Government to airlines: avoid Belarus
The UK government has told airlines to avoid flying over Belarusian airspace after a Ryanair flight destined for Lithuania was forcibly diverted to Minsk so that Roman Protasevich, an opposition journalist, could be arrested.
Western nations have been queueing up to condemn the incident which Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s CEO, called “state-sponsored hijacking, state-sponsored piracy”.
Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, described the scrambling of a Belarusian jet to intercept the aircraft, citing a bomb threat, as “a shocking assault on civil aviation and an assault on international law”.
Protasevich, 26, is accused of helping to organise the mass protests which rocked the regime of Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko – accurately described as Europe’s last dictator, who has ruled the country for 27 years – after a fraudulent election last year returned him to power.
Minsk has insisted its action was legal. Moscow has backed it, calling the West’s outrage hypocritical.
The extraordinary act throws up the question of how the West should deal with tyrants who brazenly flout international norms. EU leaders are meeting this evening to decide how to respond. There’s talk of flights bans over Belarus airspace, banning its national carrier from EU airports and even suspending ground transport links. The bloc has already blacklisted 88 people and seven companies accused of “repression and intimidation” of Belarussian protestors.
While it’s vital that the EU backs up tough talk with a meaningful response – dictators around the world will use the incident as a yard-stick to judge what they might be able to get away with – reaching a unanimous decision will be difficult, with the likes of Hungary reluctant to impose sanctions on a fellow Moscow ally.
The “hijacking” also concerns Nato, as Lithuania is member, meaning the alliance must decide how to respond to what Tom Tugendhat MP, chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, has called a “war-like act”.
That was the pandemic that was
If our vaccines continue to prevent hospitalisations as effectively as they have done so far, then the pandemic – in the UK at least – could soon be declared over, Professor Andrew Pollard, head of the Oxford Vaccine Group, said today.
Mild infection from the virus “doesn’t matter” as long as people are being kept out of hospital, because “then the NHS can continue to function and life will be back to normal”, he said.
The transmissibility of the so-called Indian variant is still unclear. But Pollard made the crucial point, that seems to have been forgotten in the hysteria surrounding the new strain, that transmissibility shouldn’t be our primary concern: “The thing that makes this a pandemic is people going into hospital”.
So far, even if a virus variant has compromised the vaccine’s ability to stop mild infection, vaccines have remained highly effective at curbing hospitalisations and deaths. We need a few more weeks to confirm that this is also the case with the Indian variant, Pollard said.
While an “end” to the pandemic seems closer than ever, murky questions remain about its origins. A newly-leaked US intelligence report has revealed that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalised as early as November 2019, after they fell ill with Covid-like symptoms, adding weight to the theory that the virus could have escaped from the lab. See Caitlin Allen below.
Racing boss dead at 81
Max Mosley, the ex-Formula One chief and privacy law campaigner, has died aged 81.
Mosley led widespread reforms of safety procedures in motor racing following the death of Ayrton Senna in 1994.
Son of Oswald, British fascist leader in the 1930s, Max Mosley won a high profile privacy case against the News of the World in 2008 after it published pictures of him in the midst of a sadomasochistic orgy at his Chelsea home. The paper wrongly claimed the session was Nazi-themed.
After winning £60,000 of damages in the landmark case, he became a campaigner against the press.
Mattie Brignal,
News Editor