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MEPs will vote on plans to cut carbon emissions, boost gas storage and support for countries hosting Ukrainian refugees in the 22-23 June plenary session.

Source : © European Union, 2022 - EP

MEPs will vote on plans to cut carbon emissions, boost gas storage and support for countries hosting Ukrainian refugees in the 22-23 June plenary session.

Source : © European Union, 2022 - EP

Media freedom advocates have criticised the European Commission over funding for a joint newsroom of European press agencies.

Auf der Plenarsitzung am 22. und 23. Juni werden die Abgeordneten über Pläne zur Verringerung der CO₂-Emissionen, die Gasspeicherung und die Ukraine abstimmen.

Quelle : © Europäische Union, 2022 - EP

Ce que la guerre en Ukraine a changé (2/6) • En Bosnie-Herzégovine, les tentations séparatistes freinées
Qui a peur de la guerre en Bosnie-Herzégovine ? (3/4) : Banja Luka ne veut pas y croire
Bosnie-Herzégovine : Dodik, Lavrov et le mystère de l'icône ukrainienne

/ Courrier des Balkans, Ukraine, Bosnie-Herzégovine, Relations internationales

Ce que la guerre en Ukraine a changé (2/6) • En Bosnie-Herzégovine, les tentations séparatistes freinées
Qui a peur de la guerre en Bosnie-Herzégovine ? (3/4) : Banja Luka ne veut pas y croire
Bosnie-Herzégovine : Dodik, Lavrov et le mystère de l'icône ukrainienne

/ Courrier des Balkans, Ukraine, Bosnie-Herzégovine, Relations internationales

Tous les matins, Les Capitales décrypte pour vous l’info à travers l’Europe.

Confronted with an energy crisis and the need to rapidly decarbonise the building sector, the EU is now facing another threat: “renovictions," where tenants are forced out of houses or apartments due to rent increases imposed after renovation.

Átadták Kína legfejlettebb repülőgép-hordozóját, amellyel háromra bővült a kínai haditengerészet anyahajóinak száma – adta hírül a CCTV kínai állami hírcsatorna.

A 003-as típusú, Fucsien elnevezésű repülőgép-hordozót Sanghajban bocsátották vízre. A teljes mértékben kínai tervezésű és gyártású anyahajó a kínai hordozók között az első, mely a korábbi technológiánál gyorsabb, elektromágneses katapult-rendszert használ a repülők indítására. Ennek a rendszernek további előnye, hogy energiafelhasználása hatékonyabb és kevesebb karbantartást igényel. A másik két kínai hordozóval ellentétben, melyeknek fedélzetén felfelé ívelt, úgynevezett síugró rámpa található a repülőgépek felszállásához, a Fucsien fedélzete sík.

A CCTV beszámolója szerint a nyolcvanezer tonnát meghaladó vízkiszorítású anyahajóval jelenleg navigációs és kikötéses teszteket hajtanak végre. A Fucsien átadását legalább két alkalommal halasztották már el. Az átadást eredetileg április 23-ára tervezték, de ez a koronavírus-járvány miatt Sanghajban alkalmazott lezárások miatt meghiúsult. Egy másik, június 3-ára, a sárkányhajó-ünnepre tervezett átadó ünnepséget indoklás nélkül napoltak el.

A kínai haditengerészet másik két anyahajója közül a 2019 decemberében átadott Santung volt az első kínai fejlesztésű. A legrégebb óta szolgáló, Liaoning elnevezésű hordozót Kína használtan vásárolta 1998-ban Ukrajnától.

 

The post Átadták Kína legfejlettebb repülőgép-hordozóját appeared first on .

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 20 2022 (IPS)

The 164-member World Trade Organization (WTO) has implicitly rubber-stamped a widely-condemned policy of “vaccine apartheid” which has discriminated the world’s poorer nations, mostly in Africa and Asia, depriving them of any wide-ranging intellectual property rights.

As Max Lawson, Co-Chair of the People’s Vaccine Alliance and Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam, said at the conclusion of the WTO’s ministerial meeting last week: “The conduct of rich countries at the WTO has been utterly shameful”.

“The European Union (EU) has blocked anything that resembles a meaningful intellectual property waiver. The UK and Switzerland have used negotiations to twist the knife and make any text even worse. And the US has sat silently in negotiations with red lines designed to limit the impact of any agreement.”

The Geneva-based WTO, whose members account for nearly 98 percent of world trade, takes decisions by consensus resulting in a rash of compromises on some of the disputed issues.

Lawson said: “This is absolutely not the broad intellectual property waiver the world desperately needs to ensure access to vaccines and treatments for everyone, everywhere. The EU, UK, US, and Switzerland blocked that text.”

This so-called compromise, he argued, largely reiterates developing countries’ existing rights to override patents in certain circumstances. And it tries to restrict even that limited right to countries which do not already have capacity to produce COVID-19 vaccines.

“Put simply, it is a technocratic fudge aimed at saving reputations, not lives”, he warned.

Summing up the conclusions of the meeting, the New York Times said last week that WTO members agreed to loosen intellectual property rights “to allow developing countries to manufacture patented Covid-19 vaccines under certain circumstances.”

”The issue of relaxing intellectual property rights for vaccines had become highly controversial. It pitted the pharmaceutical industry and developed countries that are home to their operations, particularly in Europe, against civil society organizations (CSOs) and delegates from India and South Africa.”

Oxfam’s Lawson said: “South Africa and India have led a 20-month fight for the rights of developing countries to manufacture and access vaccines, tests, and treatments. It is disgraceful that rich countries have prevented the WTO from delivering a meaningful agreement on vaccines and have dodged their responsibility to take action on treatments while people die without them.”

“There are some worrying new obligations in this text that could actually make it harder for countries to access vaccines in a pandemic. We hope that developing countries will now take bolder action to exercise their rights to override vaccine intellectual property rules and, if necessary, circumvent them to save lives.”

In a statement released last week, the People’s Vaccine Alliance, said waiving intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines have sparked worldwide debate, from Washington to Beijing and Davos to the World Trade Organization.

A group of Nobel laureates wrote to President Biden arguing that a temporary waiver of COVID-19 patent rights is essential to halting the global pandemic.

“Waiver advocates say that prioritizing the intellectual property rights of vaccine developers (many of whom have received governmental support) is making the vaccination rollout slow and unaffordable for billions of people in less-wealthy nations”.

Supporters of the status quo say a waiver would chill investment in the very pharmaceutical research that led to the vaccines’ creation, the Alliance said.

https://peoplesvaccinealliance.medium.com/open-letter-former-heads-of-state-and-nobel-laureates-call-on-president-biden-to-waive-e0589edd5704

The Alliance also pointed out that In October 2020, South Africa and India proposed a broad waiver of the Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement covering COVID-19 vaccines, tests, and treatments.

The EU, UK, and Switzerland blocked that proposal. The US supported an IP waiver for only vaccines. The final text agreed is a watered-down waiver of one small clause of the TRIPS agreement relating to exports of vaccines. It also contains new barriers that are not in the original TRIPS agreement text.

Ben Phillips, author of ‘How to Fight Inequality’ told IPS that rich countries had acted to protect the monopolies of big pharmaceutical companies to determine production levels of pandemic-ending medicines.

In doing so, he said “they are not only causing deaths in developing countries, they are causing deaths in their own countries’ too. It’s not Northern interests vs Southern interests. It’s a handful of oligarchs who cannot share vs 8 billion people who want to be safe from pandemics.”

“Almost everyone in every country in the world”, he said, “would be better off if big pharmaceutical companies made slightly less obscene profits so that enough doses of pandemic-ending medicines could be made by multiple producers across the world to reach everyone who needs them on time.

The Covid-19 crisis has exposed the rot of the system of monopolies over production of vital medicines. Everyone can see it, and it will fall. How quickly it falls is the only question left. People are organizing nationally and internationally and they won’t let this pass again,” Phillips declared.

Mandeep S. Tiwana, Chief Programmes Officer at CIVICUS, a global alliance of civil society organizations (CSOs), told IPS “unequal access to vaccines is a global scandal that flies in the face of the economic, social and technological progress we claim to have made as humanity”.

He pointed out that CSOs around the world have long called for equity in health care and an end to excessive profiteering by the pharmaceutical industry at the expense of people’s well-being.

“We need to closely examine the reasons for the lack of political will to meaningfully address these issues.”

Meanwhile, in a statement last March, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said more than 10.5 billion vaccine doses have been administered globally, “enough to protect the entire world population from severe symptoms, hospitalization and death.”

But despite this achievement, Bachelet insisted that the “grim reality” was that only around 13 per cent of people in low-income countries have been vaccinated, compared with almost 70 per cent in high-income countries.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) ,has insisted that inaction risked penalizing the planet’s most vulnerable people and countries.

“We are at an inflection point in history”, he said. “We have the tools to end the acute phase of the pandemic, if we use them properly and share them fairly. But profound inequities are undermining that chance.

“Countries with high vaccination rates are reopening while others with low vaccination rates and low testing rates have been left behind. The result is more than 60,000 deaths per week, along with an increased risk of the emergence of new variants.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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La défaite d’Emmanuel Macron au second tour des élections législatives françaises est essentiellement une défaite en raison de ses politiques néolibérales, a déclaré l’ancien Premier ministre et principal leader de gauche de l’opposition en Grèce, Alexis Tsipras.

En soutenant uniquement l’Ukraine dans ses efforts pour devenir un candidat à l’adhésion à l’Union européenne, l’UE a négligé et humilié une autre région, a déclaré l’ancienne Première ministre croate Jadranka Kosor, faisant référence aux Balkans occidentaux.

Die Mitte-Rechts-Partei Partido Popular gewann 43,1 Prozent und die absolute Mehrheit im andalusischen Parlament mit 109 Sitzen.

Face aux faibles volumes de gaz fournis par la Russie, le gouvernement allemand va utiliser davantage de charbon en été, rémunérer l’industrie pour qu’elle n’utilise pas de gaz et accorder des milliards d’euros de prêts aux commerçants pour l’achat de gaz.

Polen wolle ein siebtes Paket von EU-Sanktionen gegen Russland fordern, darunter ein Verbot von Technologieexporten, sagte der stellvertretende Außenminister Marcin Przydacz der Welt am Sonntag.

Der tschechische Bildungsminister Petr Gazdík hat am Sonntag seinen Rücktritt angekündigt, nachdem bekannt wurde, dass er an mehreren Treffen mit dem Kopf des organisierten Verbrechens Michal Redl teilgenommen hat.

Record fuel prices seen since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have led cost-conscious motorists to pivot towards alternative fuel sources, with sales of E85 – a mixture of petrol and up to 85% bioethanol – rising significantly in France.

Italien erwägt, nach der Kürzung der Gaslieferungen durch Gazprom den Alarmzustand zu verhängen, um den Gasverbrauch zu rationieren und die Gasspeicher aufzustocken, berichtet die italienische Zeitung Corriere della Sera.

Leftist Gustavo Petro, a former member of the M-19 guerrilla movement, who has vowed profound social and economic change, won Colombia's presidency on Sunday, the first progressive to do so in the country's history.

Der EU-Sonderbeauftragte für den Balkan, Miroslav Lajčák, hofft, dass der Kosovo und Serbien im Rahmen des von der EU geförderten Dialogs in den kommenden Wochen ein wichtiges Abkommen unterzeichnen werden.