/mar

Palau to welcome first tourists in a year with presidential escort | Taiwan | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/31/palau-to-welcome-first-tourists-in-a-year-with-presidential-escort
▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/03a3687a9444a299ec00f3f9d8afcae271a23af0/0_243_4856_2914/master/4856.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-ali

Palau to welcome first tourists in a year with presidential escort
Two-dogs beach in Palau’s Rock Islands, is a popular spot for tourists to have lunch. Palau is opening up to visitors from Taiwan under strict Covid-safe measures, but locals still have doubts. On Thursday, 110 people from Taiwan will be able to enjoy the thing so many around the world have been dreaming of since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic: an international holiday to a tropical island paradise. The tiny Pacific country of Palau, in the north-west corner of the Pacific with a population of around 20,000 people, will this week begin welcoming tourists from Taiwan as part of a travel bubble.Palau’s first visitors for more than a year will get the royal treatment, with Palau’s president travelling to Taiwan to personally escort them to the islands.For a chance to travel to Palau, one of Taiwan’s few diplomatic allies, Taiwanese must fork out between $2,100 and $2,800 to join a group tour booked via a travel agency. They must also tick a series of health regulation boxes, including an assurance that they have not left Taiwan within the past six months, and undergo a Covid-19 test at the airport.The trip itself is limited to fewer than eight days and will largely avoid crowded locations in Palau. But even with the rules in place, travel agents in Taipei say they have been getting enquiries since the bubble was announced on 17 March. KKDay, a popular travel startup offering discounts on bookings, has already sold out two Palau tours according to its website as well as more than 1,000 lottery tickets for a chance to win a spot on a multi-day tour.
Ngirai Tmetuchl, chairman of the board of Palau Visitors Authority, said the bubble would benefit both nations. Taiwanese tourists would get to “go to another country and enjoy the pristine waters of Palau” while his countryfolk could benefit from the boost to the archipelago’s economy, which is heavily reliant on tourism and which has been hit hard by the Covid-related border closures.Before the pandemic, tourism accounted for nearly 50% of Palau’s GDP, with Taiwan making up the third-largest group of tourists to the country, after China and Japan. Though the initial numbers arriving will be small, “Two hundred [tourists coming in the first two weeks] is more than zero, our options are zero or 200. We’ve been running on empty for a year, “ Tmetuchl said.On the itinerary for the tourists will be trips out to Palau’s famous Rock Islands and the idyllic turquoise Jellyfish Lake, where swimmers can float amongst million of gently-pulsating golden jellyfish, which have no stingers.Eledui Omelau, president of Palau’s Boat Owners Association said it had been a difficult year for Palauan boat owners, with most of them taking out loans to survive and that the prospect of Taiwanese tourists was welcome.“We have been hit hard, this travel bubble it’s a good opportunity for us, but at the same time we want to make sure we are ready,” Omelau said.

#Covid-19#migrant#migration#palau#chine#japon#taiwan#sante#tourisme#bulledevoyage#passeportsanitaire#economie

Global treaty needed to protect states from pandemics, say world leaders | Coronavirus | The Guardian

Nobody is safe until everyone is safe they say

▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/30/global-treaty-needed-to-protect-states-from-pandemics-say-world-leaders

❝The world needs a global treaty for pandemics to protect states in the wake of Covid-19, akin to the settlement forged after the second world war, Boris Johnson and other world leaders have urged.

In a joint article published in newspapers across the world, leaders including the UK prime minister, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, warn that a future global pandemic is an inevitability and that Covid has served as “a stark and painful reminder that nobody is safe until everyone is safe”.

Escalating international tensions over vaccine supplies have led to calls for countries to abandon isolationism and nationalism, and come together to make way for a new era founded on principles like

#corona #covid-19

The smell of gum trees and rejection: the Australians locked out of ’home’ by Covid border closures | Coronavirus | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/28/the-smell-of-gum-trees-and-rejection-the-australians-locked-out-of-home
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The smell of gum trees and rejection: the Australians locked out of ’home’ by Covid border closures. A year on, Australia has become virtually unreachable for thousands of citizens
“Whenever I come home, the first thing that always hits me is the light and the sunshine,” David Mack says. “New York has brilliant blue skies, but there’s something about Australian light. It sounds ridiculous, but you get hit with that sunshine and it’s just restorative.”Mack has been living in the United States for seven years, but now, in the midst of the pandemic, he misses Australia more than ever. “When Qantas stops flying … you realise very quickly Australia is an island and you have only one way easily to get in,” he says. “When everything stopped, I definitely felt cut off.”
Home can be an amorphous concept. Often we associate it with our friends and loved ones, or perhaps the more abstract notion of national identity. But equally home is in the landscapes we have grown to know and love.
“Landscape has exerted a kind of force on me that is every bit as geological as family,” Tim Winton wrote in his nonfiction book Island Home in 2017. “Like many Australians, I feel this tectonic grind – call it familial ache – most keenly when abroad.”But what happens when our connection to the place we consider home is suddenly severed? When it becomes a location we can’t reach? Or when we feel that the government of our home country has abandoned us?Australia’s international border shut on 20 March 2020. A week later, 14 days of hotel quarantine was mandated for returned travellers. While citizens and permanent residents have been allowed to return, the prohibitive cost (and risk) of flights and hotel quarantine combined with two weeks of isolation makes the prospect unappealing, if not unachievable, for many.
“That Australia’s very physically far away is not comfortable for me,” Rachel Maher says. Maher works for the United Nations on its European migration response and has been based between Athens, Afghanistan and Geneva since 2016.“I miss the sunsets and the desert [areas] I grew up in [around the] wheatbelt, the silhouettes of eucalyptus trees – and the birds. The birds … The minute you call somebody in Australia, there’s some kind of bird in the background of the call, and that makes me very nostalgic.”
Sary Zananiri, an Australian academic living in the Dutch city of Leiden, says he really longs for the sense of physical space in Australia, “which you just don’t get in Europe”.“The Netherlands is a beautiful and green country, but it’s small and it really is impossible to get away from human beings,” he says. “And there’s no wilderness, it’s all reclaimed land. It’s really a very different sort of a space. “I think the Australian psyche is very much linked to its landscape, you know … There’s something about that smell of gum trees and pine trees, and that damp of the [family] farm in the morning that I really do miss.”For many expats, the ability to dip in back home to reconnect at regular intervals made them feel at ease living so far away. Now the pandemic has put that on hold, anxiety has begun to creep in.
“I guess I’d already made peace that I was probably going to be in the States for a while and the thing that allowed me to mentally accept that was the ability to get home relatively easily,” Mack says. “Having that ease of travel [taken away] really does force you to confront the tyranny of distance.”
Elizabeth, who asked that only her first name be used, still calls Australia home despite working as teacher in Hong Kong for 23 years. Pre-pandemic, she would return at least once a year, usually for two weeks at lunar new year. Now the combined quarantine requirements – two weeks on arrival in Sydney and three weeks on return to Hong Kong – have made such a trip impossible.“That’s a total of five weeks’ quarantine and I get 16 days [of leave]. So I couldn’t even meet the demands of one quarantine, let alone to quarantine and then still have time to see family,” she says. “So pragmatically, any travel is out of the question.For Zananiri, who is fifth generation Australian on his mother’s side and Palestinian on his father’s side, the pandemic has strained his relationship with his home country.“My dad, being Palestinian, was made stateless so I think I always grew up with this idea that my Australian passport was my protection in the world, you know, and seeing how Australians abroad are being treated – the lack of consular assistance, the border measures that are in place – I do feel like [we’ve] been completely cut off.”Currently in Athens, where he is not a citizen and has no right to healthcare, Zananiri wonders how he will get vaccinated and, if he can’t, whether that will affect his chances of returning.
Australia’s deputy chief medical officer, Prof Michael Kidd, says the federal government has no plan to vaccinate its citizens abroad. Rather it will vaccinate everyone in Australia regardless of citizenship, and “we hope that other countries will be doing the same”. For a country where almost a third of the population was born overseas, that policy feels like rejection to some.
“Many of us have very multi-centred lives … a lot of us have multiple homes and multiple identifications with different places by virtue of the multiculturalism of Australia,” Zananiri says. “And I don’t think that’s really been recognised very much in government policy. There’s a projection of a very particular type of Australian in this that’s going on.”
‘A state of suspension’As Australian universities struggled with the absence of international students, the pandemic accelerated the shift in Zananiri’s mindset towards cultivating roots elsewhere.
“Watching what happened in Australia in the context of Covid, particularly around higher education and this complete destruction of university systems, there’s something depressing about watching that from afar – especially given that I left Australia precisely because I was struggling to find funding in Australia, struggling to get a permanent job.
“I recently bought an apartment in Athens and I think part of that is realising that I don’t have a lot of security in being Australian any more.”
Maher says she makes new homes wherever she goes, but she tries to maintain small connections to Australia within them. (...)Maher says it’s a “privilege” and “heart-bursting experience” to be connected to different communities, in different geographies and cities and cultures, but she worries about the long-term impacts of the “state of suspension” the pandemic has created.“I think I was fine when it was periods of short-term departure for work and I always knew I was coming back. Suspending that semi-permanently is a whole different state of mind.”

#Covid-19#migrant#migration#australie#sante#retour#frontiere#insularité#santementale#distance#famille

Gibraltar looks to post-Covid era as vaccine drive nears completion | Gibraltar | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/26/gibraltar-looks-to-post-covid-era-as-vaccine-drive-nears-completion
▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/840fd0ad961ccf194708b1a9c5ec1c3c9c586e29/0_315_6098_3659/master/6098.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-ali

Gibraltar looks to post-Covid era as vaccine drive nears completion. British overseas territory is positioning itself as real-time case study in relaxing restrictions
This month Gibraltar’s health minister snapped a photo from her first dinner out in months, showing two glasses of red wine sitting prominently on the table and a face mask cast off in the background. “Operation freedom begins,” tweeted Samantha Sacramento alongside the photo.
Operation Freedom, the name given to Gibraltar’s vaccination programme, is now closing in on its target: in the coming days the British overseas territory will become one of the first places in the world where every willing resident over the age of 16 has been fully vaccinated.“It’s pretty much mission accomplished,” said Sacramento. “It does feel much better, much easier and as if we’re getting back to normal.”More than 90% of Gibraltar’s 33,000 residents have now had two doses of the vaccine. Save for the 3% or so who declined the jab, the rest are expected to receive their second dose in the coming days, igniting hopes that the territory can turn the page on a pandemic that has killed 94 residents and infected more than 4,200.
The vaccine drive has also stretched into neighbouring Spain, where doses have been offered to the more than 10,000 workers who cross into Gibraltar regularly. Hints of a post-Covid era have started to sprout across the territory; bars and restaurants are open until 2am, the curfew has been eliminated and mask-wearing mandates are soon to be eased to cover enclosed public spaces and public transport. The number of cases in the territory has dwindled to 15, and the hospital has zero Covid-19 patients.

#Covid-19#migrant#migration#espagne#grandebretagne#gibraltar#vaccination#sante#travailleurmigrant#travailleurfrontalier#circulation#frontiere

Top Saudi official issued death threat against UN’s Khashoggi investigator | Jamal Khashoggi | The Guardian

Des nouvelles de la bande de crapules en Arabie saoudite

▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/23/top-saudi-official-issued-death-threat-against-uns-khashoggi-investigat

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/jqd9h49dzy4a9wx/capture%20d%E2%80%99%C3%A9cran%202021-03-24%20%C3%A0%2008.07.38.png?dl=0

A senior Saudi official issued what was perceived to be a death threat against the independent United Nations investigator, Agnès Callamard, after her investigation into the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In an interview with the Guardian, the outgoing special rapporteur for extrajudicial killings said that a UN colleague alerted her in January 2020 that a senior Saudi official had twice threatened in a meeting with other senior UN officials in Geneva that month to have Callamard “taken care of” if she was not reined in by the UN.

South China Sea: alarm in Philippines as 200 Chinese vessels gather at disputed reef | South China Sea | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/22/south-china-sea-philippines-200-chinese-vessels-whitsun-reef

The Philippines’ defence chief has demanded more than 200 Chinese vessels he said were manned by militias leave a South China Sea reef claimed by Manila, saying their presence was a “provocative action of militarising the area.”

“We call on the Chinese to stop this incursion and immediately recall these boats violating our maritime rights and encroaching into our sovereign territory,” defence secretary Delfin Lorenzana said in a statement on Sunday, adding without elaborating that the Philippines would uphold its sovereign rights.

#chine #philippins #mer_de_chin_méridionale

Puerto Rico sees a surge in tourism – and a rise in aggressive tourist behavior | Puerto Rico | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/12/puerto-rico-tourists-aggressive-behavior-coronavirus
▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/e221e4073316ad37b5b43197c62e3f73851975f9/0_164_3073_1844/master/3073.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-ali

At the Condado Vanderbilt hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Christian Correa clocked in to work the night-shift as a doorman and braced for the worst.
Correa, who is also a bellman at the hotel, has seen a surge in American tourists coming to the US territory in the last three months and the hotel has been busy. Although he used to enjoy high season before the pandemic, recently, many tourists arriving to Puerto Rico have enraged local residents and hospitality workers as the island eases its Covid-19 restrictions.“The tourists think they can do whatever they want,” says Correa, 24, who is also a student at the University of Puerto Rico. “We’ve seen fights, parties in the rooms and aggressive behavior.”
Should you book a holiday for 2021 yet? And what about refunds?
Low-cost flights to Puerto Rico have enticed many travelers to choose the island as a vacation spot during the pandemic. A one-way flight to Puerto Rico from Florida booked two days in advance could be as low as $62.Hotel occupancy reached 60% during Presidents’ Day holiday weekend in February, according to the island’s destination marketing organization, Discover Puerto Rico. It was the highest number since Christmas, and hotels expect to reach the same occupancy rates for the forthcoming spring break.
“We are certainly seeing the effects of increased traveler confidence coinciding with vaccine distribution in the US,” said Brad Dean, CEO of Discover Puerto Rico.For José Silva, owner of El Chicharrón restaurant, tourists arriving in the last weeks have put him on edge due to the large crowds without face masks forming on the weekends. His restaurant is located in La Placita de Santurce, a popular tourist area. Silva says the police close the streets around the area on weekends, making it hard for Ubers or taxis to pick up tourists after bars and restaurants close.“We’ve asked the police to help keep everyone distanced and look for an alternative for this area,” says Silva.In Old San Juan, another popular tourist area, Cristina Colón has been questioning whether her job as a waitress in Pirilo Pizza is worth the money as she sees a rise in clientele who refuse to abide by the Covid-19 precautions.“I’m not only concerned with my physical health, but my mental health too,” says Colón. “I’m nervous about myself, and for the friends and family I surround myself with, because I have no idea where this person who doesn’t want to wear a mask is coming from.”
Puerto Rico went into lockdown last March. Though restrictions were eased slightly over the summer, and the former governor Wanda Vázquez reopened beaches fully in September, they were closed again from November until January.Those restrictions hit the hospitality industry hard. “The executive orders implemented by Wanda Vázquez put the hotel industry under threat,” said Joaquín Bolívar, the president of Puerto Rico’s Hotel and Tourism Association.

#Covid-19#migrant#migration#puertorico#etatsunis#sante#frontiere#tourisme#economie