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* China and India should firmly follow the right path of mutual trust and cooperation between neighboring major countries, and not go astray with suspicion and distrust nor fall back on a road of negative retrogression, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Thursday. Wang made the remarks in a telephone conversation with Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, stressing that the two sides should maintain the strategic consensuses reached by their leaders.

* As COVID-19 transmission rates seemingly decline across the European Region, the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Director for Europe Hans Kluge expressed health concerns over “long-COVID” or “post-COVID” symptoms at a virtual press conference on Thursday.

* Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the situation in Armenia in a telephone conversation with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Thursday, the Kremlin said.

* The Pentagon confirmed on Thursday that the US military had conducted airstrikes against infrastructure utilized by Iranian-backed militant groups in eastern Syria. The Pentagon called the operation a “proportionate military response” carried out after consultations with coalition partners.

* China approved two more vaccines for public use, raising the number of domestically produced vaccines that can be used in China to four.

* Japan on Friday is preparing to lift the state of emergency over COVID-19 for five prefectures where the situation has improved, although the Greater Tokyo metropolitan area will likely be kept under the emergency period for the time being, according to government sources.

* The Department of Health (DOH) of the Philippines reported on Friday 2,651 new COVID-19 cases, the highest daily increase since Oct. 17 last year, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the Southeast Asian country to 571,327.

* Leaders of the European Union (EU) called for an accelerated production and delivery of COVID-19 vaccines late on Thursday as the bloc is struggling with supply shortfalls.

* Brazil surpassed 250,000 COVID-19 deaths, while France and Germany said COVID-19 is here to stay after European Union leaders discussed ways to fight new variants of the virus, step up inoculations and save Europe’s tourism industry from another ruinous summer.

* Europe’s medicines regulator issued new guidance for drug makers that modify their vaccines to protect against variants of the virus to speed up the approval process.

* France will bring in new restrictions for the Moselle area around its common border with Germany, and impose measures including weekend lockdowns in Paris and 19 other regions from the start of March if signs of the coronavirus accelerating persist.

* Australia’s Victoria state will start easing restrictions from Friday night.

* Republic of Korea launched its inoculation campaign, with shots to be administered in some 200 nursing homes.

* US President Joe Biden’s administration plans to launch a campaign to educate Americans about vaccines in anticipation of a period later this year where supply may outstrip demand because of vaccine hesitancy.

* Brazil will purchase 20 million doses of the vaccine made by India’s Bharat Biotech for delivery between March and May.

* Canada’s vaccination campaign is ramping up after earlier supply disruptions and the number of inoculations last week hit a five-week high.

* Pfizer and BioNTech said they are testing a third dose of their vaccine to better understand the immune response against new variants of the virus.

* Mexico’s economy grew quicker than first estimated during the fourth quarter as the country recovered from its sharpest economic contraction in nearly nine decades.

* Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions have fallen to the lowest level since 1995 as coronavirus restrictions limited travel. Data released by the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources on Friday revealed that emissions fell by 4.4 percent in the 12 months to September 2020.

* Security personnel of the Indian Coast Guard (ICG) rescued more than 80 Rohingya refugees who had been onboard a boat drifting in the waters of Andaman Sea for 10 days, and retrieved eight dead bodies.

* Republic of Korea’s quarantine authorities said Friday that it will extend the country’s five-tier social-distancing rules at the third-highest level in the Seoul metropolitan area for two weeks.

* US President Joe Biden said on Thursday that he would work to make US-Saudi relations “as strong and transparent as possible.” Biden made the remarks in the first phone conversation with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud since Biden’s inauguration.

* Germany’s Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure said on Wednesday that more than EUR5 billion (US$6.1 billion) would be invested in the modernization of over 3,000 railway stations across the country.

* Colombian President Ivan Duque announced a decision Thursday night to extend a declared national health emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic by three more months, as the vaccination drive entered its eighth day.

* AstraZeneca boss Pascal Soriot said he hoped to meet the EU’s expectations on the number of vaccines the company can deliver to the bloc in the second quarter.

* The Czech prime minister said people’s movement needed to be “radically” limited over at least the next three weeks.

* Portugal extended until at least mid-March a nationwide lockdown.

* The African Union is backing calls for drugmakers to waive some intellectual property rights on COVID-19 medicines and vaccines.

* Israel has frozen its programme to send vaccines abroad to buy international goodwill, Defence Minister Benny Gantz said, after the initiative came under legal scrutiny.

* Bahrain has approved Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose vaccine for emergency use.

In a letter written to Google on Thursday, INS president L. Adimoolam said the newspaper publishers were facing a very “opaque” advertising system as they had no access to Google’s advertising value chain.

The INS chief urged Google to compensate the Indian newspapers for using their news content and adequately share the advertising revenue.

The INS, a conglomerate of all the major newspapers published from across India, represents the print media in the country.

In his letter, the INS chief also stated that Google should pay to newspaper publishers for the news which is generated through “quality journalism” with credible current affairs, analysis, information and entertainment.

This follows the recent developments in several countries, including Australia and France, where newspapers publishers have raised the issue of fair payment for content, pressing Google for revenue sharing.

A U.N. report summarizing the revised climate action plans – covering about 40 percent of countries in the 2015 Paris Agreement and 30 percent of planet-heating emissions – said they would deliver a combined emissions reduction of only 0.5 percent from 2010 levels by 2030.

“That simply is not good enough,” said Patricia Espinosa, urging governments – including those that have already updated their plans – to come up with larger promised cuts before COP26.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said global emissions must fall by about 45 percent by 2030 from 2010 levels to give the world a good chance of limiting the rise in average temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.

Under the Paris accord, nearly 200 countries pledged to keep warming to “well below” 2C, and strive for a ceiling of 1.5C.

So far, the planet has heated up by about 1.2C, bringing worsening extreme weather and rising seas.

Espinosa said the synthesis report made clear “current levels of climate ambition are very far from putting nations on a pathway” to meet the 1.5C goal.

“It is incredible to think that just when nations are facing a (climate) emergency that could eventually end human life on this planet … many are sticking to their business-as-usual approach,” she told journalists.

But if governments invest trillions of dollars in planned spending to revive their economies from Covid-19 on green, climate-resilient measures, “we stand a chance of changing the trajectory,” she added.

Espinosa emphasized that the report released on Friday was just a “snapshot” of climate action plans to date and another more complete assessment would be compiled before COP26.

Many countries missed a 2020 deadline to submit stronger climate action plans because of disruption caused by the pandemic, with the COP26 summit in Glasgow postponed for a year.

The 75 countries that did submit revised plans on time include COP26 host Britain and the 27 member states of the European Union, which are covered by one EU-wide plan.

Pressure growing

Chile’s Environment Minister Carolina Schmidt, who presided over the COP25 summit in Madrid in 2019, said the report “clearly indicated that significant work must be done, in particular by major emitters.”

Only two of the 18 largest emitters – Britain and the European Union – had so far presented an updated “nationally determined contribution” (NDC) containing a “strong increase” in their emissions reduction targets, she noted.

“Other major emitters either submitted NDCs presenting a very low increase in their ambition level or have not presented NDCs yet,” she added in a statement.

Niklas Höhne, who set up a tracker for national climate policies as a founding partner of the NewClimate Institute, said countries that had not boosted ambition in their new plans could be described as “violating the spirit of the Paris Agreement.”.\

The accord calls on governments to voluntarily deliver more ambitious climate plans every five years, starting in 2020.

But the updated NDCs of Australia, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland and Vietnam fail that test, according to Climate Action Tracker, which is separate from the U.N. research report.

“It is a very, very small change that has happened so far, in comparison to the huge gap there is,” Höhne said.

The United States is due to announce its much-anticipated new 2030 emissions reduction target before a world leaders’ climate summit hosted by President Joe Biden on April 22.

Experts say China and India could announce new goals there too, and Japan plans to increase its 2030 target before COP26.

Helen Mountford, vice president of climate and economics at the World Resources Institute, noted that more than half of G20 nations had now made commitments for net-zero emissions by mid-century but few had set 2030 interim targets in line with that.

Those that did set bold targets last year – including Colombia, Argentina, Britain and the European Union – were now being overshadowed by those falling behind, she said.

“These laggards must stop fiddling while the world burns. It is in the interest of their own people and their economies to address the climate crisis, which knows no boundaries,” she said.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called Friday’s report “a red alert for our planet” and urged major climate-polluting countries to offer “much more ambitious” 2030 emissions reduction targets well before COP26.

“Long-term commitments must be matched by immediate actions to launch the decade of transformation that people and planet so desperately need,” he said in a statement.