Heads of state

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced today that the state of emergency due to the coronavirus in Japan will be extended until May 31, France Press reported.

According to the government, it is still early to abolish measures introduced to limit the spread of the virus.

"Our health system has its limits," Salkic said during his interview with country's most popular evening news programme, warning: "We should not fool ourselves but use the two-week-long window of opportunity and prevent this explosion." That evening, Colic took a deep breath and told herself that she had "to take it one day at a time" - something her father told her repeatedly throughout the 19

In an interview with Politico's Brussels Playbook, former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has expressed his disappointment over the discord that emerged between euro zone countries in their attempts to come up with a joint response to the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Authorities in Bangladesh have executed a killer of the country's independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, nearly 45 years after the brutal assassination, a prison official said.

The coronavirus pandemic should not be an excuse for human rights abuses, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet warned today.

Around five years ago, Ebola was regarded as a potential threat to global health, yet even though the lethal virus claimed nearly 12,000 lives, it was restricted mainly to West Africa, where it started. One of the reasons why it did not spread beyond that part of the world was the coordinated efforts of European and American politicians and scientists.

Prince Harry and his wife Meghan formally step down as senior members of the British royal family on March 31, as they start a controversial new life in the United States.

The couple has already relocated to California, according to reports, after announcing in January that they intended to quit royal life and "work to become financially independent."

Romanian writer and anti-Communist dissident Paul Goma has died in Paris aged 84 after being diagnosed with coronavirus, his biographer Mariana Sipos told the Romanian news portal G4Media on Wednesday.

"After receiving a message from France, I announce with sorrow and great pain the departure from among us of the great writer and dissident Paul Goma," the statement read.

Under conditions of crisis, European solidarity should not remain only in words. The quick coping with the situation created by the coronavirus in Europe requires that the European institutions and member states should pool joint efforts. This was the common stance adopted by the Presidents of Bulgaria and Portugal, Rumen Radev and Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who held a telephone conversation.

Apart from the direct impact on public health, a crisis of this magnitude can trigger at least two direct kinds of economic shock.

The first is a shock to production, owing to disrupted global supply chains. Suspending the production of basic pharmaceutical chemicals in China disrupts the production of generic drugs in India, which in turn reduces drug shipments to the United States.