WORLD ROUND UP – 2021 ARRIVES

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 WORLD ROUND UP – 2021 ARRIVES

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• Governments in Britain and across the European Union rushed to approve a post-Brexit trade agreement before December 31st, the date on which Britain’s transition period ends. The deal, which was announced on Christmas Eve, covers goods, but says little about financial services. Some disruption for business is expected. The EU’s member states back the pact, though the measures will come into force only provisionally until the European Parliament can give its blessing. 
• Scientists were worried by two new and more contagious variants of Covid-19 that are spreading around the world. Nearly all the countries in the EU began vaccinating citizens, a week after the European Medicines Agency approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The Netherlands said it would not start until January 8th, claiming it wanted more time to implement its programme “carefully”. Spain’s health minister said a registry would be kept of people who refused to get vaccinated. 
• State investigators in Russia laid more dubious fraud charges against Alexei Navalny, the country’s leading opposition politician. This came after Mr Navalny posted a tape of his phone call with an agent of the fsb security police, whom he tricked into admitting that the fsb had tried to poison him with a nerve agent in August. Vladimir Putin said that if the police had wanted to poison Mr Navalny, he would be dead. 
• The Department of Justice in USA filed a lawsuit against Walmart for an alleged lack of oversight in fulfilling prescriptions for opioids, which it says helped fuel the opioid crisis. In a strongly worded rebuttal, the retailer said the suit was riddled with factual mistakes and “cherry-picked documents” that were trying to shift blame away from the Drug Enforcement Administration. 
• Argentina became the first big Latin American country to legalise abortion, after a crucial vote in the Senate drew more support than had been expected. Women will now be able to get an abortion for any reason up to 14 weeks into a pregnancy.
• A court in Shanghai sentenced Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer, to four years in prison for “picking quarrels and causing trouble”. She had reported on the outbreak of Covid-19 in China in ways that embarrassed the Communist Party. Meanwhile, a study from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, an independent agency, suggested that people infected by Covid-19 in Wuhan may have been ten times higher than reported. 
• China’s financial regulators piled the pressure on Jack Ma, ordering his Ant Group to “rectify” its sprawling financial-services empire and go back to being a simple payments provider. This came after the government announced an antitrust probe into Alibaba, also founded by Mr Ma and affiliated with Ant. 
• Israel’s parliament failed to pass a budget and was dissolved, triggering an election on March 23rd, the fourth in two years. Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, faces a challenge from several former allies. Meanwhile, Israel became the first country to enter a third nationwide lockdown because of Covid-19. But it has already vaccinated 6% of its population, well ahead of most countries. 
• Turkey’s central bank lifted its main interest rate by two percentage points, to 17%. The bank has a new governor, who must grapple with inflation, a weak lira, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, a vocal opponent of conventional monetary policy.
• Loujain al-Hathloul, a Saudi activist, was sentenced to more than five years in prison, supposedly for trying to harm national security. Ms Hathloul had campaigned for women to be allowed to drive cars. She was detained in 2018, shortly before the ban on female drivers was, in fact, lifted. 

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