernández.Since Monday, more than 1,000 prisoners have been released in Argentina after Fernández said the government should consider granting house arrest to inmates who are at risk of contracting COVID-19.A week ago, the first confirmed COVID-19 cases inside an Argentine prison included prisoners and guards.Shortly afterwards, local media say prisoners at Devoto prison in Buenos Aires set fires, demanding the release of some prisoners over fears of contracting the coronavirus.Argentina has confirmed at least 4,415 COVID-19 cases and 215 deaths linked to the virus. 
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Street performers in Mexico City marched through the Mexican capital Thursday to showcase their request for the government’s financial help after being sidelined for more than a month by restrictions aimed at containing the spread of the coronavirus.The performers dressed as superheroes and clowns made their pitch before a supportive audience as Mexico celebrated Children’s Day.Jose Amado Villegas, a professional clown, made an affectionate appeal for public  support in getting the government to act on their behalf, saying to all the children who did not see clowns in their schools, who did not see clowns in parks, who did not see clowns at the national level, “we are here to give joy to all children.”There was no immediate government response to the street performers’ appeal.Meantime, the performers could be heading into tougher days ahead, with health authorities anticipating the month of May to be the most difficult in the pandemic for Mexico, possibly reducing their chances of resuming their livelihoods.So far, Mexico has reported 19,224 COVID-19 cases and 1,859 deaths. 
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A man armed with an assault rifle was arrested after opening fire outside the Cuban Embassy in Washington early Thursday, his bullets tearing holes into the walls and pillars near the front entrance in what authorities suspect was a hate crime.The gunfire broke out around 2 a.m. outside the embassy in northwest Washington. Metropolitan Police Department officers were called to the scene after neighbors reported hearing gunshots, authorities said. No injuries were reported.Officers found the man, Alexander Alazo, 42, of Aubrey, Texas, armed with an assault rifle, and they and took him into custody without incident, police said.A police report obtained by The Associated Press describes the shooting as a “suspected hate crime” and says Alazo “knowingly discharged multiple rounds from an AK-47 rifle into the Cuban Embassy.” But the report also says Alazo’s motivation is unknown.Officers recovered the rifle, ammunition and a white powdery substance that was found in a small baggie after Alazo’s arrest, according to the report.Alazo was arrested on charges of possessing an unregistered firearm and ammunition, assault with intent to kill and possessing a high-capacity magazine, a U.S. Secret Service spokeswoman said.Alazo remained in custody Thursday. It wasn’t immediately clear whether he had a lawyer.Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that embassy staff members were “safe and protected” but that the shooting caused “material damage” to the building. Photos showed large holes left in the building’s facade near the front door and in pillars outside the building.The Cuban government didn’t know the suspect’s potential motives, the statement said, adding that the State Department was aware of the incident.”It is the obligation of States to adopt appropriate steps to protect the premises of diplomatic missions accredited to their country against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the mission or impairment of its dignity,” the statement said.Photos from the scene posted to social media showed a group of police officers outside the embassy after the shooting and investigators searching through an SUV parked there. Other images showed investigators surveying the damage in front of the ornate embassy in Washington’s Adams-Morgan neighborhood, including a bullet hole in a window over the front door and damage to a flagpole and a column flanking a statue of Cuban independence hero José Martí.Officers from the Metropolitan Police Department and the Secret Service were investigating. 
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Russia’s top diplomat on Thursday angrily dismissed media reports alleging a Russian plot to poison the mayor of Prague and another official in the Czech capital. Prague’s mayor Zdenek Hrib and Zhanna Nemtsova, daughter of Russian opposition figure Boris Nemtsov smile after unveiling a sign renaming the square where the Russian Embassy is located in Prague, Feb. 27, 2020.Respekt weekly said in its latest edition published on Monday that Czech intelligence services suspected a Russian agent was sent to Prague three weeks ago to poison Prague Mayor Zdenek Hrib and Prague 6 mayor Ondrej Kolar. The story was based on anonymous sources.  Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov ridiculed the claims, saying that the notion that Czech authorities spotted a Russian man with powerful poison ricin and let him through doesn’t make any sense. Czech officials didn’t comment, but Kolar said in a television interview Tuesday that he has been under police protection because of “some facts that have been found, the fact that there’s a Russian here whose goal is to liquidate me.” He added that the alleged assassin was also targeting Hrib and Pavel Novotny, Prague’s Reporyje district mayor. Lavrov scoffed at the allegations. “They found a deadly poison and let him into the country?” he said at Thursday’s briefing. “Would any sound person believe in these fabrications.” Moscow and Prague have been at loggerheads for weeks after Kolar’s district removed the statue of Soviet World War II commander Ivan Konev whose armies liberated Prague from Nazi occupation. Officials in Prague 6 said the statue will be moved to a museum and a new monument honoring the city’s liberation will be installed in its place. The statue’s removal caused outrage in Russia, which has angrily lashed out at any attempts to diminish the nation’s decisive role in defeating the Nazis. Lavrov charged Thursday that the Prague authorities’ action violated a 1993 friendship treaty that carried a Czech pledge to protect memorials to Russian World War II heroes. 
 
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Brazil’s virtually uncontrolled surge of COVID-19 cases is spawning fear that construction workers, truck drivers and tourists from Latin America’s biggest nation will spread the disease to neighboring countries that are doing a better job of controlling the coronavirus.  
Brazil, a continent-sized country that shares borders with nearly every other nation in South America, has reported more than 70,000 cases and more than 5,000 deaths, according to government figures and a tally by Johns Hopkins University — far more than any of its neighbors.
The true number of deaths and infections is believed to be much higher because of limited testing.
The country’s borders remain open, there are virtually no quarantines or curfews and President Jair Bolsonaro continues to scoff at the seriousness of the disease.  
The country of 211 million people surpassed China — where the virus began — in the official number of COVID-19 deaths this week, prompting Bolsonaro to say: “So what?”
“I am sorry,” the far-right president told journalists. “What do you want me to do?”
In Paraguay, soldiers enforcing anti-virus measures have dug a shallow trench alongside the first 800 feet (244 meters) of the main road entering the city of Pedro Juan Caballero from the neighboring Brazilian city of Punta Porá, to prevent people from walking along the road from Brazil and disappearing into the surrounding city.  
Paraguay has fewer than 250 confirmed coronavirus cases and its borders have been closed since March 24, with enforcement particularly focused on the largely open frontier with Brazil.  
Argentine officials say they are particularly worried about truck traffic from Brazil, their top trading partner. In provinces bordering Brazil, Argentina is working to set up secure corridors where Brazilian drivers can access bathrooms, get food and unload products without ever coming into contact with Argentines.  
“Brazil worries me a lot,” Argentine President Alberto Fernández told local news outlets Saturday. “A lot of traffic is coming from Sao Paulo, where the infection rate is extremely high, and it doesn’t appear to me that the Brazilian government is taking it with the seriousness that it requires. That worries me a lot, for the Brazilian people and also because it can be carried to Argentina.”  
One of eight known cases in the Argentine state of Misiones is that of a 61-year-old truck driver who apparently caught the disease in Sao Paulo and then returned to Argentina, where he died after infecting his wife. Argentina has about 4,000 cases and more than 200 dead, according to the Johns Hopkins tally.  
Even officials in the United States, which has registered more than 1 million cases and more than 60,000 deaths, have expressed concern about Brazil.  
Florida, which has a large population of people of Brazilian heritage, could face a threat of air travelers from Brazil carrying the coronavirus to the state, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis told President Donald Trump in Washington on Tuesday.
“We could be away on the other side doing well in Florida, and then you could just have people kind of come in,” DeSantis said.
The governor said Trump’s ban of flights from China helped control the virus in the western U.S. Trump asked him if that meant “cutting off Brazil.”
DeSantis replied that one possibility was “not to necessarily cut them off” but to require airlines to test passengers before they board planes bound for Florida.
Authorities in Colombia are also worried, said Julián Fernandez Niño, an epidemiologist at National University in Bogota.  
“In a globalized world, the response to a pandemic can’t be closed frontiers,” he said. “Brazil has great scientific and economic capacity, but clearly its leadership has an unscientific stance on fighting coronavirus.”
In Uruguay, President Luis Lacalle Pou said the spread of the virus in Brazil was setting off “warning lights” in his administration and authorities are tightening border controls in several frontier cities.
 
Thirty workers recently crossed from Brazil to the Uruguayan border city of Rio Branco to help build a cement plant. Four tested positive for the virus, prompting Uruguay to place the whole crew in quarantine.
Officials in some Uruguayan border towns have discussed setting up “humanitarian corridors” through which Brazilians could safely leave the country.
Even socialist Venezuela, where the health system has been in a yearslong state of collapse, has said it’s worried about neighboring Brazil.
 
“I’ve ordered the reinforcement of the frontier with Brazil to guarantee an epidemiological and military barrier,” President Nicolás Maduro said on state television last week.
Bolivia’s government, a right-wing ally of Bolsonaro’s, declined to comment on its neighbor’s anti-virus measures, but Defense Minister Fernando López promised this month to strongly enforce the closure of the border.  
“If we keep being flexible on the border, our national quarantine will be useless,” he said. 
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Christian Etchebest’s Parisian bistro is a shadow of its usual bustling self. Five lunch specials sit in neat paper bags on the bar awaiting takeout customers — a tiny fraction of his normal midday business before the coronavirus. A skeleton staff rotates in daily at La Cantine du Troquet near the banks of the Seine River, just blocks from the Eiffel Tower. One day they packaged a streamlined version of his Basque menu: sausages with a celery and beetroot remoulade, mashed potatoes and a dessert of strawberries with lemon sauce. Yet Etchebest isn’t facing bankruptcy — not yet anyway — thanks to a French government program that lets him put staff on reduced hours and makes up most of their lost salary, on the condition they are not fired. That is giving him a chance to keep his team together, awaiting the day when restrictions are lifted and sit-down meals are again allowed at this restaurant and his six others across Paris.  Similar programs are keeping hard-hit businesses across Europe afloat, preventing millions of workers from losing their jobs  and income for now, and thousands of bosses from seeing their trained staff scatter. Some 11.3 million workers in France are getting up to 84% of net salary. The government estimates the cost at 24 billion euros ($26 billion), with half of all private sector employees expected to take part. FILE – Femke Zimmerman, manager of Brasserie Berlage, a cafe and restaurant nestled in the manicured gardens of The Hague’s historic art deco Kunstmuseum, poses for a portrait as she prepares the restaurant for reopening, April 24, 2020.Femke Zimmermann, manager of Brasserie Berlage in The Hague in the Netherlands, has her eye on re-opening even as she spends most days at home looking after her 1-year-old and 5-year-old sons while the restaurant’s owners pay her with government help.  For now, she is not overly worried about losing her job. She stays in contact with her team and asked them to come in to give the restaurant a two-day spring clean.  “They hate sitting at home. They want to do something for the business,” she said. Athens waiter George Sakkas, 26, is getting by on a Greek government program that lets businesses suspend workers’ contracts and replaces their pay with a flat stipend of 800 euros ($870). Businesses that take the help cannot fire staff.  “The stipend definitely helped,” he said, noting the amount was roughly what he would make anyway.  “In the beginning we didn’t know about the stipend, so [the closing] hit us very badly,” he said. “When the stipend arrived it gave us some breathing space.” 
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Britain Thursday went all out to honor the 100th birthday of a World War II veteran who has become a national hero for his $37 million fundraising effort for the nation’s health service.A retired engineer and captain in the British Army during World War II, Tom Moore wanted to do something nice for the National Health Service for the treatment he received after breaking his hip.Earlier this month he started an online campaign, pledging to do 100 laps – using his walker- around his 25-meter yard in exchange for donations. He had hoped to raise about $1,200. Instead, within days, he had raised millions.Since then his effort made “Captain Tom” a British celebrity, and the nation showed its appreciation Thursday.The Royal Air Force sent two World War II-era planes over his home. Congratulatory massages poured in from, among others, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Prince Charles and England football captain Harry Kane. About 125,000 birthday cards came in from around the world, enough to fill a hall in his grandson’s school.Birthday cards are seen on display at Bedford School ahead of Captain Tom Moore’s 100th birthday in Bedford, Britain, April 28, 2020.And the British Army – with the approval of Queen Elizabeth – gave him an honorary promotion to colonel and replaced a medal he had received for his service but had lost.The Guiness Book of World Records says Moore set a record for most money raised by an individual charity walk.Moore said Thursday he was very moved by the outpouring of gratitude, and for being made an honorary colonel. He said “I’m still Captain Tom, that’s who I really am. But if people choose to call me ‘colonel’, well, thank you very much.” 
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