The European Parliament urged the EU’s executive branch, the European Commission, Thursday to support waiver for patents surrounding COVID-19 vaccines. The proposal, submitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO), demands that COVID-19 vaccine patents be exempt from provisions in the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) requirement protecting patent rights, essentially removing IP [...]
US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed an amended version of the Atlantic Charter on Thursday during the G7 summit in Cornwall, England. The original Atlantic Charter was a post-war declaration signed by former US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and former UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1941 following the Declaration [...]
The Ho Circuit Court in Ghana on Tuesday denied bail to 21 LGBTQ rights activists who have been detained since May 20. The 21 individuals, comprising 16 women and five men, will reappear in court on June 16 for their next hearing. The activists were arrested in a hotel on May 20 after a raid [...]
L’Autorité française de la concurrence a infligé à Google une sanction pécuniaire de 220 millions d’euros (268 millions de dollars) ce lundi pour avoir abusé de sa position dominante sur le marché des serveurs publicitaires pour éditeurs de sites en ligne et applications mobiles, en violation des articles L. 420-2 du code de commerce et [...]
The Appeals Chamber of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) on Tuesday confirmed Ratko Mladić’s convictions and life imprisonment sentence by a Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Mladić, commander of the Main Staff of the Bosnian Serb Army from May 12, 1992, until at least November 8, [...]
El Salvador’s legislature on Wednesday approved President Nayib Bukele’s proposal to adopt Bitcoin as a national legal currency. The approved Bitcoin law protects cryptocurrency with unrestricted liberating power, and allows its unlimited use in any transaction. Bukele’s cryptocurrency plan aims to boost El Salvador’s economy by integrating the national and international economy through incentives and [...]
France’s antitrust watchdog fined Google €220 million (USD $268 million) Monday for giving preferential treatment to its own proprietary technologies in digital advertisements. Complaints about Google advertising practices, filed in September 2019 by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., French newspaper group Le Figaro and Belgium-based Rossel La Voix, prompted the French investigation. Google, the California-based search engine [...]
UN human rights experts on Monday demanded the release of Belarusian dissident Roman Protasevich and an end to the imprisonment and mistreatment of all independent journalists and activists in Belarus, declaring that “media freedom … has entered a black hole with no end in sight.” Last month, a Ryanair passenger jet carrying Protasevich and his [...]
The EU adopted a plan Friday banning Belarus airlines from flying over EU territory or landing in EU airports. Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko’s security forces allegedly reported a false bomb threat on a Ryanair flight from Athens, Greece, to Vilnius, Lithuania. The flight was forced to redirect outside of EU airspace to Minsk, where Belarusian security [...]
El Salvador revoked its anti-corruption agreement with the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States (OAS) Friday, ending its membership after nearly three quarters of a century. El Salvador officials accused the OAS of showing political bias, and of lacking consistency and principles. The OAS aims to fight corruption through democracy, human rights, security, [...]
