European Union Bans U.S. Travelers

U.S. travelers won't be among those allowed to visit the European Union when the bloc begins opening its external borders on July 1. EU ambassadors endorsed a list of 15 travel partners on Tuesday, including South Korea, Japan and, with a caveat, China. Those countries were hit early by the pandemic but have been able to bring the coronavirus under control.

The EU list requires reciprocal easing of travel bans — and the U.S. currently bars most travelers from European countries. China's inclusion on the travel list is predicated on its removal of EU members from its own travel restrictions.

The U.S. was seen as a long shot to make the travel list, which requires that only those countries with epidemiological situations — taking into account both the infection rate and current trends — that are equal to or better than the EU's can send tourists and other nonessential visitors to the open-border region.

When the EU began discussing its travel list earlier this month, many U.S. states were seeing a worrying spike in cases — a trend that has only worsened.

As ambassadors at the European Council debated the final list, the U.S. shattered its record for daily new cases, reporting 39,972 new cases on June 26, compared with its previous mark of 36,291 cases, which was set on April 24.

The allowed countries are:

Algeria, Australia, Canada, Georgia, Japan, Montenegro, Morocco, New Zealand, Rwanda, Serbia, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia, Uruguay, China (subject to confirmation of reciprocity)

It's up to each EU member state to decide how to implement the list — but the European Council says none of them should unilaterally lift travel restrictions on a "non-listed" country.

Now that the EU travel list has been released, the bloc plans to revise it on a regular basis, as frequently as every two weeks. For now, the U.S. is excluded along with other countries that are struggling to fight the coronavirus, such as Brazil and Russia.

The EU has roughly 116 million more people than the U.S. But the bloc is currently reporting roughly 1.5 million coronavirus cases — far less than the more than 2.6 million cases reported by the U.S.

And in a troubling sign of how deeply the coronavirus has taken root in the U.S., the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that the official tally is vastly undercounted, with more than 20 million Americans possibly infected.

"Our best estimate right now is that for every case that was reported, there actually were 10 other infections," CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said last week.

As it issued the travel list, the EU also provided more clarity about how it analyzes other countries' coronavirus status. In addition to looking at the number of new cases over the past 14 days, for instance, the European standard calls for a country's case rate per 100,000 inhabitants to be "close to or below the EU average."

When U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was asked about the possible exclusion of the U.S. last week, he said discussions are ongoing.

"I am confident that we will find a set of conditions that create sufficient health and safety protections" and still allow travel, Pompeo said at a press briefing.

If no U.S. tourists visit Europe in the coming months, it would deal another financial blow to an already ailing travel and hospitality industry. Last year, roughly 2 million or more Americans visited Europe in each month from May through September, according to the U.S. National Travel & Tourism Office.

The pandemic has turned travel into a fraught topic, over fears of the possible spread of the virus. It has also caused tension between the EU and the U.S., particularly after President Trump announced a travel ban on 26 European countries (exempting the United Kingdom) in mid-March. EU officials publicly registered their disapproval, saying they had not been warned about the ban. Days later, the EU began closing its own borders.

Coronavirus Conspiracies

The fighting with a tiny deadly being along with conspiracy theories still insists on their journey around the globe by spreading panic and confusion. Bill Gates's Nano-Chip Vaccine and 5G Signals lead the rumours.

Divide and Conquer is the fundamental strategy of the winners. The World's Best Generals have always emerged victorious as they practiced the Division theory!

The present situation arise important questions such as; How did we end up in a society divided between False or Real reality? Will we be able to exterminate the enemy if we fight each other? Who is the enemy?

Time will reveal the answers but till then let's have a look at the pervasive rumours that are flying at the speed of light around the world.

5G Signal Conspiracy

Scientists say it is biologically impossible that the 5G mobile phone signals transmit the virus or reduce our defenses to it. However, this fact hasn't stopped the rumours going global, leading to protests even in countries where the technology doesn't yet exist.

In Bolivia, the sharing of videos of telecommunications equipment along with claims 5G is responsible for coronavirus, have led to attacks on masts in two towns.

"There is no 5G technology in the country," says Adriana Olivera, a journalist at Verifica Bolivia, but "after seeing these rumours, combined with the fact that everyone is confined to lockdown, it led to people pulling down antennas in K'ara K'ara and Yapacani".

Even some senior politicians and religious leaders have been spreading rumours about the technology, linking it to the spread of the virus. A former Nigerian senator, in a video shared 25,000 times on Facebook, has said the pandemic is purely cover for the introduction of 5G, suggesting it causes harm. "Those with underlying medical conditions," he says, "are easily consumed by the reaction of this 5G technology and they die."

An evangelical pastor in Tanzania said on Instagram and YouTube that the push for the mobile technology is behind the spread of coronavirus.

A former grand mufti in Egypt has spoken on television about the 5G network and how it might have caused electromagnetic disturbance, creating a perfect environment for the spread of coronavirus.

Meanwhile in Europe, fearmongering has also led to protests and attacks on masts. The BBC has reported on dozens of incidents of antenna-destruction in the UK.

In Serbia, 5G conspiracies and speculation about Bill Gates have also been popular both on television and in the tabloid press, where stories are often drawn from English or Russian sources. "So, we get to see the same fake news content as the UK, US or elsewhere," says Lazara Marinkovic, who reports on disinformation for BBC News Serbian.

Celebrities have also fed into the speculation, including Novak Djokovic who revealed his opposition to vaccinations in April and his wife Jelena who shared a video which promoted conspiracies about 5G.

A spreader of the 5G claims in the English-speaking world has been David Icke - the British conspiracy theorist kicked off Facebook and YouTube. Clips where he discusses a link between 5G and the virus have been censored on social media but are still accessible online, racking up hundreds of thousands of views on Russian YouTube and Facebook accounts.

Bill Gates and Microchips.

One of the most widespread claims is that the pandemic is a grand plan masterminded by Bill Gates to implant microchips into humans along with a coronavirus vaccine. The international fact checking network, IFCN, contains a database with coronavirus fact checks from their network of partners. It shows fact-checkers in at least 14 countries have debunked local versions of the microchip theory, including in Greece, Kazakhstan, the Philippines and Mexico.

One YouTube video from Argentina which endorses the theory has clocked up 1.3 million views. Another Facebook video from Pakistan repeats the claim and has been viewed almost 650,000 times since it was posted in May.

Some versions of the theory put their own local spin on it. In Arabic the imaginary microchips were dubbed "Antichrist chips" in a video with over 375,000 views on YouTube and multiple posts on Facebook.

BBC News Brazil has spotted a version of the "microchip" theory in messages circulating on WhatsApp and Facebook in Portuguese. Users are copying and pasting a chunk of text which opens with the words: "I have to confess; Bill Gates is really an evil genius! It's easy to control submissive people."

The message goes on to claim that Bill Gates is finalizing plans for a "stamp-shaped vaccine that goes under the skin" and that this will be linked to an individual's social media profiles in order to control them via 5G.

The combination of the microchip theory with 5G conspiracies was given a boost in Brazil by Allan dos Santos, a strong supporter of President Bolsonaro, who is being investigated by a Brazilian federal inquiry into "fake news".

In a tweet which has been liked more than 14,000 times he quotes a Pakistani commentator as saying Bill Gates wants to implant a nano-chip vaccine to control the population through 5G. Somewhat distancing himself from the claims, he adds "Absurd? It is necessary to debate this."

Multilingual moderation

The moderation of content around the world is outsourced by Facebook to international fact-checking organizations. Some regions, such as North America and Europe, have more rigorous systems in place than others, which are "fact-checking deserts", says Rory Smith, from First Draft.

"As more and more people start to believe these conspiracies", he warns, "this may result in an increase in vaccine hesitancy which could foster another global public health crisis of its own".

Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the nation's leading experts on infectious diseases, warned Sunday that it's "unlikely" the U.S. will achieve herd immunity to the coronavirus if a portion of the population refuses to get a coronavirus vaccine.

BBC Reality Check

EU Might Refuse Americans In

European Union envoys are close to finalizing a list of countries whose citizens will be allowed to enter Europe again, possibly from late next week, EU diplomats confirmed Saturday. Americans are almost certain to be excluded in the short term due to the number of U.S. coronavirus cases.

The envoys were expected to have narrowed down later Saturday the exact criteria for countries to make the list, which include the way the spread of the virus is being managed. Another key condition is whether the country has a ban on citizens from European nations.

The number of cases in the United States has surged over the past week, with an all-time high of 45,300 confirmed new daily infections just reached. President Donald Trump also suspended the entry of all people from Europe’s ID check-free travel zone in a decree in March.

The EU diplomats confirmed that an official agreement on the criteria — likely to include a limit on the infection rate per 100,000 citizens — is expected late on Monday or early Tuesday. The diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity because the procedure is ongoing and politically extremely sensitive.

Infection rates are high in Brazil, India and Russia, and it’s unlikely the EU will let their citizens in, either. The list would be updated every 14 days, with new countries added and some possibly being left off based on how they manage the spread of the virus.

More than 15 million Americans are estimated to travel to Europe annually, and any delay would be a further blow to virus-ravaged economies and tourism sectors, both in Europe and the United States. Around 10 million Europeans are thought to cross the Atlantic for vacations and business each year.

The 27 EU nations and four other countries that are part of Europe’s “Schengen area” — a 26-nation bloc where goods and people move freely without document checks — appear on track to reopen their borders between each other by July 1.

Once that happens, restrictions on non-essential travel to Europe, which were imposed in March to halt new virus cases from entering, would gradually be lifted.

On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo played down concerns that the EU might refuse to allow Americans in.

“We’ve denied travel to Europe and vice versa. That’s the posture that we all sit in now, and I think we’re all taking seriously the need to figure out how to get this up,” Pompeo said. “We’ll work to get this right. We want to make sure that it’s health-based, science-based.”

“We need to get our global economy back going again,” he said.

The European Commission, which monitors the bloc’s laws, believes that “travel restrictions should not be lifted as regards third countries where the situation is worse” than the average in the 27 EU member countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.

The commission insists that it’s not trying to target any country or that the list might be politicized as tourism-reliant countries around Europe push to get their borders back open again.

“The European Union has an internal process to determine from which countries it would be safe to accept travelers,” spokesman Eric Mamer said Thursday, adding that its decisions are “based on health criteria.”