EU agrees to compel multinationals to publish how much tax they pay in each EU country and in some non-EU countries (though some of the biggest tax havens are missing from that list).

For countries that charge businesses no tax, will they be required to publish how much of their income flows through them?

*Microsoft Irish subsidiary paid zero corporate tax on £220bn profit last year.*

This subsidiary is only nominally Irish, since it "pays taxes" in Bermuda, and it sucks in money from around the world.

Dissident leaders in Nicaragua call for a general strike to protest the jailing of the opposition leader.

*World's soils "under great pressure", says UN pollution report.*

*UN Agencies Call for a Decade of Restoring Ecosystems to Confront Biodiversity and Climate Emergencies.*

*World must rewild on massive scale to heal nature and climate, says UN.*

Rewilding is often a difficult task, and in some cases nobody knows a way to make it successful. We can't count on being able to duplicate an ecosystem that has been eliminated in a place, not even if that ecosystem still exists elsewhere. And even less, if it does not.

The EU has banned Belarus planes from EU airspace, and orders its planes not to fly over Belarus.

What about planes registered in other countries — the UK, for instance? Should the EU allow UK planes flying to or from EU cities to cross Belarus?

The EU has proposed "we'll try a little harder" as a substitute for unlocking vaccine production.

The point at the end about the existing WTO for compulsory licensing of patents is true (though countries including the US have pressured countries not to do this), but it is fundamentally inadequate because it only allows a country to make vaccine for its own use. Most countries, other than big economies, can't do their own vaccine manufacturing. The bigger and more capable countries must be allowed to make vaccine for the smaller/poorer countries.

Globally, the world has to choose between efficiency (and profit), and finishing the job of vaccinating everyone quickly. The efficient way to vaccinate everyone is to make just enough vaccine plants, then run them until they make enough vaccine for everyone. That costs less but will take a long time. The rapid way is to keep building vaccine plants, so that the production will accelerate. This way, we will get enough vaccine to vaccinate everyone, sooner.

The drawback is that many of those vaccine plants won't run for a whole year. The expense of running them may seem wasteful. Private companies would call it wasteful, but so would the governments that have to pay to get them running. "Why be in such a rush", they will argue. "We have enough plants now — be patient and you'll all get vaccine."

However, while billions of people are "being patient", tens or hundreds of millions of them will be patients, and millions of them might die from Covid-19.

In addition, the virus might mutate and become even more dangerous than the Delta and Kappa variants are now. They might kill hundreds of millions of people.

Producing vaccine as fast as we can until the job is finished is worth the cost.