Good morning,
Oscar’s
Hollywood crippled by Covid, closing film sets and movie theatres, is looking for a comeback and tonight heralded a turning point for the industry with the Oscar’s.
Nomadland won best picture, about financially displaced Americans, with British actors Sir Anthony Hopkins and Daniel Kaluuya taking top honours. Hopkins is 83, and Kaluuya is the first black British actor to win. And Chloe Zhao is the first woman of colour and only the second woman at all to win the best director award.
Nomadland is a collection of portraits of people, often played by non-professional actors in the margins of society in the American West.
Can you imagine one day soon, we can go back to a theatre, and hopefully wearing a mask and socially distanced, see a movie!
India
The images of fires burning are haunting because each one represents the death of a Covid patient who was denied oxygen, because the hospitals simply and horribly ran out in India. America, The UK and other countries are flying in emergency equipment such as testing kits and ventilators, but its too little too late to control a surge that could bring 1 million deaths from Covid in India which is registering more than 300 thousand cases a day and 2800 deaths a day. Predictions are there will be 13 thousand deaths per day.
It didn’t have to be this way, because India had only 100 deaths a day in February, and is one of the largest producers of vaccines, but its leaders largely ignored warnings of new variants and a surge in cases, including P.M. Modi who held large rallies political rallies and claimed the health emergency was over.
Iraq
The death toll has now increased in a hospital fire in Baghdad caused by an exploding oxygen tank, that quickly trapped Covid patients in the Ibn Khatib hospital before fire crews could enter the building.
82 are now dead and more than 100 others injured.
Iraq’s health Minister has been sacked and other health officials suspended.
Vaccine Passports
No one is calling them vaccine passports, but they are surely coming and The EU has now announced Americans who have had vaccines will soon be able to visit European Countries this summer.
“The Americans, as far as I can see, use European Medicines Agency-approved vaccines,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said Sunday in an interview with The Times in Brussels. “This will enable free movement and the travel to the European Union.
It won’t be long before other countries including the UK accept vaccination certificates.
Britain’s P.M.
I have not written about this before because to some degrees it’s internal politics in Britain but P.M. Boris Johnson is under siege from several directions, and the leader may be running short of political good will in his own Country and political party.
His long time key former aid who handled his political campaign and all affairs inside Downing Street has turned on him, and is promising to reveal corruption and unethical practices by Johnson who has often been described as a bumbling disengaged leader, but this takes it all to another level.
The texts and other evidence allegedly reveals scandals over Johnsons handling of the pandemic and even the refurbishment of his apartment, the cost of which he may have tried to pass off to political donors. The aid is said to have a dossier of wrong doing he will hand over the a Parliamentary Committee next month. The Mirror is running a story Johnson didn’t want another lockdown and said he’s “rather see bodies piled high in the thousands”. Headline news here today.
Please sign up to subscribe to this news letter and Have a good Monday everyone.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/04/25/world/covid-vaccine-coronavirus-cases#us-vaccines-india-covid
https://news.sky.com/story/iraq-fire-kills-dozens-of-covid-19-patients-in-baghdad-hospital-12286342
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/boris-johnson-said-hed-see-23980806
https://www.latimes.com