ELMAU, Germany, June 27: Leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) kicked off their three-day annual summit on Sunday in Schloss Elmau in south Germany's Bavarian Alps amid lower expectations and protests.
The summit will focus on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, climate and others, while the host dampened expectations.
The ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, especially further sanctions against Russia, will dominate the discussions at the summit of the world's major industrialized countries, as U.S. President Joe Biden said on Sunday morning that the G7 would impose a ban on imports of Russian gold.
In the first working session on Sunday, the leaders discussed global economic issues. All G7 countries are concerned about the crises that are currently being dealt with: falling growth rates in some countries, rising inflation, shortages of raw materials and disruption to supply chains, according to the host German Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
After the following working session in the afternoon, the G7 leaders launched a billion-dollar global infrastructure and investment initiative, dubbed the "Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment."
A German federal government source said on Saturday night that price caps of Russian oil will be discussed, a measure that envisages forcing Russia to sell oil to large buyers such as India at a significantly lower price in the future. The G7 countries are intensively discussing the issue and are "on the way to finding an agreement."
The source said that there will be a statement about the issue of the Russia-Ukraine conflict by the G7 leaders. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will deliver a speech via video during the summit.
Leaders will also address the food crisis caused by the Russia-Ukraine conflict. They will try to seek ways to unblock Ukraine's grain exports across the Black Sea and make financial pledges to help countries hardest hit by the crisis.
According to the policy priorities made by the host country Germany, G7 leaders will also address issues including climate change, by establishing a "climate club" put forward by Scholz.
Besides leaders of Germany, the United States, Japan, Canada, Britain, Italy, France and the European Union, leaders from India, Indonesia, South Africa, Senegal and Argentina have been invited to take part in the summit.
The West bloc is expected to take advantage of the G7 summit to try to persuade major developing countries to join their sanctions against Russia, experts said.
However, the host nation Germany tried to dampen the expectations of this summit. In his weekly podcast released on Saturday, Scholz said that although Elmau, the summit site, "lies in the mountains, we will certainly not move mountains there."
On Saturday, some 4,000 people marched in Munich against the G7 summit, with some protest groups accusing major western countries of triggering the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and of making the whole world bear the consequences of the conflict, including the food crisis.
Demonstrations continued and protestors got closer to the summit site on Sunday afternoon. More than 1,000 protestors attended the demonstrations, according to the organizers.
Climate crisis and the fear of an escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict are the main concerns of protestors. "We will not allow them to destroy our planet and our future," said a protestor at the rally.
BRUSSELS, June 5: The EU on Friday adopted a sixth sanctions package against Russia, poised to phase out almost 90 percent of Russian oil imports into the bloc by the end of the year.
By targeting Russia's oil exports, the EU is trying to wean itself off the oil supplies from its single largest energy supplier, a move that will elevate the already-surging inflation and put its fragile economic growth at greater peril.
OIL EMBARGO
After a special summit held here, EU leaders agreed on Monday night to ban "more than two thirds" of Russian oil imports to the bloc, President of the European Council Charles Michel tweeted, referring to the move as a maximum pressure on Russia to end the ongoing conflict.
According to the measures, imports of crude oil from Russia to the EU by sea will be banned in six months while refined petroleum products will be phased out in eight months.
Deliveries of Russian crude via the Druzhba pipeline, one of the world's longest oil pipeline which runs through Poland, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, will be exempt from the embargo for an indefinite time, local news outlets reported.
"Tonight #EUCO agreed a sixth package of sanctions. It will allow a ban on oil imports from #Russia. The sanctions will immediately impact 75% of Russian oil imports. And by the end of the year, 90% of the Russian oil imported in Europe will be banned," Michel tweeted.
WEIGH HEAVILY
It is not an easy move for the EU to cut off the import of Russian oil.
The 27-country EU relies on Russia for 30 percent of its oil consumption. In 2021, the EU imported 51 billion U.S. dollars of crude oil and 24.6 billion dollars of refined products from Russia.
In spite of the intensified efforts of the EU countries to secure oil supplies from other countries, industry analysts say it will be nearly impossible for the EU to fill the gap if Russian oil is totally banned.
Hungary, which imports 65 percent of its oil from Russia through pipelines, has asked for an exception from the ban along with Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that the EU sanctions against Russia will wreak havoc on the country's economy.
Commenting on the proposal to ban Russian oil imports, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said on May 4 that "finally, we now propose a ban on Russian oil. Let's be clear: it will not be easy."
The latest sanctions have been seriously questioned by some analysts especially at a time when high inflation is threatening the economic recovery in the EU.
The inflation in the euro area hit another historical high of 8.1 percent in May, the statistical office of the EU announced recently.
High inflation has become a challenge for EU members, with inflation rates climbing to 7.9 percent in Germany, 5.8 percent in France, 7.3 percent in Italy, 8.5 percent in Spain in May. In a few other countries including Slovakia and Greece, the inflation went up over 10 percent in April.
The European Commission forecast that the inflation in the EU could stand at 6.8 percent in 2022.
Stubbornly high inflation levels pile pressure on the European Central Bank (ECB) to tighten its monetary policies in order to tame price hikes. The market has been betting on an interest rate rise from the ECB in July.
The ECB warned earlier that the surging prices stemming mainly from soaring energy prices and disrupted supply chains can hardly be brought down by raising interest rates.
TAIPEI, TAIWAN, June 3: In the span of just five days last month, China gave out 100 million shots of its COVID-19 vaccines.
After a slow start, China is now doing what virtually no other country in the world can: harnessing the power and all-encompassing reach of its one-party system and a maturing domestic vaccine industry to administer shots at a staggering pace. The rollout is far from perfect, including uneven distribution, but Chinese public health leaders now say they’re hoping to inoculate 80% of the population of 1.4 billion by the end of the year.
As of Tuesday, China had given out more than 680 million doses — with nearly half of those in May alone. China's total is roughly a third of the 1.9 billion shots distributed globally, according to Our World in Data, an online research site.
The call to get vaccinated comes from every corner of society. Companies offer shots to their employees, schools urge their students and staffers, and local government workers check on their residents.
That pressure underscores both the system’s strength, which makes it possible to even consider vaccinating more than a billion people this year, but also the risks to civil liberties — a concern the world over but one that is particularly acute in China, where there are few protections.
“The Communist Party has people all the way down to every village, every neighborhood,” said Ray Yip, former country director for the Gates Foundation in China and a public health expert. “That’s the draconian part of the system, but it also gives very powerful mobilization.”
China is now averaging about 19 million shots per day, according to Our World in Data's rolling seven-day average. That would mean a dose for everyone in Italy about every three days. The United States, with about one-quarter of China's population, reached around 3.4 million shots per day in April when its drive was at full tilt.
It's still unclear how many people in China are fully vaccinated — which can mean anywhere from one to three doses of the vaccines in use — as the government does not publicly release that data.
Zhong Nanshan, the head of a group of experts attached to the National Health Commission and a prominent government doctor, said on Sunday that 40% of the population has received at least one dose, and the aim was to get that percentage fully vaccinated by the end of the month.
In Beijing, the capital, 87% of the population has received at least one dose. Getting a shot is as easy as walking into one of hundreds of vaccination points found all across the city. Vaccination buses are parked in high foot-traffic areas, including in the city center and at malls.
But Beijing’s abundance is not shared with the rest of the country, and local media reports and complaints on social media show the difficulty of getting an appointment elsewhere.
“I started lining up that day at 9 in the morning, until 6 p.m., only then did I get the shot. It was exhausting,” Zhou Hongxia, a resident of Lanzhou, in northwestern Gansu province, explained recently. “When I left, there were still people waiting.”
Zhou's husband hasn't been so lucky and has yet to get a shot. When they call the local hotlines, they are told simply to wait.Central government officials on Monday said they're working to ensure supply is more evenly distributed.
Before the campaign ramped up in recent weeks, many people were not in a rush to get vaccinated as China has kept the virus, which first flared in the country, at bay in the past year with strict border controls and mandatory quarantines. It has faced small clusters of infections from time to time, and is currently managing one in the southern city of Guangzhou.
Although there are distribution issues, it is unlikely that Chinese manufacturers will have problems with scale, according to analysts and those who have worked in the industry. Sinovac and Sinopharm, which make the majority of the vaccines being distributed in China, have both aggressively ramped up production, building brand new factories and repurposing existing ones for COVID-19. Sinovac’s vaccine and one of the two Sinpharm makes have received an emergency authorization for use from the World Health Organization, but the companies, particularly Sinopharm, have faced criticism for their lack of transparency in sharing their data.
"What place in the world can compare with China on construction? How long did it take our temporary hospitals to be built?” asked Li Mengyuan, who leads pharmaceutical research at Western Securities, a financial firm. China built field hospitals at the beginning of the pandemic in just days.
Sinovac has said it has doubled its production capacity to 2 billion doses a year, while Sinopharm has said it can make up to 3 billion doses a year. But Sinopharm has not disclosed recent numbers of how many doses it actually has made, and a spokesman for the company did not respond to a request for comment. Sinovac has produced 540 million doses this year as of late May, the company said on Friday.
Government support has been crucial for vaccine developers every step of the way — as it has in other countries — but, as with everything, the scope and scale in China is different.
Yang Xiaoming, chairman of Sinopharm’s China National Biotec Group, recounted to state media recently how the company initially needed to borrow lab space from a government research center while it was working on a vaccine.
"We sent our samples over, there was no need to discuss money, we just did it,” he said.
Chinese vaccine companies also largely do not rely on imported products in the manufacturing process. That's an enormous benefit at a time when many countries are scrambling for the same materials and means China can likely avoid what happened to the Serum Institute of India, whose production was hobbled because of dependence on imports from the U.S. for certain ingredients.
But as the availability of the vaccine increases so, too, can the pressure to take it.In Beijing, one researcher at a university said the school’s Communist Party cell calls him once a month to ask him if he has gotten vaccinated yet, and offers to help him make an appointment.
He has so far declined to get a shot because he would prefer the Pfizer vaccine, saying he trusts its data. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of concerns he could face repercussions at his job at a government university for publicly questioning the Chinese vaccines.
China has not yet approved Pfizer for use, and the researcher is not sure how long he can hold out — although the government has, for now, cautioned against making vaccines mandatory outright.
“They don’t have to say it is mandatory,” Yip, the public health expert, said. “They’re not going to announce that it’s required to have the vaccine, but they can put pressure on you.”
