EU countries planning to simplify travel with COVID certificates

Jan 26 2022

Under new rules for travel, prospective voyagers will be able to travel all throughout the EU with proof of vaccination, recovery, or a negative test and not face quarantine of additional testing. News portal Politico confirmed that ministers backed the Council recommendations at a meeting of the General Affairs Council on Tuesday.

The aim of this is to take into account the advantage of the individual situation of people, especially those vaccinated, and limit for them as much as possible travel restrictions in Europe. This was stated ahead of the meeting by France’s European Affairs Secretary Clement Beaune. Travellers will be able to freely enter a country if they have had their first series of jabs a maximum of 270 days ago or if they received their booster.

This would also apply to people who recovered from COVID in the last 180 days, and passengers who have had a PCR test 72 hours before arriving or an antigen 24 hours before. One exception will be countries in the dark red category of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Currently, most of the EU falls in this category.

This new framework will enter force on the 1st of February along with a nine-month duration period of vaccination certificates following a primary course of jabs. The new measures also modify the ECDC’s existing map which currently serves as the basis for travel restrictions. Under these new metrics, the map will also take into account vaccination rates when weighing new cases.

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Flying cars approved, but you’ll need a pilot’s license

Jan 26 2022

A car that can transform into a small aircraft has just passed flights tests in Slovakia with flying colours (pun intended).

Dubbed the “Air Car”, it was awarded an official Certificate of Airworthiness by the Slovak Transport Authority after completing 70 hours of rigorous flight testing.

The test flights – which induced more than 200 takeoffs and landings – were found to be compatible with European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) standards. This was issued by Klein Vision, the company behind the air-car.

‘The challenging flight tests include the full range of flight and performance manoeuvres and demonstrated an astonishing static and dynamic stability in the aircraft mode’ it said.

However, if you’ve been dreaming of hopping into an AirCar, you might be sorely disappointed. A spokesperson for Klein Vision told CNN that a pilot license is required to fly the hybrid vehicle.

The company hopes to have the AirCar commercially available within 12 months. A team of eight specialists clocked up more than 100,000 hours converting design concepts into mathematical models that led to the prototype’s production.

Running on fuel sold at any gas station, the vehicle can fly at a maximum operating altitude of 18,000 feet, the car’s invention Stefan Klein said that AirCar certification opens the door for mass production of very efficient flying cars.’

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Opposition alleges PL newspaper received €30,000 in government ads

Jan 26 2022

The Opposition has accused the Labour government of pumping around €30,000 in adverts for one single issue of KullĦadd, a PL party newspaper, to commemorate the second year of the Robert Abela administration.

Nationalist MP Claudette Buttiġieġ said that government paid the Labour Party around €30,000 in adverts on the newspaper on Sunday 16th January. This refers to a 32-page supplement with adverts from a number of ministries.

Buttiġieġ said that each advert cost around €950 each, going on to criticise h government for spending taxpayer’s money on political propaganda. President of the Nationalist Party’s General Council Mark Anthony Sammut said statistics publishes by the National Statistics Office (NSO) depict a reality of an exponential rise in Malta’s cost-of-living.

Referring to Carmen Ciantar’s €163,000 contract and that of One TV presenter Karl Stagno Navarra, he said that ‘inflation is a reality and it is creating difficulties for those at risk of poverty. The prices of essential items like food are going up every day. But government goes on a reckless spending spree, dishing out money to people close to the Labour Party.’

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Two-thirds of UK Omicron positives say they had COVID before

Jan 26 2022

The findings of a large, continuing study have shown that two-thirds of people recently infected with the Omicron variant say they had COVID-19 previously. The study, React, which swab-tests thousands of volunteers in England, still requires some more work to know how many are true reinfections.

However, results are revealing the groups of people which are more likely to contract the virus again. These also include healthcare workers and households with kids or lots of members under one roof. More than two million people have been tested in the study, with the latest findings based on 100,000 PCR tests posted to volunteers and then returned.

About 4,000 were positive, one of the highest rates since the pandemic began. When a selection of them were sequenced to check which type of COVID was the culprit, almost all were Omicron. Two out of every three (65%) of the infected volunteers said they had already previously tested positive for COVID. There could be instances where the latest PCR might be picking up old virus traces. Other estimates suggest one in every 10 Omicron case is a possible reinfection.

UK’s health security agency chief executive Dr Jenny Harries said that although vaccines may not stop every infection, they were doing a great job at protecting lives.

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