Britain on Monday reported 1,649 new COVID-19 infections and one new death within 28 days of a positive test.

Monday is a public holiday, which has in the past affected the numbers reported. The death toll from the disease in Britain now stands at 127,539. Meanwhile, some 50 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccines have been given to people across Britain, the government said.

The new development came as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said there is a “good chance” the one-meter plus rule for social distancing can be ditched next month.

But he also said that the move would be dependent on the data, and “we can’t say it categorically yet”.

With the vaccine rollout moving fast, Johnson once again called upon British people to come forward and get their jabs when asked to do so.

The British government is easing its COVID-19 restrictions step by step. Its roadmap shows that all legal limits on social contact could be remove on June 21.

The ban on foreign holidays is expected to be lifted for people in England from May 17 as part of the next easing of coronavirus restrictions.

Experts have warned that despite progress in vaccine rollout, Britain is “still not out of the woods” amid concerns over new variants, particularly those first emerged in South Africa, Brazil and India, and the third wave of pandemic on the European continent.

To bring life back to normal, countries such as Britain, China, Russia, the United States as well as the European Union have been racing against time to roll out coronavirus vaccines.

NICOSIA: Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after trying to change the country’s history through his involvement in numerous conflicts in the Middle East and Nagorno Karabakh, appears to be determined to change the geography also by trying to create a second Bosporus strait. His plan is to dig an artificial 45-kilometer canal, parallel to the Bosporus, linking the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara. But this grandiose project, which Erdogan himself in the past described as “crazy”, may prove to be a white elephant expected to cause huge ecological catastrophe, anger the inhabitants of Istanbul and create problems with Russia.

Erdogan always had a strong penchant for megaprojects, like the world’s largest airport in Istanbul, a railway tunnel under the Bosporus, a third bridge across Bosporus, a giant mosque, a billion-dollar port complex, and a 1000-room presidential palace in Ankara. In this way, he created thousands of new jobs, dished lucrative jobs to his cronies and increased his power base.

However, some of these projects did not perform as good as the Turkish President expected. For example, the Italian-Turkish consortium operating the third Bosporus Bridge and the Marmara motorway walked away from the project and is expected to be replaced by a Chinese consortium. Also, the Istanbul airport, mainly due to the devastating effect of the pandemic, is losing money and the Turkish government is trying to get China’s ICB Bank to refinance about USD 6.2 billion of its loans.

The cost of the Istanbul Canal is expected to amount between USD 13 billion to USD 25 billion. Planning for the project started in 2011, but it was put to the back burner for years. According to the Turkish government, the canal will help moderate traffic through the Bosporus, reducing the number of ships and oil tankers that pass through Istanbul.

It is difficult to understand the reason why the mercurial Turkish President announced last month that tenders for the construction of the canal project would be awarded very soon. He argues that the project will attract much-needed investment and invigorate economic activity, while the government estimates that annual transit fees from the canal will be about USD 5 billion.

Those against the project say that in addition to uncontrolled building development, the Istanbul Canal project will put the country into deep and unnecessary debt, while Turkey is currently facing massive foreign debt, an inflation rate exceeding 17 per cent, and depleted foreign currency reserves.

Economist Mustafa Sonmez says that the project “lacks any economic rationality, while the Bosporus already guarantees good conditions for shipping and allows sufficient passage.”

Turkey’s environmentalists hate the project because it will destroy large forested areas bordering the Black Sea, damage Istanbul’s freshwater resources and the ecosystem, while it would lead to the creation of a second city with an estimated population of two million along its banks. Furthermore, it will cut land to the west of Istanbul which could be used as an evacuation zone in case a major earthquake hits the country’s biggest city, which sits on an active fault.

China is boosting its leverage over financially vulnerable countries and ensnaring some in sovereignty-eroding debt traps by extending loans with strings attached.

The latest to fall prey to China’s debt-trap diplomacy is Laos, which recently signed a 25-year concession agreement allowing a majority Chinese-owned company to control its national power grid, including electricity exports to neighbouring countries, writes author Brahma Chellaney for The Hill. This shows that Beijing continues to weaponise debt as part of its strategy to expand its economic, political and military presence abroad, even as countries reel from the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The lopsided nature of Chinese-dictated contracts curtail the options of borrowing nations and give China’s state-owned banks a huge discretion over any borrower, including the power to scrap loans or even demand full repayment ahead of schedule.

“Such terms give lenders an opening to project policy influence over the sovereign borrower, and effectively limit the borrower’s policy space to cancel a Chinese loan or to issue new environmental regulations. Some of the debt contracts in our sample could pose a challenge for multilateral cooperation in debt or financial crises, since so many of their terms run directly counter to recent multilateral commitments, long-established practices, and institutional policies,” the study noted.

As China leverages its state-sponsored loans to aggressively advance its trade and geopolitical interests, many Chinese loans have not been publicly disclosed, raising a ‘hidden debt’ problem, Chellaney wrote.

Every contract since 2014 has incorporated a sweeping confidentiality clause that compels the borrowing country to keep confidential its terms or even the loan’s existence, the study found, which breaches the principle that public debt should be public and not hidden from taxpayers so that governments can be held accountable.

According to the study, the Chinese contracts obligate the borrower to exclude the Chinese debt from any multilateral restructuring process, such as the Paris Club of official bilateral creditors, and from any “comparable debt treatment”.

This confirms that China’s infrastructure financing comes mainly in the form of market-rate loans and little of its loans are for aid or low-interest lending. The more dire the borrower’s financial situation, the higher the interest rate China is likely to charge for lending money, Chellaney wrote for The Hill.

Laos’ decision to hand over majority control of its national electric grid to China also holds implications for national water resources as hydropower makes up more than four-fifths of the country’s total electricity generation.

In 2011, China secured 1,158 square km of strategic Pamir Mountains territory from Tajikistan in exchange for debt forgiveness. Tajikistan’s unending debt crisis has also forced it to grant Chinese companies rights to mine gold, silver and other mineral ores.

Sri Lanka also transferred the Hambantota Port, along with more than 6,000 hectares of land around it, to Beijing on a 99-year lease.

Challeney further wrote that China’s debt-trap diplomacy has not even spared its ally Pakistan, which has given Beijing exclusive rights, coupled with a tax holiday, to run Gwadar Port for the next four decades.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which is known as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature initiative, has been plagued by allegations of corruption and malpractice, and many of its completed projects have proved not to be financially viable, the author wrote for The Hill.

With BRI central to its debt-trap diplomacy, China continues to enlarge its footprint in that state to become its economic master of vulnerable and poorly-financed countries.

At least five people were killed after a series of explosions went off in the Central Bago region of Myanmar on Monday, as protests against the hostile military continue.

Three explosions occurred on Monday, killing three police officers who had joined a civil disobedience movement in opposition to February’s military coup, Kyodo News reported citing local media. A villager who had taken in the officers was also killed, and another police officer was seriously injured.

A local council member of the ousted National League for Democracy (NLD) party, led by ex-State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, was among the deceased, according to local media.

Meanwhile, parliamentarians and police officers have been staying in villages in the Bago region to escape the violent crackdowns on protests by the armed forces.

The military rule entered three months on Saturday since the coup on February 1. Since then, a total of 766 people have been killed as the junta intensified its crackdown on anti-coup protests, while 3,614 people have been detained, according to Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a non-profit.

Furthermore, 50 journalists are currently detained, 25 of whom have been prosecuted. This is in addition to two journalists on bail awaiting trial, and 29 journalists evading arrest warrants, AAPP said.

Last month, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders had urged the head of Myanmar’s military chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, to end the violent crackdown in the country.

The Pakistan government’s claim that the country’s press is free is a “bald-faced” lie as journalists continue to face threats from state elements and news editors are coerced into censoring “undesirable” information or giving stories a certain slant, country’s leading newspaper Dawn has said.

In an editorial on the World Press Freedom Day, Dawn said that journalists’ safety appears to be very low on the government’s list of priorities. “Today is World Press Freedom Day: for Pakistan’s beleaguered journalist community, it is a reminder of how the space for them is steadily shrinking. But this grim reality should also be of concern to those who understand the critical importance of a free press in a democracy,” the newspaper noted.

Pakistan has emerged as the riskiest place to practice journalism, according to the Freedom Network’s annual state of the Press Freedom 2021 report.

It has been ranked 145th out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’s (RSF) 2020 World Press Freedom Index, three places lower than in 2019.

Dawn noted that Pakistan documented at least 148 attacks or violations against journalists across the country from May 3, 2020 till April 20, 2021.

These include six murders, seven attempted assassinations, five kidnappings, 25 arrests or detentions, 15 assaults and 27 legal cases registered against journalists.

“And state authorities, responsible for protecting constitutional rights, emerged as the biggest threat to media practitioners — perceived as the perpetrators in a whopping 46 pc of the documented cases,” it said.

“Meanwhile, threats from known and ‘unknown’ state elements continue to be hurled at journalists; news editors are coerced into censoring ‘undesirable’ information or giving stories a certain slant; media outlets are threatened with financial ruin if they refuse to toe the line. In the midst of this, for government functionaries to insist that the press in Pakistan is free, as they are wont to do sometimes, is no less than a bald-faced lie.” it added.

Amid the ongoing US drawdown from Afghanistan, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has hinted that all possible outcomes can unfold following the exit of American troops from the war-torn country, including “really dramatic, bad possible” results.

“On the one hand you get some really dramatic, bad possible outcomes, and on the other hand, you get a military that stays together and a government that stays together,” Milley told a select group of reports including CNN on Sunday. “Which one of these options becomes reality at the end of the day, we frankly don’t know yet and we have to wait and see how things develop over the summer. There’s a lot of variables to this, and it’s not 100 per cent predictable,” he added.

This statement comes as Washington formally started their drawdown from the war-torn country on May 1.

Milley further said the withdrawal of the troops has been going on for a long and this is the final stage. “It’s been a long glidepath as we deliberately handed off functions and responsibilities to the Afghan security forces at the time,” Milley said. “This has been going on for a while. This is just the final phase.”

This statement about the bad “possible outcomes” comes a month after a report in the US media had stated that top US military commanders were recommending against a full withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, advising to try to cement a peace agreement first, but US President Joe Biden did not share their concern.

US media reports had said high-ranking US military officers had recommended retaining the current force of 2,500 troops while stepping up diplomacy to try to cement a peace agreement.

According to the reports published last month, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, himself a retired military commander for the region, had shared the concerns of the senior officers, cautioning that withdrawing all US troops would suspend what amounted to an insurance policy for maintaining a modicum of stability in the country.

Biden administration is now set to pull US forces out by September 11, the 20th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks.