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Austria announced Thursday that while the alpine nation’s ski resorts will be open and skiers are welcome, the nation is banning all apres-ski events (social activities after a day of skiing) during the upcoming winter tourism season.Skiing and other winter sports are big business in Austria, making up as much as 15% of the economy. But in February and March, post-skiing partying in the clubs and bars of the popular west Austrian resort of Ischgl resulted in an outbreak that was considered one of Europe’s earliest “super-spreader” events of the pandemic.Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz told reporters in Vienna that while they want to encourage tourists, things cannot be as they were.  “Skiing, eating out, nature and enjoying the hospitality, outdoor activities, shopping — not just in ski resorts but also in cities, a wellness vacation in Austria, culture tourism. All that will be possible this coming winter. What won’t be possible is apres ski the way we know it from the past. The risk of infection is simply too high,” he said.The new rules will follow the same COVID-19-related restrictions for all bars, clubs and restaurants in Austria — table service only, with no standing at a bar. In closed ski lifts, face masks will be required, and passengers must stay 1 meter apart, the same as on public transport. Ski instructors and lift operators, as well as hotel and restaurant staff, will be tested regularly.Austria is working to bring a recent surge in COVID-19 cases under control, a situation that has prompted one of its top sources of foreign tourists, Germany, to issue a travel warning for one of its skiing regions, the province of Vorarlberg.
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British workers whose hours were cut because of the coronavirus pandemic could receive new government wage subsidies in the near future. Britain’s treasury chief has proposed measures aimed at preventing further layoffs when current subsidies expire next month. The new measures, proposed Thursday by Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, are in response to a call from businesses and labor unions for the government to provide additional support. Right now the government pays up to 80% of wages workers made before they were furloughed, but the proposal would pay 77% of pre-pandemic wages. The payment would be dependent on employers allotting workers at least one-third of their pre-pandemic hours. Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak leaves No. 11 Downing Street, heading for the House of Commons to unveil details of his Winter Economy Plan, in London, Sept. 24, 2020.The treasury chief hopes that will ensure fewer workers are laid off. “The government will directly support the wages of people in work, giving businesses who face depressed demand the option of keeping employees in a job on shorter hours rather than making them redundant,” Sunak said of the proposed measures. He said similar support will be offered to the self-employed. Businesses that took out loans would also have more time to pay them back. Those include $43.8 billion in loans to 1 million small businesses that could be eligible to “pay as you grow.” A sign is placed across a closed road in London, Sept. 24, 2020.”Businesses who are struggling can now choose to make interest-only payments and anyone in real trouble can apply to suspend repayments all together for up to six months,” Sunak said. The treasury chief also said he will extend until March 31 the temporary reduction in the valued-added tax rate for the hospitality and tourism industries, which have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic. The cut to 5% from 20% had been scheduled to end in January. 
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Sir Harold Evans, the charismatic publisher, author and muckraker who was a bold-faced name for decades for exposing wrongdoing in 1960s London to publishing such 1990s best-sellers as “Primary Colors,” has died, his wife said Thursday. He was 92.
His wife, fellow author-publisher Tina Brown, said he died Wednesday in New York of congestive heart failure.  
A vision of British erudition and sass, Evans was a high-profile go-getter, starting in the 1960s as an editor of the Northern Echo and the Sunday Times of London and continuing into the 1990s as president of Random House. Married since 1981 to Brown, their union was a paradigm of media clout and A-list access.  
A defender of literature and print journalism well into the digital age, Evans was one of the all-time newspaper editors, startling British society with revelations of espionage, corporate wrongdoing and government scandal. In the U.S., he published such attention-getters as the mysterious political novel “Primary Colors” and memoirs by such unlikely authors as Manuel Noriega and Marlon Brando.  
He was knighted by his native Britain in 2004 for his contributions to journalism.  
He held his own, and more, with the world’s elite, but was mindful of his working class background: a locomotive driver’s son, born in Lancashire, English, on June 28, 1928. As a teen, he was evacuated to Wales during World War II. After serving in the Royal Air Force, he studied politics and economics at Durham University and received a master’s in foreign policy.
His drive to report and expose dated back to his teens, when he discovered that newspapers had wildly romanticized the Battle of Dunkirk between German and British soldiers.
 “A newspaper is an argument on the way to a deadline,” he once wrote. He was just 16 when he got his first journalism job, at a local newspaper in Lancashire, and after graduating from college he became an assistant editor at the Manchester Evening News. In his early 30s, he was hired to edit the Daily Echo and began attracting national attention with crusades such as government funding for cancer smear tests for women.
He had yet to turn 40 when he became editor of the Sunday Times, where he reigned and rebelled for 14 years until he was pushed out by a new boss, Rupert Murdoch. Notable stories included publishing the diaries of former Labour Minister Richard Crossman; taking on the manufacturers of the drug Thalidomide, which caused birth defects in children; and revealing that Britain’s Kim Philby was a Soviet spy.
“There have been many times when I have found that what was presented as truth did not square with what I discovered as a reporter, or later as an editor, learned from good shoe-leather reporters,” he observed in “My Paper Chase,” published in 2009. “We all understand in an age of terrorism that refraining from exposing a lie may be necessary for the protection of innocents. But ‘national interest’ is an elastic concept that if stretched can snap with a sting.”
Meanwhile, the then-married Evans became infatuated with an irreverent blonde just out of Oxford, Tina Brown, and soon began a long-distance correspondence — he in London, she in New York — that grew intimate enough for Evans to “fall in love by post.” They were married in East Hampton, New York, in 1981. The Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee was best man, Nora Ephron was among the guests.  
With Brown, Evans had two children, adding to the two children he had with his first wife.
Their garden apartment on Manhattan’s exclusive Sutton Place became a mini-media dynasty: He the champion of justice, rogues and belles lettres, she the award-winning provocateur and chronicler of the famous — as head of Tatler in England, then Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and as author of a best-selling book about Princess Diana.
Evans emigrated to the U.S. in 1984, initially serving as editorial director of U.S. News & World Report, and was hired six years later by Random House. He published William Styron’s best-selling account of his near-suicidal depression, “Darkness Visible,” and winked at Washington with “Primary Colors,” a roman a clef about then-candidate Bill Clinton that was published anonymously and set off a capitol guessing game, ended when The Washington Post unmasked magazine correspondent Joe Klein.
Evans had a friendly synergist at The New Yorker, where Brown serialized works by Monica Crowley, Edward Jay Epstein and other Random House authors. A special beneficiary was Jeffrey Toobin, a court reporter for The New Yorker who received a Random House deal for a book on the O.J. Simpson trial that was duly excerpted in Brown’s magazine.  
Evans took on memoirs by the respected — Colin Powell — as well as the disgraced: Clinton advisor and alleged call girl client Dick Morris. He visited Noriega’s jail cell in pursuit of a memoir by the deposed Panamanian dictator. In 1994, he risked $40,000 for a book by a community organizer and law school graduate, a bargain for what became former President Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father.”
Evan’s more notable follies included a disparaged, Random House-generated list of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century, for which judges acknowledged they had no ideal how the books were ranked, and Brando’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me.”  
As Evans recalled in “My Paper Chase,” he met with Brando in California, first for dinner at a restaurant where the ever-suspicious actor accused Evans of working for the CIA. Then they were back at Brando’s Beverly Hills mansion, where Brando advocated for Native Americans and intimated that he had sex with Jacqueline Kennedy at the White House.
After a follow-up meeting the next afternoon — they played chess, Brando recited Shakespeare — the actor signed on, wrote what Evans found a “highly readable” memoir. He then subverted it by kissing CNN’s Larry King on the lips, “stopping the book dead in its tracks,” Evans recalled.
Evans left Random House in 1997 to take over as editorial director and vice president of Morton B. Zuckerman’s many publications, including U.S. News & World Report and The Atlantic, but stepped down in 2000 to devote more time to speeches and books.  
More recently, he served as a contributing editor to U.S. News and editor at large for the magazine The Week. In 2011, he became an editor-at-large for Reuters. His guidebook for writers, “Do I Make Myself Clear?”, was published in 2017.
“I wrote the book because I thought I had to speak up for clarity,” he told The Daily Beast at the time. “When I go into a cafe in the morning for breakfast and I’m reading the paper, I’m editing. I can’t help it. I can’t stop. I still go through the paper and mark it up as I read. It’s a compulsion, actually.”
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Swiss health authorities have ordered a quarantine for a staggering 2,500 students at a prestigious hospitality management school in the city of Lausanne after “significant outbreaks” of the coronavirus that are a suspected byproduct of off-campus partying.  
 
Authorities in Switzerland’s Vaud canton, or region, said all undergraduates at the Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne, known as the Lausanne Hospitality Management University in English, have been ordered to quarantine both on- and off-campus because the number of COVID-19 outbreaks because targeted closures were not possible.
 
The World Health Organization, national health authorities and others have cautioned that young people, who tend to have milder COVID-19 symptoms than older demographic groups, have been a key driver for the continued spread of the coronavirus in recent weeks, particularly in Europe.  
 
“Significant outbreaks of infection have appeared at several levels of training, making a more targeted closure impossible that that involving the 2,500 students affected,” the Vaud regional office said in a statement. “Until Sept. 28, the students must stay home. For some, that means not leaving their housing on the hospitality school site.”
 
It noted that an early investigation showed that “one or more parties was at the origin of these many outbreaks of infection,” and reiterated authorities previous call for a “responsible attitude” among party-goers such as by wearing masks, tracing their contacts, keeping alert for symptoms, and “social distancing.”  
 
School administrators were taking “all necessary measures” to ensure that classes were continuing online, the statement said.
 
University spokesman Sherif Mamdouh said Thursday that the situation was “not ideal” but that the university took precautions in recent months. He said that 11 students had tested positive for the coronavirus and none required hospitalization.  
 
Mamdouh said the quarantine affects 2,500 undergraduates. The university has a total student body of about 3,500, including people pursuing advanced degrees. He said hundreds of students living in on-campus dormitories on campus will be subject to the quarantine.
 
Switzerland is not alone. The latest government figures in neighboring France show that 22% of the country’s currently active virus clusters emerged at schools are universities. The United States has also seen clusters linked to college students.  
 
World Health Organization spokeswoman Margaret Harris said that while it is “unfair to just put it on the young people,” it’s also unsurprising that teenagers and young adults might assume they don’t need to worry about succumbing to the virus.
 
“Perceptions do indicate that they don’t feel they are as at-risk as older groups” Harris said, particularly in the wake of data showing younger people typically have less-severe cases of COVID-19.
 
“The message they have heard is: ‘You are out of jail, go out and play,'” she said. “We don’t want to be the fun police, but we want people to have fun safely.
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As the European Union introduces a new migration and asylum plan after a blaze at an overcrowded camp in Greece left thousands without shelter, a FILE – Venezuelan migrants on their way to Peru sleep along the Pan-American Highway between Tulcan and Ibarra in Ecuador, after entering the country from Colombia, Aug. 22, 2018.”Many of the countries leading the global downturn have been on the receiving end of the mass exodus of Venezuelans fleeing the humanitarian crisis in their country,” the report shows. Biggest shiftThe most significant change came from Ecuador, Peru and Colombia, which have absorbed millions of Venezuelans since 2015. “Initially, many of the migrants and refugees were welcomed in these countries, but public sentiment started to turn against them as their economies, and their health, education and social assistance programs buckled under the strain,” according to the report.FILE – Volunteers carry donated items towards a group of undocumented migrants looking for work as day laborers alongside a hardware store in San Diego, California, Feb. 4, 2017.Ray added that despite the Trump administration’s efforts to curb immigration, the U.S., which ranked sixth overall in the index, has generally positive attitudes toward newcomers. “Despite the fact that immigration is such a hot topic in the U.S., Americans are mostly very accepting of migrants,” she said. Experts note that, around the world, greater acceptance is often displayed by younger generations and people with advanced levels of education. 
 
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Britain became the latest European country to impose restrictions on socializing Wednesday following a sharp rise in coronavirus transmission rates. The number of new cases is roughly doubling every week, and the chief medical officer has warned of 50,000 new infections daily by mid-October if the pattern continues.Britain has suffered the highest number of coronavirus deaths in Europe, with over 41,000 fatalities.Under the new rules, pubs and restaurants will be forced to close by 10 p.m. and will be restricted to table service. Bar and wait staff, taxi drivers and shop workers will be required by law to wear face masks, and there will be stiffer penalties for anyone breaking the new rules. People are once again being encouraged to work from home if possible.People drink at the outside tables of a cafe in Soho, in central London, Sept. 23, 2020.In a televised address Tuesday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the blame partly on the public.”While the vast majority have complied with the rules, there have been too many breaches, too many opportunities, for our invisible enemy to slip through undetected. The virus has started to spread again in an exponential way,” Johnson said. Conflicting messagesOver the summer, the message from government was very different as transmission rates were lower following the hard lockdown in March and April. During August, the government tried to get people back out and spending by paying half of diners’ food bills under its “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme. Workers were encouraged to return to the office, in the hope that people would begin spending money again on take-out meals, and in bars and restaurants, hair salons and the numerous other services that had suffered amid the lockdown.Shoppers wear face masks due to the novel coronavirus pandemic as they walk along the streets of Preston, Lancashire, Sept. 23, 2020.Following the prime minister’s address Tuesday, many people expressed confusion at the changing message.”It is all a bit back and forth, up and down, no one knows which way to go,” said London resident Adam Veasey, a photocopier salesman.”I think people have forgotten because there hasn’t been one clear, specific message that has resulted in this sort of behavior that we’re seeing now, and I think everyone has relaxed,” said fellow London resident Richard, who declined to give his family name.Some medical experts have voiced concern that the new restrictions don’t go far enough. “Things have already really started to escape our grasp, especially with testing breakdowns,” Dr. Peter Drobac, a global health expert at the University of Oxford, told VOA in an interview Wednesday. “Given all of that, I do have concerns about whether the measures that were announced … will actually be enough to stem the tide.”Others, including Carl Heneghan, director of the A man, not wearing a face covering, passes signs telling travelers they must wear face masks unless they are exempt, as he leaves Victoria station during the evening rush hour, in central London, Sept. 23, 2020.”If you look at the countries that have been most successful, including countries that never had to resort to full lockdowns, one of the big differences is they invested early in testing and tracing capabilities. We’ve never, I think, met the mark here in the U.K. on that,” he said.Business groups, especially pubs and restaurants, have voiced alarm at the tightening of restrictions. Kate Nicholls, CEO of UKHospitality, an industry group, said the new curfew could bankrupt businesses.”We’ve still got one in five premises closed, 900,000 people still supported by full furlough, which is coming to an end in a matter of weeks. And a 10 p.m. curfew means that businesses have to be empty, closed and locked up by 10 p.m. That means last orders at 9:00. That halves restaurant revenues, it decimates pub sector trade,” Nicholls told Britain’s ITN News.The furlough scheme has supported around 10 million jobs by paying up to 90% of workers’ wages. That program is due to end next month, and the government is under increasing pressure to extend it amid warnings of soaring unemployment. 
 
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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson defended his government’s COVID-19 testing plan Wednesday as opposition members in parliament claimed the government lost control of the virus when it lost control of testing. The exchange took place during the weekly “question time” in parliament, one day after Johnson announced new COVID-19 restrictions following a resurgence of new cases across Britain. Opposition Labor leader Keir Starmer called out Johnson for saying test and trace had “very little or nothing” to do with the transmission of the disease after deeming it a “game changer” a few months ago. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson leaves 10 Downing Street in London, Sept. 23, 2020.Johnson responded that he meant the tests had little to do with the actual spread of the disease, saying, “It is an obvious fact of biology and epidemiology that alas this disease is transmitted by human contact or aerosol contact.” The prime minister went on to explain that earlier in the pandemic, the government did not have the test and trace capacity in place, which it does now. He said the National Health Service now has ability “to see in granular detail where the epidemic is breaking out, exactly which groups are being infected.” Johnson said that is why they were able to implement the isolated, local lockdowns, such as the one imposed in northeast Britain last week. Tuesday, Johnson announced shorter bar, pub and restaurant hours and mandatory masks for retail workers, and urged people who are capable of working from home to do so after Britain recorded 4,926 new confirmed coronavirus cases in 24 hours, the highest daily total since early May and four times the figure of a month ago. 
 
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Pope Francis once again used his weekly general audience Wednesday at the Vatican to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic and urged the world’s leaders to remember all segments of society as they fight the coronavirus and work to rebuild world economies. Speaking before a limited group of masked faithful in a Vatican courtyard, Francis said everyone has something to contribute as the world attempts to emerge from this crisis But, he said, society’s leaders must respect and promote “the intermediate or lower levels” of society.    People attend Pope Francis’ weekly general audience at the San Damaso courtyard, at the Vatican, Sept. 23, 2020.He added that multinationals and pharmaceutical companies do not have all the answers.  “The largest financial companies are listened to rather than the people or the ones who really move the economy,” Pope Francis said Wednesday. “Multinational companies are listened to more than social movements. Putting it in everyday language, they listen more to the powerful than to the weak.” The pope called for an inclusive rethink of the economic, social and political structures of the global economy that he says have showed weakness during the health crisis. Francis has long insisted on the need to involve society’s most marginal groups — the indigenous, the poor and the elderly — in making decisions about their own future. “Let’s think about the cure for the virus; the large pharmaceutical companies are listened to more than the health care workers employed on the front lines in hospitals or in refugee camps. This is not a good path,” said Pope Francis.The pope next week is expected to release an encyclical on fraternity and solidarity in the post-COVID world. 
 
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Germany’s health ministry Wednesday said its coronavirus smartphone app has been downloaded more than 18 million times and transmitted 1.2 million test results from labs to users during the first 100 days of use.Health Minister Jens Spahn told reporters in Berlin that while the “Corona Warn App” is far from perfect, it should be considered a success. He said almost 5,000 users have activated the app to warn their contacts and called it a key tool in the country’s effort to contain the spread of the virus, which causes the COVID-19 disease.He said, “This shows that the corona tracing app works, it is in demand…it helps to prevent infections and it is one of the most successful apps worldwide.”Spahn noted in particular the fact that most users can get their test results sent directly to their smartphones, without having to wait for their doctor to inform them.German Health Minister Jens Spahn attends a news conference to give an update on a smartphone app that allows users to evaluate their risk of being exposed to the coronavirus in Berlin, Germany, Sept. 23, 2020.Germany’s strict privacy rules mean that the app stores all data on phones and not on a central server. Observers, however, say there is no precise data on the number of people alerted about possible exposure.Should an app user get a positive test result, the app has a button the person can press to warn his or her contacts. Spahn says one problem is not everyone is doing that. “Only about half of the app users who get a positive result inform their contacts afterwards.”Spahn says the app is not a cure-all, but one of a number of important tools the government is using to control the spread of the virus.German tech company Deutsche Telekom, working with software company SAP, developed the app. Deutsche Telekom Chief Executive Tim Hoettges said more than 90% of labs in Germany are now connected to it.Hoettges said efforts are under way to establish a European “gateway” that will allow the German app to communicate with those in 10 other European countries, including Italy, Poland and Spain, that use the same decentralized, Bluetooth-based system.
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For over a month, protesters in Belarus have demanded an end to the quarter century rule of longtime authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko.  That follows what demonstrators say was a rigged presidential election and police crackdown aimed at keeping Lukashenko in power. And, as Charles Maynes reports, among those increasingly in police crosshairs are the 1.6 million strong Catholics, who are a minority the Eastern Orthodox country.
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