People have been leaving cities for the countryside across the U.S. and Europe, and Scotland’s fragile island communities are more at risk than most from the economic shift.
Europe
A number of European governments are launching programs to test entire populations of countries or regions for Covid-19, in an effort to tamp down contagion ahead of Christmas and ease economically damaging restrictions and lockdowns.
France’s hospital system has been pushed to the brink by the latest surge of the coronavirus, fielding more patients than at any other time in the pandemic.
While the U.S. and Europe struggle to contain an autumn surge in coronavirus infections, Finland and Norway are bucking the trend, keeping cases under control without stringent restrictions.
European leaders, who have reacted enthusiastically to President-elect Joe Biden’s win, now face the challenge of following up their congratulations with action.
With offices mostly shut and face-to-face meetings rare, some are escaping Europe’s chilly north for the Mediterranean coast.
Italy is on course to have more Covid-19 patients in intensive care by the last week of November than during the spring peak.
While schools in some U.S. states are going back to remote learning, European countries are mostly persevering with open schools, believing—for now—that the cost to children of closing classrooms outweighs the health risks.
The continent was again the center of the pandemic in late summer amid a surge in cases, but in some countries infections have started to fall back. Still, leaders are wary of letting their guard down too soon.
following a string of terrorist attacks in three countries.
U.K. Treasury chief Rishi Sunak outlined a review of finance rules, including possible ways to make it easier for companies to raise money in London, aimed at keeping the country’s financial sector competitive with New York’s after Brexit.
Italy’s business capital has become the center of a second wave of the coronavirus, putting at risk the country’s economic recovery and reviving the specter of a health-care crisis Italians thought they had overcome this spring.
Government efforts to spread the pain of new pandemic restrictions in France have angered big retail chains and given little comfort to small businesses, which are fighting to get all curbs lifted.
The northern Italian city is largely being spared the second wave that is spreading across the country and Europe, possibly thanks to a degree of immunity from the spring outbreak.
Advances on the battlefield by Azerbaijan in its conflict with Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh shattered hopes this week for an end to the fighting and the forging of a diplomatic settlement.
Hashim Thaci, who has led Kosovo as prime minister or president for years, said he would go to The Hague to fight a range of war-crimes charges that include murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution and torture.
Austria and France are planning a joint push for tougher European Union-wide measures to stamp out Islamist extremism on the continent after terrorist attacks in both countries in recent weeks, officials in Vienna and Paris said.
Denmark’s entire population of farmed mink has been ordered culled after researchers discovered the animals harbor new mutations of the virus that threaten the effectiveness of a future vaccine, and which are now spreading to humans.
Schools across France launched a campaign that uses the killing of teacher Samuel Paty in a terrorist attack to reinforce core values of the French republic, from freedom of expression to the separation of religion and state.
Austrian authorities said they are investigating whether the lone gunman who killed four people and wounded many more in Vienna got help from like-minded Islamist radicals.
