EUROPE

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U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday confirmed a four-week delay to an end to all legal lockdown restrictions, which was previously set for June 21, as he said the link between coronavirus infections and hospitalisations remains at concerning levels due to the Delta variant.

The last and fourth stage of the lockdown roadmap, dubbed “Freedom Day”, will now move to July 19 instead amid a worrying spike in cases of the Delta variant, first identified in India, which experts fear will result in greater hospitalisations in coming weeks.

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France charged on Friday three members of a neo-nazi group on suspicion of planning an attack against a masonic lodge, a judicial source said.

The three suspects, two men aged 29 and 56 and a woman aged 53, were placed in pre-trial detention under charges of "criminal terrorist association," the source added.

They were arrested on Tuesday as part of a preliminary investigation opened in February by France's anti-terror prosecutor on a small ultra-right group named "Honour and Nation."

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A jury in Italy convicted two American friends in the 2019 slaying in Rome of a police officer in a tragic unraveling of a small-time drug deal gone bad, sentencing them to the maximum life in prison.

More than 12 hours after deliberations began, the jury of two judges and six civilians delivered verdicts and sentences Wednesday night that set off a collective gasp in the courtroom: Finnegan Lee Elder, 21, and Gabriel Natale-Hjorth, 20, former schoolmates from the San Francisco area, were each found guilty of murder and four other counts and received Italy's stiffest punishment, life imprisonment.

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Europe can achieve herd immunity against the coronavirus within the next four months, the head of German pharmaceutical company BioNTech, which developed the first widely approved COVID-19 vaccine with U.S. partner Pfizer, said Wednesday.

While the exact threshold required to reach that critical level of immunization remains a matter of debate, experts say a level above 70 per cent would significantly disrupt transmission of the coronavirus within a population.

“Europe will reach herd immunity in July, latest by August,” Ugur Sahin, BioNTech's chief executive, told reporters.

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France plans to lift restrictions and ease a nationwide curfew on 2 May, in the belief that daily number of Covid-19 cases, an average of 33,000 infections per day over the past week, will soon begin falling.

President Emmanuel Macron chaired a weekly meeting with top ministers Wednesday to evaluate the government's efforts to combat the Covid crisis and to discuss the easing of restrictions in place.