The UK government has amended its foreign travel guidance to clarify that the Indian-made version of the AstraZeneca vaccine is an approved jab. But it is not clear whether people from India can travel to the UK without having to self-isolate for 10 days. The UK’s refusal to recognize Covishield had triggered a firestorm of protests in India. With more than 721 million doses administered so far, Covishield is India’s primary vaccine.
President Biden is set to announce on Wednesday that the United States is buying 500 million more doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to donate to countries around the world, a pledge that will bring the total promised U.S. vaccine donations to more than 1.1 billion. Biden will make the announcement during remarks at the start of a virtual summit aimed at boosting commitments from other nations and the private sector.
A volley of automatic gunfire hit a car carrying a senior aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday, an incident a senior official called an assassination attempt and Zelenskiy said may have been a message intended for him. The aide, Serhiy Shefir, survived unscathed but police said his driver had been wounded after more than 10 bullets hit the car near the village of Lesnyky, just outside the capital Kyiv.
Around 300 protesters stormed Namibia’s parliament on Tuesday, as the National Assembly was due to vote on a $1 billion compensation offer from Germany to atone for its 1904-1908 genocide against the Herero and Nama people. Namibian authorities announced on May 28 that Germany had agreed to fund projects in the southwest African nation worth that amount over 30 years, to atone for the killings and property seizures in its then colony more than a century ago.
A new guild of artists from Nigeria’s Benin City has offered to donate artworks to the British Museum in London as a way to encourage it to return the priceless Benin Bronzes that were looted from the city’s royal court by British troops in 1897. Created in the once mighty Kingdom of Benin from at least the 16th century onwards, the bronze and brass sculptures are among Africa’s finest and most culturally significant artifacts.