Kim Willsher in Paris
The French government has announced it intends to increase the fine for littering from €68 to €135, after complaints from street cleaners that people are throwing masks, gloves and tissues possibly contaminated with Covid-19 on to the streets.
A bill is expected to be presented to the lower house, the Assemblée Nationale, in the next 10 days as part of a clam down on littering and dumping, including throwing cigarette ends into the streets, another headache in French cities.
The move comes as the government is under pressure to ease restrictions further across the country ahead of the end of its three-week progressive deconfinement programme, after the country’s scientific advisory committee announced the epidemic is “under control” in France.
France has introduced measures to deal with the pandemic in three-week blocks, the next of which ends on 21 June.
Prof Jean-François Delfraissy, who heads the scientific committee, said there was a low circulation of the virus but advised the authorities to use the respite time to “prepare different state structures for an eventual return of the epidemic”.
Specialists cannot agree on the likelihood of a coronavirus “second wave”.
On Saturday, the Château de Versailles opened to the public for the first time in 82 days; about 70% of the château’s revenue comes from visitor ticket sales, but 80% of the visitors are tourists and France’s borders remain closed except for essential business and personal reasons. Château staff said there was a rush on the place on Saturday, but even so they have 4,000 visitors instead of the 20,000 a day on a normal June weekend.
France reported 31 new deaths from Covid-19 in the 24 hours to Saturday, bringing the total to 29,142 since March. The number of patients in intensive care with the virus is down to 1,059.
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More than 400 migrants disembarked in Malta overnight on Saturday from four tourist boats after the government U-turned and allowed them to land after nearly 40 days onboard.
The 425 migrants, who had been picked up in the Mediterranean during various rescue operations, had been in limbo since April on the chartered boats held outside Maltese waters, Agence France-Presse reports.
Malta had refused them entry, pointing to the closure of its ports due to the coronavirus emergency and also to its full detention centres.
But in an about-face late on Saturday, Malta’s government said it was not prepared “to endanger lives of both the migrants and the crew, due the lack of solidarity shown by European Union member states in terms of relocation”.
“No European country accepted these migrants despite talk of solidarity,” the government said in a statement.
Sources told AGI news service the decision was taken because the crew feared for their safety, with the government saying the situation became “very difficult and commotions arose”.
In the late hours of Saturday and early Sunday, the boats docked at Boiler Wharf in Senglea and the migrants disembarked. It was not immediately clear where they were taken.
Malta had come under fire from humanitarian groups for holding the migrants on the tourist boats, which are not designed for lengthy stays.
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Africa’s long-distance truckers say they are facing stigma as they are increasingly accused of being carriers of coronavirus, the Associated Press reports.
While hundreds of truckers have tested positive for the virus in recent weeks, the drivers say they are being stigmatised and treated like criminals, and being detained by governments.
One side-effect is slowed-down cargo traffic, which has created a challenge for governments in much of sub-Saharan Africa, where many borders remain closed due the pandemic, on how to strike a balance between contagion and commerce.
Abdulkarim Rajab, a Kenyan who has been driving trucks for 17 years, said: “When I entered Tanzania, in every town that I would drive through, they would call me, ‘You, corona, get away from here with your corona!’”, and recalls the times in which drivers were being accused of spreading HIV during that outbreak.
Rajab and his load of liquefied gas spent three days at the Kenya-Tanzania border, where the line of trucks waiting to be cleared stretched into the distance and wound around the lush hills overlooking the crossing at Namanga.
Tanzania closed the border there this week, the second time the frontier was closed in less than a month, after many Tanzanian truckers with negative results started testing positive at the border.
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Infections in Afghanistan climb above 20,000
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Afghanistan has topped 20,000 as the country recorded its biggest daily rise in the number of deaths from Covid-19 on Sunday.
The health ministry has detected 791 new cases from 1,427 tests, according to the latest update, bringing the total number of infections to 20,342. Thirty patients died overnight, taking the country’s Covid-19 death toll to 357. There have been 1,875 recoveries.
The capital Kabul has recorded its worst day of the crisis after 23 patients died in the last 24 hours to Sunday and 313 new cases were detected. The capital is the country’s worst affected area with 8,030 confirmed cases and 66 deaths.
Mohammad Yaghoub Heidari, the governor of Kabul, warned that the actual number of infections in the capital may be much higher than official figures show.
“There is a catastrophe going on in Kabul,” Heidari said, adding that the city had started carrying out burials during the night.
From Saturday, masks must be worn in public places, two-metre physical distancing must be maintained and gatherings of more than 10 people should be avoided, the health ministry announced. Elderly people have been advised not leave their homes and workplaces must be disinfected.
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