Europe
Report concludes UK waited too long for virus lockdown
The British government waited too long to impose a lockdown in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, missing a chance to contain the disease and leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths, a parliamentary report concluded Tuesday.
The deadly delay resulted from ministers’ failure to question the recommendations of scientific advisers, resulting in a dangerous level of “groupthink” that caused them to dismiss the more aggressive strategies adopted in East and Southeast Asia, according to the joint report from the House of Commons’ science and health committees. It was only when Britain's National Health Service risked being overwhelmed by rapidly rising infections that Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservative government finally ordered a lockdown.
“There was a desire to avoid a lockdown because of the immense harm it would entail to the economy, normal health services and society,’’ the report said. “In the absence of other strategies such as rigorous case isolation, a meaningful test-and-trace operation, and robust border controls, a full lockdown was inevitable and should have come sooner.’’
Read:Moderna has no plans to share its COVID-19 vaccine recipe
The U.K. parliamentary report comes amid frustration with the timetable for a formal public inquiry into the government’s response to COVID-19, which Johnson says will start next spring.
Lawmakers said their inquiry was designed to uncover why Britain performed “significantly worse” than many other countries during the early days of the pandemic so that the U.K. could improve its response to the ongoing threat from COVID-19 and prepare for future threats.
The 150-page report is based on testimony from 50 witnesses, including former Health Secretary Matt Hancock and former government insider Dominic Cummings. It was unanimously approved by 22 lawmakers from the three largest parties in Parliament: the governing Conservatives and the opposition Labour Party and the Scottish National Party.
The committees praised the government’s early focus on vaccines as the ultimate way out of the pandemic and its decision to invest in vaccine development. These decisions led to Britain’s successful inoculation program, which has seen almost 80% of people 12 and over now fully vaccinated.
“Millions of lives will ultimately be saved as a result of the global vaccine effort in which the U.K. has played a leading part,” the committees said.
But they also criticized the government’s test-and-trace program, saying its slow, uncertain and often chaotic performance hampered Britain’s response to the pandemic.
Read: Merck asks US FDA to authorize promising anti-COVID pill
The government’s strategy during the first three months of the crisis reflected official scientific advice that widespread infection was inevitable given that testing capacity was limited; that there was no immediate prospect for a vaccine; and the belief that the public wouldn’t accept a lengthy lockdown, the report said. As a result, the government sought merely to manage the spread of the virus, instead of trying to stop it altogether.
The report described this as a “serious early error” that the U.K. shared with many countries in Europe and North America.
“Accountability in a democracy depends on elected decision-makers not just taking advice, but examining, questioning and challenging it before making their own decisions,” the committees said. “Although it was a rapidly changing situation, given the large number of deaths predicted, it was surprising the initially fatalistic assumptions about the impossibility of suppressing the virus were not challenged until it became clear the NHS would be overwhelmed.”
Trish Greenhalgh, a professor of primary care health services at the University of Oxford, said the report “hints at a less-than-healthy’’ relationship between government and scientific bodies. With COVID-19 still killing hundreds of people every week in Britain, advisory committees continue to debate exactly what evidence is “sufficiently definitive” to be considered certain, she said.
Read:‘Mission 100 Days’ launched to curb Covid during festivals in India
“Uncertainty is a defining feature of crises...,’’ Greenhalgh said. “Dare we replace ‘following the science’ with ‘deliberating on what best to do when the problem is urgent but certainty eludes us’? This report suggests that unless we wish to continue to repeat the mistakes of the recent past, we must.”
Even senior officials like Cummings and Hancock told the committees they were reluctant to push back against scientific consensus.
Hancock said as early as Jan. 28, 2020, he found it difficult to push for widespread testing of people who didn’t show symptoms of COVID-19 because scientific advisers said it wouldn’t be useful.
“I was in a situation of not having hard evidence that a global scientific consensus of decades was wrong but having an instinct that it was,” he testified. “I bitterly regret that I did not overrule that scientific advice.”
Moderna has no plans to share its COVID-19 vaccine recipe
Moderna has no plans to share the recipe for its COVID-19 vaccine because executives have concluded that scaling up the company's own production is the best way to increase the global supply, the company’s chairman said Monday.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Noubar Afeyan also reiterated a pledge Moderna made a year ago not to enforce patent infringement on anyone else making a coronavirus vaccine during the pandemic.
“We didn’t have to do that," Afeyan said. ”We think that was the right, responsible thing to do.” He added: “We want that to be helping the world.”
Read:Japan suspends 1.63M doses of Moderna over contamination
The United Nations health agency has pressed Moderna to share its vaccine formula. Afeyan said the company analyzed whether it would be better to share the messenger RNA technology and determined that it could expand production and deliver billions of additional doses in 2022.
“Within the next six to nine months, the most reliable way to make high-quality vaccines and in an efficient way is going to be if we make them," Afeyan said. Asked about appeals from the World Health Organization and others, he contended that such pleas assumed ”that we couldn’t get enough capacity, but in fact we know we can.”
Moderna “went from having zero production to having 1 billion doses in less than a year," Afeyan said, referring to the Massachusetts-based company's sprint to develop the vaccine and produce it in large quantities. "And we think we will be able to go from 1 to 3 billion" in 2022.
"We think we are doing everything we can to help this pandemic,'' Afeyan added, citing the company's increasing output and its pledge on patent infringement.
He noted that $2.5 billion (about 2.1 billion euros) and 10 years were spent in developing the platform that makes Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine.
“Others joined the hunt when COVID-19 came along, and we're glad to see that the capacity therefore has been increased considerably beyond what Moderna would have been able to do” by itself, Afeyan said.
Read: Moderna says vaccine 93% effective but seeks 3rd-shot in fall
Asked how successful he thought others might be if they started from scratch using Moderna patents, he declined to speculate. But “it's hard for me to imagine that they would be able to get any meaningful scale in a short time frame at the quality we would be able to do as a certainty” for 2022.
Asked about recent criticism that Moderna has been furnishing its vaccine mainly to wealthy countries while low-income countries clamor for the product, Afeyan said the company supplied a “quite significant” output to poorer nations, mostly through its work with the U.S. government, which contracted early in the pandemic with the company for doses.
Moderna is working with multiple governments "to help them secure supplies for the express purpose of supplying to low-income countries,'' the executive said.
“There is more supply in the EU and the U.S. government than they will be able to use,” said Afeyan, who is also a co-founder of Moderna.
Read: Close to committing $1 billion to Moderna for Covid-19 booster shot: Cipla
Separately, Moderna made a commitment in May to Covax, the U.N.-backed vaccine program, to arrange for a total of 500 million does to go to poorer countries. He said probably 40 million doses would begin to ship in the last three months of this year, with the rest shipping next year.
The COVID-19 vaccine is Moderna's only commercial product. The company announced plans last week to open a vaccine plant somewhere in Africa. Afeyan said he hopes a decision will be made soon on an exact location. Still, it could take years to get the plant up and running.
Afeyan spoke on the last full day of a visit to Italy in which he met Pope Francis, who has appealed for universal vaccine access. He also appeared in Venice to promote a humanitarian prize.
Co-founded by Afeyan, the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative aims to “empower modern-day saviors to offer life and hope” to those urgently needing basic humanitarian aid. Through the prize, the organization has awarded $5 million in grants to more than 30 humanitarian projects to help people recover from war, famine, genocide, human rights violations and other challenges.
3 US-based economists win Nobel for research on wages, jobs
A U.S.-based economist won the Nobel prize in economics Monday for pioneering research that transformed widely held ideas about the labor force, showing how an increase in the minimum wage doesn’t hinder hiring and immigrants don't lower pay for native-born workers. Two others shared the award for developing ways to study these types of societal issues.
Canadian-born David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded half of the prize for his research on how the minimum wage, immigration and education affect the labor market.
The other half was shared by Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dutch-born Guido Imbens of Stanford University for their framework for studying issues that can't rely on traditional scientific methods.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the three “completely reshaped empirical work in the economic sciences.”
Together, they helped rapidly expand the use of “natural experiments,” or studies based on observing real-world data. Such research made economics more applicable to everyday life, provided policymakers with actual evidence on the outcomes of policies, and in time spawned a more popular approach to economics epitomized by the blockbuster bestseller “Freakonomics,” by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt.
Read: Russian Nobel winner: Peace Prize is for my paper, not me
In a study published in 1993, Card looked at what happened to jobs at Burger King, KFC, Wendy's and Roy Rogers when New Jersey raised its minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.05, using restaurants in bordering eastern Pennsylvania as the control — or comparison — group. Contrary to previous studies, he and his late research partner Alan Krueger found that an increase in the minimum wage had no effect on the number of employees.
Card and Krueger's research fundamentally altered economists’ views of such policies. As noted by the Economist magazine, in 1992 a survey of the American Economic Association’s members found that 79% agreed that a minimum wage law increased unemployment among younger and lower-skilled workers. Those views were largely based on traditional economic notions of supply and demand: If you raise the price of something, you get less of it.
By 2000, however, just 46% of the AEA’s members said minimum wage laws increase unemployment, largely because of Card and Krueger.
Their findings sparked interest in further research into why a higher minimum wouldn’t reduce employment. One conclusion was that companies are able to pass on the cost of higher wages to customers by raising prices. In other cases, if a company is a major employer in a particular area, it may be able to keep wages particularly low, so that it could afford to pay a higher minimum, when required to do so, without cutting jobs. The higher pay would also attract more applicants, boosting labor supply.
Their paper "has shaken up the field at a very fundamental level,” said Arindrajit Dube, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “And so for that reason, and all the following research that their work ignited, this is a richly deserved award.”
Krueger would almost certainly have shared in the award, Dube said, but the economics Nobel isn't given posthumously. Krueger, Imbens said, co-authored papers with all three winners.
Krueger, who died in 2019 at age 58, taught at Princeton for three decades and was chief Labor Department economist under President Bill Clinton. He also was Obama’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
Card and Krueger's paper made a huge impact on other economists. Lisa Cook, an economics professor at Michigan State University, said their paper was “a revelation” that helped crystallize her thinking for her research on racial violence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and how it inhibited patent filings by Black Americans.
Card's research also found that an influx of immigrants into a city doesn't cost native workers jobs or lower their earnings, though earlier immigrants can be negatively affected.
Read: Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah awarded Nobel literature prize
Card studied the labor market in Miami in the wake of Cuba’s sudden decision to let people emigrate in 1980, leading 125,000 people to leave in what became known as the Mariel Boatlift. It resulted in a 7% increase in the city’s workforce. By comparing the evolution of wages and employment in four other cities, Card discovered no negative effects for Miami residents with low levels of education. Follow-up work showed that increased immigration can have a positive impact on income for people born in the country.
Angrist and Imbens won their half of the award for working out the methodological issues that allow economists to draw solid conclusions about cause and effect even where they cannot carry out studies according to strict scientific methods.
Card's work on the minimum wage is one of the best-known natural experiments in economics. The problem with such experiments is that it can be difficult to isolate cause and effect. For example, if you want to figure out whether an extra year of education will increase a person’s income, you cannot simply compare the incomes of adults with one more year of schooling to those without.
That's because there are many other factors that might determine whether those who got an extra year of schooling are able to make more money. Perhaps they are harder workers or more diligent and would have done better than those without the extra year even if they did not stay in school. These kinds of issues cause economists and other social science researchers to say “correlation doesn’t prove causation.”
Imbens and Angrist, however, figured out how to isolate the effects of things like an extra year of school. Their methods enabled researchers to draw clearer conclusions about cause and effect, even if they are unable to control who gets things like extra education, the way scientists in a lab can control their experiments.
Imbens, in one paper, used a survey of lottery winners to evaluate the impact of a government-provided basic income, which has been proposed by left-leaning politicians in the U.S. and Europe. He found that a prize of $15,000 a year did not have much effect on a person's likelihood to work.
Card said he thought the voice message that came in at 2 a.m. from someone from Sweden was a prank until he saw the number on his phone really was from Sweden.
He said he and his co-author Kreuger faced disbelief from other economists about their findings. “At the time, the conclusions were somewhat controversial. Quite a few economists were skeptical of our results,” he said.
Imbens' wife, Susan Athey, is also an economist and president-elect of the AEA, and Imbens said they sometimes argue about economics in front of their three children.
“This means, I hope, they'll learn that they need to listen to me a little bit more,” he said. ”I'm afraid it probably won't work out that way."
At home in Brookline, Massachusetts, Angrist said: “I can hardly believe it. It's only been a few hours and I am still trying to absorb it."
Read:Physics Nobel rewards work on climate change, other forces
He also missed the call from Nobel officials and awoke to a torrent of texts from friends. Fortunately, he said, he knew enough other Nobel Laureates that he got a callback number from them.
As a youth, Angrist dropped out of a master's program in economics at Hebrew University in Israel, although he did meet his future wife, Mira, there. He has dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship.
“I did have sort of a winding road,” he said. “I wasn't a precocious high school student.”
The award comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish kronor (over $1.14 million).
Unlike the other Nobel prizes, the economics award wasn’t established in the will of Alfred Nobel but by the Swedish central bank in his memory in 1968, with the first winner selected a year later. It is the last prize announced each year.
3 US-based economists receive economics Nobel Prize
Three U.S-based economists won the 2021 Nobel prize for economics on Monday for work on drawing conclusions from unintended experiments, or so-called “natural experiments.”
David Card of the University of California at Berkeley was awarded one half of the prize, while the other half was shared by Joshua Angrist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Guido Imbens from Stanford University.
Read: Journalists from Philippines, Russia get Nobel Peace Prize
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the three have “completely reshaped empirical work in the economic sciences.”
“Card’s studies of core questions for society and Angrist and Imbens’ methodological contributions have shown that natural experiments are a rich source of knowlege,” said Peter Fredriksson, chair of the Economic Sciences Committee. “Their research has substantially improved our ability to answer key causal questions, which has been of great benefit for society.”
Unlike the other Nobel prizes, the economics award wasn’t established in the will of Alfred Nobel but by the Swedish central bank in his memory in 1968, with the first winner selected a year later. It is the last prize announced each year.
Read:Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah awarded Nobel literature prize
Last week, the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to journalists Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia for their fight for freedom of expression in countries where reporters have faced persistent attacks, harassment and even murder.
Ressa was the only woman honored this year in any category.
The Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to U.K.-based Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, who was recognized for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee.”
The prize for physiology or medicine went to Americans David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch.
Read: Nobel in chemistry honors 'greener' way to build molecules
Three scientists won the physics prize for work that found order in seeming disorder, helping to explain and predict complex forces of nature, including expanding our understanding of climate change.
Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan won the chemistry prize for finding an easier and environmentally cleaner way to build molecules that can be used to make compounds, including medicines and pesticides.
Huge fire extinguished at oil facility in southern Lebanon
Firefighters extinguished a huge blaze that broke out in a storage tank at one of Lebanon's main oil facilities in the country's south Monday after it sent orange flames and a thick black column of smoke into the sky.
Energy Minister Walid Fayad said the fire broke out when workers were transferring gasoline from one storage tank to another in the coastal town of Zahrani. He said nearly 250,000 liters of gasoline were burnt during the blaze, which lasted more than three hours. No one was reported hurt.
The fire came as Lebanon struggles through a serious power crisis that has resulted in electricity cuts lasting up to 22 hours a day.
Read:Fuel tanker explodes in Lebanon, killing 20, wounding dozens
“The situation now is almost under full control,” Fayad told reporters at the facility. He said earlier that the gasoline was for the Lebanese army.
State-run National News Agency said it was not immediately clear what caused the fire.
Lebanese troops had closed the highway linking Beirut with southern Lebanon that passes through Zahrani. The road was reopened after the fire was extinguished.
The Zahrani Oil Installation is about 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of Beirut. It is close to one of Lebanon’s main power stations, which stopped functioning two days ago due to a fuel shortage.
Earlier in the day, the head of the civil defense, Raymound Khattar, told the local MTV station that they believe there were 300,000 liters of gasoline in the tanker. Khattar added that work focused on extinguishing the fire and cooling down a nearby tanker, to keep it from igniting.
Read: Mired in crises, Lebanon hopes summer arrivals bring relief
In August 2020, a blaze at Beirut’s port triggered a massive explosion that killed at least 215 people, wounded thousands and destroyed the facility and nearby neighborhoods. The blast at Beirut’s port, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever reported, was caused by hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate, a highly explosive material used in fertilizers that had been improperly stored for years.
Earlier this year, a German company found dangerous nuclear material stored at the facility in Zahrani. Eight small containers that weigh less that 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) containing depleted uranium salts were removed shortly afterward.
The material has been stored at the facility since the 1950s, when it was run by the Mediterranean Refinery Company, or Medreco. Medreco was an American company whose main shareholders were Mobil and Caltex and it was active in Lebanon for four decades until the late 1980s.
German companies urge next government to step up on climate
Dozens of large German companies have urged the country's next government to put in place ambitious policies to meet the goals of the Paris climate accord.
In an open letter Monday, 69 companies said the next government needs to put Germany “on a clear and reliable path to climate neutrality” with a plan for doing so within its first 100 days in office.
The signatories included chemicals giant Bayer, steelmaker ThyssenKrupp and sportswear firm Puma.
Read:Germany will take next step after WHO's approval of Covaxin
The center-left Social Democrats narrowly beat outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Union bloc in last month election. They are due to meet Monday with the environmentalist Greens party and the pro-business Free Democrats to discuss forming a coalition government.
“Climate protection was the decisive topic in the federal election and the parties must place it at the top of their agenda in building the new federal government,” said Michael Otto, board chairman of mail order company Otto Group and president of the Foundation 2 Degrees, which organized the letter.
Earlier this year, Merkel's government adopted a plan to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions to ‘net zero’ by 2045, five years earlier than previously planned.
But official figures show that Germany is slipping behind on its ambitions for cutting greenhouse gases, with 2021 emissions forecast to rebound sharply after a pandemic-related economic slump.
Read:After close vote, Germany on tricky path to form government
The foundation, which says its members have an annual turnover of about 1 trillion euros ($1.16 trillion) and employ more than five million people worldwide, wants the next government to support the rollout of renewable energy and enact a climate-friendly tax reform that includes a strengthened carbon pricing system to prevent investments in power-hungry industries going abroad.
Pointing toward the upcoming U.N. climate summit in Glasgow and Germany's presidency of the Group of Seven major economies next year, the companies said the government must also work to set international standards for the global financial system and climate-neutral products.
“As businesses, we are prepared to fulfil our central role in climate action. We call upon the new German government to make the transformation to climate neutrality the central economic project of the coming legislative period,” they said.
Czech president hospitalized; Could affect forming new govt
Czech President Milos Zeman was rushed to the hospital on Sunday, a day after the country held parliamentary election in which populist Prime Minister Andrej Babis' party surprisingly came in second and Zeman has a key role in establishing a new government.
The Czech presidency is largely ceremonial but the president chooses which political leader can try to form the next government. Earlier Sunday, Zeman met with Babis, his close ally, but the prime minister made no comment as he left the presidential chateau in Lany, near Prague.
On Saturday, the centrist ANO (Yes) party led by Babis, a populist billionaire, narrowly lost the Czech Republic’s election, which could spell the end of the euroskeptic leader’s reign in the European Union nation of 10.7 million people.
A liberal-conservative three-party coalition named Together captured 27.8% of the vote, beating Babis’ ANO, which won 27.1%. In a second blow to the populists, another center-left liberal coalition received 15.6% to finish third.
The winning coalition won 71 seats while its third-place partner captured 37 seats to have a comfortable majority of 108 seats in the 200-seat lower house of Parliament, and they pledged to work together. Babis's party won 72 seats, six less than in the 2017 election.
But Zeman earlier indicated he would first appoint the leader of the strongest party, not the strongest coalition, to try to form the government. That would give Babis a chance to give it a try to find a majority for his possible new government.
Read: Amid pandemic, Czech intensive care ward is still half-full
If he fails, as expected, and his latest government doesn’t win a mandatory confidence vote in the house, Zeman could ask him to try to create a new government again.
That has happened before. With no deadlines for the president’s move, the country faced a long term of political instability from the October 2017 election until July the following year, when Babis’ second Cabinet finally won the confidence vote.
“It would be no surprise if the election’s loss wouldn’t become reality for Babis for the following months,” said analyst Petr Just from Metropolitan University Prague.
But unlike in 2017, this latest election produced a clear winner. Petr Fiala, the leader of Together and its candidate for prime minister, urged Zeman to accept the election results.
“The opposition has gained a clear majority in the lower house,” Fiala said. “The Constitution clearly says that a government needs support of a majority. We’ll see what steps President Zeman is to take but it’s essential that he cannot ignore that.”
In his only post-election comment, Zeman congratulated the election winner and all elected lawmakers.
If Zeman is not able to act due to his illness or other reasons, the prime minister and the speakers of both houses of parliament will take over his presidential powers. If that happens, the new speaker of the lower house selects the premier. The parliament has to meet within 30 days of the election to select the speaker and other officials.
In other election results, the anti-migrant and anti-Muslim force in the Czech Republic, the Freedom and Direct Democracy party, which wants the country to leave the EU, finished fourth with 9.6% support, or 20 seats. In another surprise, the Social Democrats and the Communists, the country’s traditional parliamentary parties, both failed to win seats in parliament for the first time since the split of Czechoslovakia in 1993.
Read: UK rises to 35 coronavirus cases, Czech Republic sees 1st 3
Prague’s military hospital confirmed that Zeman was transported there Sunday. Zeman, 77, is a heavy smoker and drinker who has suffered from diabetes. He has trouble walking and has been using a wheelchair.
“The reason for his hospitalization are the complications that accompany the chronic disease for which we treat him here,” said Dr. Miroslav Zavoral, the director of the clinic. He declined to elaborate.
Jiri Ovcacek, the president's spokesman, later said his current stay in hospital doesn't threaten the country's post-election negotiations and his Constitutional duties. He said Zeman has asked to receive media monitoring on a daily basis.
Zeman was previously admitted on Sept. 14 for what his office described later as a planned examination. The office said the president was only dehydrated and slightly exhausted. Zeman was released after eight days, his longest hospital stay.
He spent four days in the same hospital in 2019 for similar reasons.
La Palma's volcanic eruption is going strong 3 weeks later
Three weeks since its eruption upended the lives of thousands, the volcano on Spain’s La Palma island is still spewing out endless streams of lava with no signs of ceasing.
Authorities on Sunday monitored a new stream of molten rock that has added to the destruction of over 1,100 buildings. Anything in the path of the lava — homes, farms, swimming pools and industrial buildings in the largely agricultural area — has been consumed.
The collapse Saturday of part of the volcanic cone sent a flood of bright red lava pouring down from the Cumbre Vieja ridge that initially cracked open on Sept. 19. The fast-flowing stream carried away huge chunks of lava that had already hardened. An industrial park was soon engulfed.
Read: Hawaii's Kilauea volcano erupts, lava fountains form in park
“We cannot say that we expect the eruption that began 21 days ago to end anytime soon,” said Julio Pérez, the regional minister for security on the Canary Islands.
La Palma is part of Spain’s Canary Islands, an Atlantic Ocean archipelago off northwest Africa whose economy depends on the cultivation of the Canary plantain and tourism.
The new rivers of lava have not forced the evacuation of any more residents since they are all so staying within the exclusion zone that authorities have created. Some 6,000 residents were promptly evacuated after the initial eruption.
Government experts estimated that the largest of the lava flows measures 1.5 km (.9 miles) at its widest point, while the delta of new land being formed where lava is flowing into the Atlantic has reached a surface of 34 hectares (84 acres).
The scientific committee advising the government said that if the delta continues to grow outwards into the sea, parts of it could break off. That would generate explosions, gas emissions and large waves, committee spokeswoman José María Blanco said, but should not represent a danger to those outside the no-go zone.
Read: California wildfire dangers may be spreading south
The Canary Islands' tourism industry was already hard hit by the pandemic, and officials were urging tourists not to keep staying away.
“This eruption is impacting a part of the island, but La Palma is still a safe place and can offer a lot to those who visit,” said Mariano Hernández, the island’s leading authority.
The last eruption on La Palma 50 years ago lasted just over three weeks. The last eruption on all the Canary Islands occurred underwater off the coast of El Hierro island in 2011 and lasted five months.
Russian Nobel winner: Peace Prize is for my paper, not me
As editor of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry Muratov was well aware that his independent Russian newspaper — a persistent critic of the Kremlin, government corruption and human rights abuses in Russia — was seen as a top contender for the Nobel Peace Prize.
But the prestigious award wasn't on his mind when the announcement came down that he'd been named co-winner. At the time Friday, Muratov was absorbed in an argument on the phone with a reporter, Elena Milashina.
“At that time, there were several calls from Oslo. But only a reckless person would say to Milashina ‘Wait, I’ll talk to Oslo and then you and I will quarrel,” Muratov said on Ekho Moskvy radio.
Finally, he was told by his paper's spokeswoman that he had won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, along with journalist Maria Ressa of the Philippines, for their fight for freedom of expression in countries where reporters have faced persistent attacks, harassment and even murder.
Read:Journalists from Philippines, Russia get Nobel Peace Prize
The 59-year-old Muratov was similarly casual, even sardonic, about the recognition of the prize that came from the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. In the radio interview, the host asked him for comment on Peskov's statement. Muratov said he hadn't read it and the host offered to read it to him.
“Should I rise?” Muratov said, then heard that Peskov said “he is committed to his ideals, he is talented, he is brave.”
“All the above is certainly true,” Muratov responded.
Other reactions from Kremlin circles were far less generous.
“The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the most controversial nominations of the Nobel Committee. Such decisions devalue the prize itself, it is already difficult to be guided by it,” said Dmitry Kiselev, whose weekly news magazine program on state TV is larded with paeans to Russian President Vladimir Putin and disdain for the opposition.
Considering how critical Novaya Gazeta has been toward Putin and his government, Peskov's congratulatory words could be seen as determined spin-control. They also likely reflect relief that the Norwegian Nobel Committee did not chose another Russian nominee for the Peace Prize — imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Navalny's dramatic arrest this year when he returned from Germany after recuperating from nerve-agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin gave him international prominence. Many of his supporters were disappointed that his bravery in confronting Russia's government did not earn him the Nobel.
Lyubov Sobol, one of Navalny's closest and most visible aides, congratulated Muratov on Twitter, but added that she believes Navalny is “the most important fighter for peace in our country.”
Muratov, though pleased by the recognition, agreed.
Read: Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah awarded Nobel literature prize
“I can tell you directly that if I were on the Nobel committee, I would have voted for him for his absolutely crazy courage,” he said.
Novaya Gazeta has courted controversy since its founding in 1993 by Muratov and other former colleagues at the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, the onetime organ of the Communist Youth League. The goal was to create “ an honest, independent, and rich publication that would influence national policy,” according to his citation for the 2007 International Press Freedom Award.
Although the Nobel has brought him intense international attention, Muratov has been at pains to downplay his personal prominence, saying repeatedly that he regards the award as being given to the whole paper and as a tribute to its six reporters or contributors who have been killed.
The most famous victim was Anna Politkovskaya, who reported on Russia's Chechnya wars and was gunned down in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building in 2006. Muratov's Nobel award was announced one day after the 15th anniversary of her killing. Although six people were convicted of involvement in the shooting, whoever ordered it has not been identified and the statute of limitations on the case expired on Thursday.
Yuri Shchekochikhin, a reporter investigating corrupt business deals and the possible role of Russian security services in the 1999 apartment house bombings blamed on Chechen insurgents, died in 2003 of poisoning and the culprits were never found. Anastasia Baburina was shot to death in 2009 after a news conference with a lawyer representing the family of a Chechen girl raped and murdered by a Russian military officer; the lawyer also died in the attack.
The paper and its journalists also have endured an array of threats, ranging from a severed goat's head and funeral notices sent to the paper, to mysterious dustings of powder at the home of a reporter.
Read: Nobel in chemistry honors 'greener' way to build molecules
Prominent investigations at the paper in recent years include reporting on the alleged torture and murders of gay men by Chechen officials, publishing bodycam footage of Russian prison officials torturing an inmate and the beheading of a detainee in Syria by men believed to be Russian mercenaries working for a contractor closely tied to Putin.
The paper's report on the “Blue Whale” phenomenon in which Russian youths reportedly were lured online into committing suicide was criticized as possibly overstated, but a Russian man later claimed to have organized it and was sentenced to prison.
The Nobel Peace award raised concerns about whether it could subject Novaya Gazeta to being designated as a “foreign agent” under Russian law, a term applied to organizations and individuals who receive foreign funding and are engaged in unspecified political activity. The stipulation apparently is aimed at undermining their credibility.
“I hope that this status of Muratov will protect Novaya Gazeta from the status of a foreign agent and will become some kind of protection for Russian journalists, who are massively announced as foreign agents,” said Yevgenia Albats, editor of the Novoye Vremya news magazine. “I hope this will help Russian journalism survive in these difficult conditions.”
But a few hours after the Nobel announcement, the Russian Justice Ministry added nine more journalists and three more organizations to its list of foreign agents.
Kurz to quit as Austrian chancellor amid corruption probe
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said Saturday that he will step down in a bid to defuse a government crisis triggered by prosecutors' announcement that he is a target of a corruption investigation.
Kurz, 35, said he has proposed to Austria's president that Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg become chancellor. But Kurz himself will remain in a key political position: he said he will become the head of his conservative Austrian People's Party's parliamentary group.
Kurz's party had closed ranks behind him after the prosecutors' announcement on Wednesday, which followed searches at the chancellery and his party's offices. But its junior coalition partner, the Greens, said Friday that Kurz couldn't remain as chancellor and demanded that his party nominate an “irreproachable person” to replace him. The coalition government took office in January, 2020.
Read: Austria's Greens clear final hurdle for government with Kurz
The Greens' leader, Vice Chancellor Werner Kogler, welcomed Kurz's decision as “a right and important step.”
“This means that we can continue our work in government,” he said.
Kurz and his close associates are accused of trying to secure his rise to the leadership of his party and the country with the help of manipulated polls and friendly reports in the media, financed with public money. Kurz, who became the People’s Party leader and then chancellor in 2017, denies wrongdoing.
The Greens said the probe created a “disastrous” impression. In a separate case, anti-corruption authorities put Kurz under investigation in May on suspicion of making false statements to a parliamentary commission, an allegation he also rejected.
Opposition leaders had called for Kurz to go and planned to bring a no-confidence motion against him Tuesday in parliament.
Read:Austria awaits Greens' approval for government with Kurz
“We are still in a very sensitive phase in Austria — the pandemic is not yet over and the economic upswing has only just begun,” while a reform of the country’s tax system to help curb greenhouse gas emissions has been negotiated but is not yet implemented, Kurz said.
“What we need now are stable conditions,” he told reporters in Vienna. “So, in order to resolve the stalemate, I want to make way to prevent chaos and ensure stability."
He insisted again that the accusations against him “are false and I will be able to clear this up — I am deeply convinced of that."
Kurz said of the Greens' demand for his replacement: “Many tell me that this is unfair and ... you can imagine that I personally would also be grateful if the presumption of innocence in our country really applied to everyone.”
He insisted that the accusations against him were being “mixed up” with old text messages that have surfaced in recent days. “Some of them are messages that I definitely wouldn't formulate the same way again, but I am only a human being with emotions and also flaws,” he said.
Kurz will keep his party's leadership as well as becoming its parliamentary group leader.
Read: Austria's Kurz optimistic new coalition will last full term
He responded to the demand for an untainted new leader with Schallenberg, 52. Although loyal to Kurz, Schallenberg has a background in diplomacy rather than party politics.
Schallenberg already served as foreign minister in a non-partisan interim government that ran the European Union nation of 8.9 million people for several months after Kurz’s first coalition with the far-right Freedom Party collapsed in 2019.
Kurz pulled the plug on that government after a video surfaced showing the vice chancellor and Freedom Party leader at the time, Heinz-Christian Strache, appearing to offer favors to a purported Russian investor.
Austria's next regular parliamentary election is due in 2024.