Новости за 29.11.2021

G7 health ministers will hold an emergency meeting on Monday about the new Omicron Covid-19 variant spreading across the world and forcing border closures, as experts race to determine the level of threat posed by the new strain, The Guardian writes. The meeting was called by G7 chair Britain, which is among a steadily growing number of countries that have detected cases of the heavily mutated new strain.

Czech president Miloš Zeman appointed the leader of a centre-right alliance Petr Fiala as prime minister on Sunday in a ceremony he performed from a plexiglass cubicle after testing positive for Covid-19, Reuters writes. Fiala leads a bloc of five centre and centre-right opposition parties that won an election in October, ousting the incumbent premier Andrej Babiš and his allies.

Germany must do "everything possible not to allow Nord Stream 2 to be an instrument in the arsenal of [Russian] president [Vladimir] Putin," Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki told German press agency DPA Sunday, referring to a Russian-German gas pipeline and Russia's aggressive posturing on Ukraine. Germany and the US were working on a joint deceleration on the pipeline, Germany's foreign ministry told Reuters, but Germany opposed new US sanctions.

EU borders agency Frontex will fly a surveillance plane "day and night" over the English Channel to help spot migrant boats, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the EU Commission agreed in talks in Calais Sunday, French interior minister Gerald Darmanin said. France had earlier uninvited the UK from the Calais meeting in a diplomatic spat between London and Paris, but "this meeting was not anti-English, it was pro-European," Darmanin said.

"We [Europe and Taiwan] must safeguard our shared values to ensure our free and democratic way of life," Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen told visiting MEPs from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in Taipei on Monday, Reuters reports. China recently downgraded relations with Lithuania for opening a Taiwan mission in Vilnius. It also voiced anger when a group of MEPs visited Taipei to study resilience to Chinese disinformation earlier this month.

EU officials who went to monitor regional elections in Venezuela were "a delegation of spies - they weren't observers", president Nicolás Maduro said Sunday, Reuters reports. "They looked to stain the electoral process [in their report] and they couldn't," he said. The monitors said the vote was better than previous ones, but complained of "extended use of state resources in the campaign" and delays in opening of polling stations.

Swiss people have voted to keep coronavirus vaccine-passes and other restrictions after some 60 percent of them said Yes in a referendum on Sunday. Just under two-thirds of Swiss nationals have been vaccinated, while infections are growing by some 50 percent a day. The referendum came amid a wave of recent anti-vax protests in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK, as Europe imposed its latest wave of lockdowns.

Greece has opened two new EU-funded "Closed Controlled Structures" for migrants, with barbed wire-fences and CCTV, on the islands of Kos and Leros. "We have finally put behind us a migration crisis that started in 2015," Greek migration minister Notis Mitarachi said Saturday. Meanwhile, Italy rescued 244 migrants, including 41 minors, of which one was a baby, from a boat drifting in bad weather near its southern coastline on Sunday.

The European Commission spent €542.4m between 2016 and 2020 for studies written by external private contractors. The findings are part of a larger probe into how large consultancies are increasingly landing lucrative contracts, amid questions on possible conflicts of interest.

Russian mercenaries have taken command of at least one EU-trained battalion to help "predate" the Central African Republic, a leaked report said.