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Austria is placing millions of people not fully vaccinated against COVID-19 in lockdown as of today as Europe becomes the epicentre of the pandemic once again.

Anyone over the age of 12 who has not been double-jabbed is now only allowed to leave their homes for work, school, exercise and buying essential supplies – with the lockdown affecting about two million of Austria‘s 8.9 million population.

The revived restrictions came into force at midnight on Sunday and will last for 10 days before being reviewed.

A lockdown has been imposed in Austria for people are not fully vaccinated
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A lockdown has been imposed in Austria for people who are not fully vaccinated

Europe is now accounting for more than half of the average seven-day cases worldwide and around half of latest deaths – the highest levels since April last year when COVID-19 was at its initial peak in Italy.

Governments across Europe are concerned that enforcing fresh measures will derail a fragile economic recovery as other countries including the Netherlands, Germany and the Czech Republic taking or planning measures to curb the spread.

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COVID-19: Booster jabs explained

Austria has one of the lowest vaccination rates in western Europe, with only around 65% of the total population fully vaccinated.

The country has faced a worrying trend in infections in recent weeks – reporting 11,552 new cases on Sunday, while a week ago there were 8,554 new infections.

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The seven-day infection rate is currently 775.5 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants, while neighbouring Germany, which has already sounded the alarm over rising numbers, has a rate of 289 in comparison.

In the Netherlands, 15 people were arrested after protests broke out over a three-week partial coronavirus lockdown that was imposed on Saturday night due to a spike in infections.

A woman wearing a mask looks at street art as she walks at the International Street Art Museum following the new social restrictions announced by the Dutch government, as the Netherlands battle to control the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Amsterdam, Netherlands 14 October 2020
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The Dutch government has also announced new social restrictions for the Netherlands

Caretaker Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte had earlier said his government wants to “deliver a hard blow to the virus” as bars, restaurants and supermarkets will be ordered to close at 8pm and professional sports matches will be played in empty stadiums.

In eastern Europe, Romania and Bulgaria have reported record numbers of daily coronavirus infections. Case rates have increased by more than tenfold in two months to the end of October, when some restrictions were reimposed.

Daily case rates in the UK have also risen to around 70 cases for every 100,000 people and have remained there for much of the summer.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson described the fresh concerns as “storm clouds” of a new coronavirus wave are gathering over Europe on Friday and urged Britons to get their booster jabs.

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COVID-19: ‘I’m seeing the storm’

According to The Times, the UK government is poised to extend the COVID-19 booster programme to people under the age of 50 to drive down transmission rates as winter approaches.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) is expected to give its approval on Monday on the move to extend the rollout, with the newspaper adding that the precise details of the age groups have not been confirmed.

More than two million people in England received their COVID-19 booster in the past week, with health officials describing the numbers as record-breaking.

And at least one million 12 to 15-year-olds have now had a COVID vaccine in England, with jabs for this group beginning on 20 September.

Professor Neil Ferguson, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), said with high levels of COVID immunity and a strong booster vaccination programme, the UK is “unlikely” to experience a “catastrophic winter wave” of infections that would require a Christmas lockdown similar to last year.

Acknowledging however that the UK is seeing a “hint of an uptick in the last few days” following weeks of declining case numbers and hospital admissions, he told the BBC’s Today programme: “We’ve had very high case numbers – between 30,000 and 50,000 a day – really for the last four months, since the beginning of July.

“That has obviously had some downsides.

“It has also paradoxically had an upside of boosting the immunity of the population compared with countries like Germany, the Netherlands and France, which have had much lower case numbers and are only now seeing an uptick.”

Shoppers wearing face masks on Oxford Street, in central London, as the Department of Health and Social Care is calling upon eligible people to get their covid-19 booster vaccinations. Picture date: Friday October 22, 2021.
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The UK government is urging the public to get their booster shots

Wales is dealing with a high level of virus across the country by requiring COVID passes on entry of cinemas, theatres and concert halls in a bid to bring cases under control.

Dawn Bowden, deputy minister for arts and sport, said the measures “will help keep these businesses open during the difficult autumn and winter months ahead”.

The Welsh government said the guidance on self-isolation had also been changed and people are being encouraged to work from home to help tackle the rising cases.

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COVID-19 and kids: Should we be worried?

Meanwhile, Israel has announced that a campaign to vaccinate some 1.2 million children aged five to 11 will begin within days.

The decision to green light jabs for children in this age group was announced by the health ministry on Sunday, following an agreement by a panel of experts.

It comes after US health officials granted the vaccine safe for the same age group earlier this month.

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Central and eastern European governments have had to take drastic action with fresh measures as they struggle to ramp up vaccine uptake.

Latvia, one of the least vaccinated countries in the EU, introduced a four-week lockdown in mid-October. On Friday, its parliament voted to ban ministers who refuse vaccination from voting on laws and participating in discussions.

The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Russia have also tightened restrictions.

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IDF says it mistakenly identified Gaza aid workers as threat – after video of deadly attack emerges

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IDF says it mistakenly identified Gaza aid workers as threat - after video of deadly attack emerges

The IDF says it mistakenly identified a convoy of aid workers as a threat – following the emergence of a video which proved their ambulances were clearly marked when Israeli troops opened fire on them.

The bodies of 15 aid workers – including eight medics working for the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) – were found in a “mass grave” after the incident, according to the head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Jonathan Whittall.

The Israeli military originally claimed an investigation found the vehicles did not have any headlights or emergency signals and were therefore targeted as they looked “suspicious”.

But video footage obtained by the PRCS, and verified by Sky News, showed the ambulances and a fire vehicle clearly marked with flashing red lights.

In a briefing from the IDF, it said the ambulances arrived in the Tel Sultan neighbourhood in Rafah shortly after a Hamas police vehicle drove through.

Palestinians mourn medics, who came under Israeli fire while on a rescue mission, after their bodies were recovered, according to the Red Crescent, at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip March 31, 2025. REUTERS/Hatem Khaled/File Photo
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Palestinians mourning the medics after their bodies were recovered. Pic: Reuters

An IDF surveillance aircraft was watching the movement of the ambulances and notified troops on the ground. The IDF said it will not be releasing that footage.

When the ambulances arrived, the soldiers opened fire, thinking the medics were a threat, according to the IDF.

The soldiers were surprised by the convoy stopping on the road and several people getting out quickly and running, the IDF claimed, adding the soldiers were unaware the suspects were in fact unarmed medics.

An Israeli military official would not say how far away troops were when they fired on the vehicles.

The IDF acknowledged that its statement claiming that the ambulances had their lights off was incorrect, and was based on the testimony from the soldiers in the incident.

The newly emerged video footage showed that the ambulances were clearly identifiable and had their lights on, the IDF said.

The IDF added that there will be a re-investigation to look into this discrepancy.

Analysis: Video undermines Israel’s account of aid worker deaths

The clip is filmed through a vehicle windscreen - with three red light vehicles visible in front
Image:
The clip is filmed through a vehicle windscreen – with three red light vehicles visible in front

Addressing the fact the aid workers’ bodies were buried in a mass grave, the IDF said in its briefing this is an approved and regular practice to prevent wild dogs and other animals from eating the corpses.

The IDF could not explain why the ambulances were also buried.

The IDF said six of the 15 people killed were linked to Hamas, but revealed no detail to support the claim.

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Bodies of aid workers found in Gaza

The newly emerged footage of the incident was discovered on a phone belonging to one of the workers who was killed, PRCS president Dr Younis Al Khatib said.

“His phone was found with his body and he recorded the whole event,” he said. “His last words before being shot, ‘Forgive me, mom. I just wanted to help people. I wanted to save lives’.”

Sky News used an aftermath video and satellite imagery to verify the location and timing of the newly emerged footage of the incident.

More from Sky News:
Israeli troops expand Gaza ‘security zone’
What happened to the ceasefire?

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Aid worker attacks increasing

It was filmed on 23 March north of Rafah and shows a convoy of marked ambulances and a fire-fighting vehicle travelling south along a road towards the city centre. All the vehicles visible in the convoy have their flashing lights on.

The footage was filmed early in the morning, with a satellite image seen by Sky News taken at 9.48am local time on the same day showing a group of vehicles bunched together off the road.

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France needs to sort its political mess – or populist winds blowing from the US will strengthen

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France needs to sort its political mess - or populist winds blowing from the US will strengthen

Contemplating the turmoil sown by the return of President Trump, nobody could deny that the results of leadership elections in major nations matter to the rest of the world.

Take just the members of the G7 – so-called rich, industrialised democracies. Italy elected Giorgia Meloni in 2022, confirming the rise of the far-right. She was not only Italy’s first female leader, she was also the first from a neo-fascist party since Mussolini.

The arrival of Donald Trump and Sir Keir Starmer changed the complexion of politics in the US and the UK last year. Germany elected a more hawkish chancellor in waiting this spring.

Barring accidents, the next potentially transformative election in what used to be called the “Western alliance” will not be for two years.

France is due to elect a new president to succeed Emmanuel Macron in the summer of 2027. The contest is already plagued by undercurrents of disruption, conflict between politicians and the law, and populism – similar to the fires burning elsewhere in the US and Europe.

This week French judges banned the frontrunner to win the presidency from running for office for the next five years. It looked as though they have knocked Marine Le Pen out of the race.

Nobody, least of all her, the leader of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), knows what is going to happen next in French politics.

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In opinion polls just over half of the French population, between 54% and 57%, agreed that justice had run its course. “The law is the same for everyone,” President Macron declared.

After lengthy consideration by a tribunal of three judges, Le Pen and nine other former RN MEPs were found guilty of illegally siphoning off some €4.4m (£3.7m) of funds from the European Parliament for political operations in France, not for personal gain.

Le Pen was sentenced to a five-year ban and four years in prison, not to begin before the appeals process had been concluded. Even then that sentence in France would normally amount to two years’ house arrest wearing an ankle alarm.

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Marine Le Pen hits out at ban

French presidents, such as Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, have been convicted before. Controversy is flaring because Le Pen was given an extra punishment: the immediate ban on running for political office, starting this week.

Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, her second in command at RN, likened the ban to a “nuclear bomb” and a “political death penalty”. Speaking in L’Assemblee Nationale, of which she is still a member, Le Pen identified herself with Alexei Navalny, the dissident leader murdered in Russia, and Ekrem Imamoglu, the recently imprisoned Turkish opposition leader and mayor of Istanbul.

The ban was imposed at the discretion of the chief judge Benedicte de Perthuis, a former business consultant, Francois Bayrou, France’s Macronist prime minister admitted he was “troubled” by the verdict. Not surprisingly perhaps from him, since the prosecution is appealing against verdicts in a similar case of political embezzlement, in which Bayrou’s party was found guilty but he was acquitted, escaping any possibility of a ban.

Bayrou is expected to be a candidate for the presidency. Meanwhile, RN has the power to bring down his government since it is the largest party in the Assembly, with 37%, but was kept out of power by a coalition.

FILE - Leader of the French far-right National Rally Marine Le Pen, left, and lead candidate of the party for the upcoming European election Jordan Bardella during a political meeting on June 2, 2024 in Paris. Jordan Bardella, Le Pen's 28-year-old prot..g.. who she'd been hoping to install as prime minister, grumbled that "the alliance of dishonor" between the National Rally's rivals kept it from power. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla, File)
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Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. File pic: AP

Populist forces on both sides of the Atlantic rushed to support Marine Le Pen. Matteo Salvini in Italy, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Vladimir Putin‘s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov all denounced what they saw as a “violation of democratic norms”. Hungary’s Viktor Orban said on X “Je suis Marine Le Pen”. Orban’s post came on the same platform Donald Trump Jr posted that “JD Vance was right about everything”, a reference to the US vice president’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he claimed Europe was silencing populist opposition.

President Trump weighed in: “The Witch Hunt against Marine Le Pen is another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech… it is the same ‘playbook’ that was used against me.”

Le Pen has called for bans and tough sentences for corrupt politicians from other parties. In France, mainstream commentators are accusing her of hypocrisy and “Trumpisme” for attacking the courts now.

They also allege, or rather hope, that RN’s anger is endangering Marine Le Pen’s drive to make her party respectable with her so-called “wear a neck-tie strategy”, designed to dispel the loutish, racist image of her father’s Front National.

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Le Pen leaves court after guilty verdict

For all the protests, justice and politics are now inextricably mixed in France. A ban from political campaigning would be pointless for most convicts, who have no political ambitions.

Any suggestion that Le Pen was just being treated like any other citizen was dispelled when it was announced that her appeal would be speeded up to take place next summer. The president of the court de cassation conceded: “Justice knows how to adjust to circumstances… an election deadline in this case.”

The ban could be lifted in time to give Le Pen a year to stand for the presidency. At this stage, a full acquittal seems unlikely, given the weight of evidence against RN. That is awkward for her and her party because, presumably, she would be campaigning while under house arrest.

The best course of action for 29-year-old Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s apparent successor, or “Dauphin”, would be to stick with her now. He would gain little if he split RN by insisting she is fatally wounded.

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If she loses her appeal in a year’s time, his loyalty and indignation would be likely to boost his candidacy. Conventional wisdom is that without a lift he may be slick, but is too callow and too square to stand a chance of becoming president in 2027.

The far right in France is no different from the far right elsewhere – prone to internal rivalries and in-fighting.

The craggy intellectual Eric Zemmour came fourth in the first round in the last presidential contest in 2022. Back then he had the support of Marion Marechal-Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s flighty niece. The two have since fallen out and may separately bid to carry the far-right torch.

Macron is riding high as an international statesman but he is unpopular at home. Even if he wanted to, he cannot stand again because of term limits.

His attempts to spawn an heir apparent have failed. The 34-year-old prime minister Gabriel Attal led Ensemble to crushing defeat in last year’s parliamentary elections.

Current prime minister Bayrou, and former prime minister Edouard Philippe, will probably make a bid for the centre-right vote. Bruno Retailleau, the trenchantly hardline interior minister, looks a stronger candidate for the Gaullist Les Republicains.

Read more:
Le Pen’s political career is in tatters
European far-right welcomes Trump 2.0

In the last presidential contest, Jean-Luc Melenchon of the hard-left La France Insoumise came third. He may fancy his chances of getting into the final two in 2027 against a right-wing candidate, unless the Socialists get it together. Or perhaps he may let through two finalists from the right and the extreme right.

It is a mess.

France and Europe need effective leadership from a French president. The unnecessary judicial suspension of Marine Le Pen’s candidacy has simply generated uncertainty. Her supporters are outraged and her foes no longer know who they are fighting against.

The French establishment thinks it will all blow over. Just as likely the controversy in France will strengthen the populist winds blowing across the continent and the US.

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IDF admits mistakenly identifying Gaza aid workers as threat – after video of attack showed ambulances were marked

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IDF says it mistakenly identified Gaza aid workers as threat - after video of deadly attack emerges

The IDF has admitted to mistakenly identifying a convoy of aid workers as a threat – following the emergence of a video which proved their ambulances were clearly marked when Israeli troops opened fire on them.

The bodies of 15 aid workers – including eight medics working for the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) – were found in a “mass grave” after the incident, according to the head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Jonathan Whittall.

The Israeli military originally claimed an investigation found the vehicles did not have any headlights or emergency signals and were therefore targeted as they looked “suspicious”.

But video footage obtained by the PRCS, and verified by Sky News, showed the ambulances and a fire vehicle clearly marked with flashing red lights.

In a briefing from the IDF, they said the ambulances arrived in the Tel Sultan neighbourhood in Rafah shortly after a Hamas police vehicle drove through.

Palestinians mourn medics, who came under Israeli fire while on a rescue mission, after their bodies were recovered, according to the Red Crescent, at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip March 31, 2025. REUTERS/Hatem Khaled/File Photo
Image:
Palestinians mourning the medics after their bodies were recovered. Pic: Reuters

An IDF surveillance aircraft was watching the movement of the ambulances and notified troops on the ground. The IDF said it will not be releasing that footage.

When the ambulances arrived, the soldiers opened fire, thinking the medics were a threat, according to the IDF.

The soldiers were surprised by the convoy stopping on the road and several people getting out quickly and running, the IDF claimed, adding the soldiers were unaware the suspects were in fact unarmed medics.

An Israeli military official would not say how far away troops were when they fired on the vehicles.

The IDF acknowledged that its statement claiming that the ambulances had their lights off was incorrect, and was based on the testimony from the soldiers in the incident.

The newly emerged video footage showed that the ambulances were clearly identifiable and had their lights on, the IDF said.

The IDF added that there will be a re-investigation to look into this discrepancy.

The clip is filmed through a vehicle windscreen - with three red light vehicles visible in front
Image:
The clip is filmed through a vehicle windscreen – with three red light vehicles visible in front

Addressing the fact the aid workers’ bodies were buried in a mass grave, the IDF said in its briefing this is an approved and regular practice to prevent wild dogs and other animals from eating the corpses.

The IDF could not explain why the ambulances were also buried.

The IDF said six of the 15 people killed were linked to Hamas, but revealed no detail to support the claim.

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Bodies of aid workers found in Gaza

The newly emerged footage of the incident was discovered on a phone belonging to one of the workers who was killed, PRCS president Dr Younis Al Khatib said.

“His phone was found with his body and he recorded the whole event,” he said. “His last words before being shot, ‘Forgive me, mom. I just wanted to help people. I wanted to save lives’.”

Sky News used an aftermath video and satellite imagery to verify the location and timing of the newly emerged footage of the incident.

More from Sky News:
Israeli troops expand Gaza ‘security zone’
What happened to the ceasefire?

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Aid worker attacks increasing

It was filmed on 23 March north of Rafah and shows a convoy of marked ambulances and a fire-fighting vehicle travelling south along a road towards the city centre. All the vehicles visible in the convoy have their flashing lights on.

The footage was filmed early in the morning, with a satellite image seen by Sky News taken at 9.48am local time on the same day showing a group of vehicles bunched together off the road.

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