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In July 2020, the government announced it would monitor Indias performance of 29 select global indices. A meeting with 47 Central ministries and departments was held to work out how to improve the ranking. Let us see what has happened since.

On the United Nations Human Development Index, we have fallen by one place. This is because of a decline in average income and disinvestment in girls education and health. The United Nations World Happiness Report does not measure happiness. It measures GDP per capita, life expectancy, freedom and perceptions of corruption. India has fallen 19 places here.

On the Global Hunger Index, which measures hunger, stunting in children and undernourishment, India has fallen 46 places and is today behind Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh.

Conservative (meaning right-wing) bodies in the United States have long been monitoring the world from their point of view on freedom. On the Cato Human Freedom Index, India has fallen 44 places because of a decline in rule of law, religious freedom and freedom to trade.

The World Economic Forum (popularly known as Davos) issues the Global Gender Gap Index which monitors progress on gender parity. India has fallen 26 places. The World Bank through its Women, Business and the Law Index monitors womens economic opportunities. India has fallen 13 places.

On the Smart Cities Index which looks at health, safety, mobility, activities and opportunities for citizens, Delhi has fallen 18 places, Bengaluru has fallen 16 places, Hyderabad 18 places and Mumbai 15 places. The Access Now Tracker looks at internet shutdowns around the world. India is by far the global leader here. India had six shutdowns in 2014, 14 in 2015, 31 in 2016, 79 in 2017, 134 in 2018, 121 in 2019 and 109 in 2020.

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A downwardly mobile India on global indices & govts media blitzkrieg - National Herald

In a slightly creaky, book-filled office at Cardiff University, Matthew Williams pulls up a blood-red graph on his computer. At first glance you might think it referred to stock market fortunes, but when I peer closely, the sad truth behind its jagged peaks becomes clear: it traces the amount of anti-Black hate speech recorded on Twitter in the aftermath of last Julys Euro 2020 final, when England lost to Italy in a nail-biting penalty shootout.

After missed penalties from three Black England players, Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka, racist abuse went through the roof, says Williams. Within the hour there was an almost 700% increase in hate directed against those players. Half of the 20,000 toxic tweets came from within the UK; the police made 11 arrests for hate crimes, four of which have resulted in prosecutions.

In some ways this is a textbook example of a hate-filled outburst. There was a trigger event and, for many offenders, lots of alcohol and drugs involved. That the abuse trickled off over the following two days is also typical. But the content of the hate directed against the players was new. Alongside familiar racists slurs there was a deluge of primate emojis. Williams calls this a key shift. Weve never seen emojis used as features of hate speech in that way and volume before.

Williams would know: he is a professor of criminology specialising in hate crimes and, along with computer scientist Pete Burnap, is the co-founder of the HateLab, a platform that monitors hate across social media in real time. They are on the frontline of internet hate, observing shifts in behaviour and figuring out who is stirring the fury. They pass their insights on to civil rights organisations, governments and big tech firms who use it to inform counter-hate-speech campaigns, ban users and pursue prosecutions.

An all-seeing eye for the racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic venom that humans spit at one another from behind keyboards, Williams has advised everyone from Twitter, Meta (formerly Facebook), Google and TikTok to the Professional Footballers Association, the UK Home Office and the US Department of Justice.

The 45-year-old has also just published a book that investigates the biological and sociological reasons why people commit hate crimes. The Science of Hate asks big, urgent questions: is everyone capable of hate? Is this the most hateful the world has ever been? And, perhaps most importantly, how can we combat it?

In recent years, hate has felt omnipresent. It is no coincidence that soaring hate-crime figures are found in countries where the extreme right is rising, writes Williams, adding that divisive messages from public figures are directly linked to tipping some people into violence on the streets. The 2016 election of Donald Trump coincided with the biggest rise in hate crimes in the US since 9/11. And the HateLab found there were 1,100 racist attacks committed in the UK as a direct result of the 2016 Brexit referendum result.

In nations with reasonable hate-crime recording standards, such as the UK, US and much of Europe, the data points to an upward trend, says Williams. The internet has amplified the rage by giving people a 24/7 hotline to spurt poisonous views and egg one another on. A 2021 survey found that half of all 12- to 15-year-olds in the UK had encountered hateful content online. Left unchallenged, he writes, the expression of hate has the potential to become more widespread than at any other point in history.

Yet Williams is no doomster. With neatly combed hair, a gently lilting Welsh accent and an easy laugh, he is a surprisingly cheery character given his line of work. He does, however, want to awaken us to the fact that everyone has prejudices You can say you dont but youre lying and, under the right mix of circumstances, has the potential to slide towards hateful behaviour.

Its a sobering thought in a woke era in which were loath to admit any prejudices. But its intended as a rallying cry. Being mindful of our own prejudices helps us keep them in check and understanding how biases work better equips us to de-fang those who peddle hate, especially online.

To keep my faith in humanity I have to constantly remind myself that the majority are not hateful, says Williams. What I hope for is for more of these good citizens to stand up to hatred when they see it, instead of scrolling or walking on.

Williams, who is gay, knows full well how damaging a hate crime can be. In 1998, when he was 20, he was beaten up by three men after leaving a gay bar in London. Their punches were punctuated by snickering and homophobic slurs. The attack shook him. I couldnt get it out of my head: it filled my thoughts until there was no room for anything else, he says. Even today, he wont hold his husbands hand in public for fear of being targeted. Its stayed with me for a long, long time.

It also shaped his career, prompting the then-aspiring journalist to switch to criminology. A key thrust behind the book was to find out what made his attackers do what they did that day. Theres this notion that all hate crime offenders are monsters beyond understanding and that if you dare to try to understand them, you humanise them or in some way provide an excuse for their behaviour, he says. I wanted to find something that really separated me from my attackers, something that was unique about them and different from me.

Instead, his findings showed that he and his attackers were, in all likelihood, remarkably similar in our biology and psychology. The common core? An innate human desire to be part of a group and to favour people we perceive to be like us. Such groupishness is an evolutionary trait: huddling with others increases our chance of survival. And it means that, from a young age, we instinctively view the world through the lens of our group and other folks: us and them.

Our behaviour towards others occupies a spectrum, with unconscious bias at one end, prejudice in the middle and hate at the other extreme. Whereas prejudiced behaviour means avoiding others, hateful acts seek them out in order to hurt them. Theres often a twisted moral element to hate, too, with offenders claiming that the victims group are an affront to their way of life.

Neuroscientific studies suggest bias is mapped on to our brains: the amygdala, a fast but dumb threat detector in our temporal lobe, as Williams puts it, often sounds an alarm when it registers someone who is not like us. The smarter prefrontal cortex then overrules it when it realises there is nothing to worry about (most studies on this relate to race). But research suggests certain individuals can develop an oversized amygdala and a weak executive control centre, meaning they instinctively overreact to threats and then have no reasoning function to calm things down. Statistically, hate offenders are most likely to be young men (and in western countries, white). Williams imagines them to be fearful, angry and powerless.

Traumatic childhoods often set them apart. Many grew up with abusive or absent parents and experienced personal losses, homelessness, drug addictions or other traumas that left them emotionally unstable. Childhood scars can thwart psychological development to a point where normal coping mechanisms are either malfunctioning or absent, he writes.

Williams cites a study from the University of Manchester involving in-depth interviews with 15 young white British men convicted of racial violence. When stressed or triggered, they took out their frustrations on ethnic minorities who they saw as having less power than them, he writes. Race hate provided a convenient home for their unresolved frustrations from past trauma. The racial other was an easy target: hate almost always involves punching down. (For the most extreme type of hate criminal, a mission offender, eliminating other groups is seen as serving a higher purpose. Examples include suicide bombers; the 1999 London nailbomber who targeted gay, black and Bengali communities; and Joseph Paul Franklin, a KKK member who, during the 1970s and 80s, killed more than 20 black people.)

While its human nature to classify us and them, how those lines are drawn is at least theoretically not fixed. Evolution tells us that were not inherently racist or biased against a religion or a sexual orientation, says Williams. That certain groups are consistently targeted for hate is a product of social forces: it is shaped by what we see in the media, what our parents tell us and who we interact with growing up (children who attend mixed-race schools before the age of 12 are less likely to possess race-related bias). And new battle lines are constantly being drawn. Covid has pitted vaxxers and anti-vaxxers against one another, seen a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes and resulted in experts and even the NHS becoming targets of derision.

The unique dynamics of social media can spur people into hateful outbursts. Filter bubbles and algorithms reinforce and deepen prejudices, while anonymous accounts reduce accountability. When sparked by an event whether political vote, terror attack or football game some users temporarily lose their ability to suppress their ingrained biases and take to their keyboards as the mask of civility slips. In whats known as a cascade effect, theyre encouraged by the rush of others doing the same, and the perception that such actions have little or no consequence, says Williams, who is currently busy monitoring a prolonged wave of hate speech against Russians in the wake of the Ukraine invasion.

The most common target for online hate? Women. Misogyny is always the most prevalent category on social media: its a huge problem, says Williams. Its rifeness is partly attributable to the fact that women account for half the population (most other hate victims are minorities), so there are lots of targets, and to a culture of misogyny that festers among incels and other all-male communities. Misogyny would probably attract the highest number of hate-crime prosecutions if it were, in fact, a hate crime.

In the UKs hate crime legislation, sex and gender are not recognised as protected characteristics, so a judge is not compelled to consider misogyny as an aggravating factor in sentencing and police are not required to record it as a hate statistic. Just this February, MPs rejected a proposal to add it as a category due to concerns it could complicate domestic violence and rape prosecutions. Because theres no sort of legal framework there, [anti-women online hate] is probably not policed to any great extent not in the same way anti-black or anti- Muslim or anti-gay rhetoric would be, says Williams.

Who should be accountable for stamping out hate is a thorny issue. While governments and police should be responsible for dealing with the most serious offences, in many places including the US but not the UK hate crimes are woefully under-reported. This is a combination, says Williams, of a lack of police resources (investigating hate crimes requires considerable effort) and lack of trust in police by the most vulnerable members of society.

Online, big tech clearly has a role to play in monitoring content on their sites and banning users who go too far. But sifting through the millions of posts requires vast resources and, as Williams puts it, Theres no money in stopping hate. Theres no thriving marketplace for services that track hate speech and coordinate anti-hate campaigns, meaning organisations doing these things are chronically underfunded and rely on support from government and charities to survive (HateLab is mostly funded by the UKs Economic and Social Research Council and the Alfred Landecker Foundation).

By contrast, There seems to be more profit in generating hate and keeping people on social media by engaging with it, says Williams. As is shown by YouTubes famously addictive algorithm, which draws viewers deeper down a rabbit hole by suggesting ever more extreme content, hate is sticky. Its like not being able to avert your eyes from a car crash. Even so, Williams is optimistic that an anti-hate crusade could bear fruit for businesses concerned with bottom lines. Can you imagine if you could say your platform was free of hate speech? he says. How great would that be for the company but also the profits!

Rather than relying on the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Williams thinks were best placed to take on the responsibility ourselves. First, we need to learn the art of neutralising hate speech. Our instinct, says Williams, is to go in all guns blazing and attack the hate speaker with equally offensive speech sometimes, which surprise, surprise escalates the situation. By contrast, calmly challenging the logic of their claims has proven success.

If they say, All Muslims are terrorists, you say, Hang on a second. Dont you think that if every Muslim was a terrorist, wed have a lot more terror attacks right now? Because theres X many Muslims living in this place.

The quick-witted among us will be pleased to hear that humour and parody can be handy, too. Engaging in a lighthearted way and maybe being a bit sarcastic to highlight the inconsistency of their argument can help the [hate makers] start to interact a bit more, he says. And coordinated efforts whereby a group of users are singing from the same hymn sheet are far more effective than solo missions (a catchy hashtag can help engender a sense of solidarity). Such things need to be taught in schools, he says. We dont have any solid educational guidance on what the best counter speech is.

Combining this knowledge with an eagle eye, we need to start shutting down bile whenever we see it and taking control of our online spaces. Williams has seen examples of this done with success in the past, such as the safety pin campaign in the aftermath of Brexit, whereby every time someone said something racist, a bunch of people would descend on it using the safety-pin hashtag and standing up for migrants.

Williams views Wikipedia as an unlikely North Star. Its a self-regulating system: people pull up information if its false, members of the community flag it and get rid of it. They set their standards of operation. Hes hopeful that we can turn our online spaces into more mature places if counter speakers engage with hate speakers in a sustained, coordinated drive. And en masse. That, I think, will change how these platforms look.

Its not rocket science, but it does require a conscious effort. Start by looking at your own prejudices. Then, armed with a calm mind and perhaps a quip or two, pull up your Twitter, Instagram and TikTok feed. And then, you anti-hate hounds, get sniffing.

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do To Stop It by Matthew Williams is published by Faber & Faber at 9.99. Order a copy from the guardianbookshop.com for 9.29

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Meet the man who wont let the haters win - The Guardian

Young people who support access to abortion chant in front of un-scalable fence that stands around the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on May 5, 2022. JIM WATSON | AFP via Getty Images

After a draft opinion suggested that the Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wade, President Biden and other Democrats called on voters to send more lawmakers who support abortion rights to Washington.

"If the court does overturn Roe, it will fall on our nation's elected officials at all levels of government to protect a woman's right to choose," Biden said in a written statement the day after the draft opinion was reported. "And it will fall on voters to elect pro-choice officials this November."

For Arekia Bennett-Scott, those words fell flat.

"It didn't feel like an urgency for the White House, a fight that they want to, like, get out in front of," she said.

Bennett-Scott is the executive director of Mississippi Votes, a youth advocacy group. Her state's only abortion provider is at the center of the case that could strike down the landmark law that has stood for half a century.

"The rest of the country is going to wake up in Mississippi the day Roe v. Wade is overturned," she said.

With six months to go until November's midterms, key components of the broad, multigenerational coalition of voters that powered Democratic victories in 2018 and 2020 are showing signs of dampened enthusiasm. Some party leaders hope that the prospect of a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade could reenergize them.

"Voters have struggled with a believability gap, with majorities noting that they did not believe Roe was truly at risk," said Laphonza Butler, the head of EMILY's List, a national group that backs women candidates who support abortion rights. "Now that the Supreme Court's pending decision to overturn Roe all together has leaked, we believe voters are galvanized to take action."

Polling shows that most young people oppose completely overturning Roe.

"We have got to connect these generations so that the experiences of pre-Roe v. Wade can be made much more clear and tangible to young voters who haven't lived a time without Roe v. Wade being the law of the land," Butler said.

Nicole Hensel, the executive director of the youth-focused group New Era Colorado, said that while young people haven't lived in a country without Roe, "that doesn't mean that young people don't know what it feels like to live without access to abortion."

"This fight is the ability to control other people's bodies. And that is something that young people are very fearful of and also energized to resist," she added.

But Hensel pointed out that while the prospect of the Supreme Court striking down Roe is launching young people to action that action doesn't always equal voting. It could mean things like protesting, having conversations with family members or people in their communities or getting involved at the local level.

"If we want young people to mobilize for the midterms, then politicians can't pay lip service to these issues. They need to show that they're willing to take bold action," she said.

Hensel said she wants to see the Senate vote to codify abortion rights into law something the Senate plans to hold a vote on next week. The legislation does not have the support to be enacted.

If Roe is overturned, individual states would decide whether abortions would be legal. In Kansas, the right to an abortion is currently protected by the state's constitution. But that could change in August when the state's voters have their say on a constitutional amendment.

"There's a lot of anger and distrust in political institutions right now. But we know that we can't cede that ground," said Melissa Stiehler, the advocacy director for Loud Light, a Kansas-based group focused on engaging young people.

She says young voters are looking for "unapologetic leadership."

"You've got folks who are talking about abortion access, but not even using the word abortion. You have politicians who are claiming that this is an incredibly divisive issue when, time and time again, every poll shows that the majority of voters do not want Roe overturned," she said. "And that is what we're seeing in our future that is more real than ever. These are not hypothetical things."

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Democrats hope abortion will jolt young voters to action in the midterms - Houston Public Media

SLOVIANSK, Ukraine Russias push to give its president a showcase victory in Ukraine appeared to face a new setback on Saturday, as Ukrainian defenders pushed the invaders back toward the northeast border and away from the city of Kharkiv, with the Russians blowing up bridges behind them.

With less than 48 hours before President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia aimed to lead his country in Victory Day celebrations commemorating the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany, the apparent Russian pullback from the area around Kharkiv, Ukraines second-largest city, contradicted the Russian narrative and illustrated the complicated picture along the 300-mile front in eastern Ukraine.

The Russians have been trying to advance in eastern Ukraine for the past few weeks and have been pushing especially hard as Victory Day approaches, but Ukrainian forces armed with new weapons supplied by the United States and other Western nations have been pushing back in a counteroffensive.

The destruction of three bridges by Russian forces, about 12 miles northeast of Kharkiv, reported by the Ukrainian military, suggested that the Russians not only were trying to prevent the Ukrainians from pursuing them, but had no immediate plans to return.

A senior Ukrainian official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the fighting, said Russian forces were destroying bridges not to retreat but because we are pushing them out.

He said the fight for Kharkiv was not over, and that although at the moment we are dominating, Russian forces were trying to regroup and go on the offensive.

Some military analysts said the Russian actions were similar to what Russias military had done last month in a retreat from the city of Chernihiv north of Kyiv.

Frederick W. Kagan, a military historian and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based public policy research group, said Russias strategy near Kharkiv could be an indicator that the order to retreat to somewhere had been given and they were trying to set up a defensive line.

Ukrainian forces have retaken a constellation of towns and villages in the outskirts of Kharkiv this past week, putting them in position to unseat Russian forces from the region and reclaim total control of the city in a matter of days, according to a recent analysis by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research group.

The setback is now forcing the Russian military to choose whether to send reinforcements intended for elsewhere in eastern Ukraine to help defend the positions on the outskirts of Kharkiv, the institute said.

The back-and-forth around Kharkiv is part of a more complex battlefield in eastern Ukraine that has left an increasing number of towns and cities trapped in a gray zone, stuck between Russian and Ukrainian forces, where they are subject to frequent, sometimes indiscriminate, shelling.

The Russian occupiers continue to destroy the civilian infrastructure of the Kharkiv region, the regions governor, Oleh Sinegubov, said in a Telegram post on Saturday, adding that shelling and artillery attacks overnight had targeted several districts, destroying a national museum in the village of Skovorodynivka.

For Russia, perhaps the best example of anything resembling a victory was the long-besieged southeastern port city of Mariupol. Although much of the city has been destroyed by Russian bombardments, there were growing indications on Saturday that Russias control of the city was nearly complete.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defenses intelligence directorate said in a Saturday statement that Russian officers were being moved from combat positions and sent to protect a Russian military parade being planned in Mariupol.

Petro Andrushchenko, an adviser to the city council, posted a series of photos to Telegram on Friday that appeared to show how Russian forces were restoring monuments of the Soviet period across the city.

One image appeared to show a Russian flag flying above an intensive care hospital. Another image, posted on Thursday, showed municipal workers replacing Ukrainian road signs with signs in Russian script. The images could not be verified.

On Friday, 50 people were evacuated from the citys Azovstal steel plant, the final holdout of Ukrainian forces and a group of civilians in the city. Three Ukrainian soldiers were killed on Friday during an attempt to evacuate civilians from the plant, said Mikhailo Vershinin, the chief of the citys patrol police.

Mr. Vershinin, who was at the plant, said via a messaging app on Saturday that a rocket and a grenade were to blame. Six were wounded, some seriously, he said, and in the factorys makeshift hospital, there is no medicine, no anesthesia, no antibiotics and they may die.

Both Ukrainian and Russian officials said Saturday that all civilian evacuations from the Mariupol factory had been completed.

There was no immediate confirmation from the Red Cross or United Nations, which have been helping to coordinate recent evacuations from the factory. A spokeswoman for the Red Cross said earlier on Saturday that efforts to evacuate the remaining civilians were ongoing.

Elsewhere, Russia launched six missile strikes on Saturday aimed at Odesa, Ukraines Black Sea port, according to the city council. Four hit a furniture company and destroyed two high-rise buildings in the blast, and two missiles were fired on the citys airport, which already had been rendered inoperable by a Russian missile that knocked out its runway last week.

The goal of Russian forces for now at least appears to be seizing as much of the eastern Ukrainian region known as the Donbas as possible, by expelling Ukrainian forces that have been fighting Russian-backed separatists for years in the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. Since Russias invasion began on Feb. 24, about 80 percent of those two provinces have fallen under the Kremlins control.

The regional governor of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, Serhiy Haidai, said on Facebook on Saturday that a Russian bomb hit a school in the village of Bilogorivka where about 90 people had taken shelter. About 30 people have been rescued so far, he said. The bodies of at least two people were recovered from the rubble, according to Ukraines State Emergency Service. Rescue operations were suspended on Saturday night and were to resume on Sunday, officials said.

Russian forces are trying to break through Ukrainian lines and encircle troops defending the area around the eastern city of Sievierodonetsk but are for now being held in check, Mr. Haidai said on Saturday.

It is a war, so anything can happen, but for now the situation is difficult but under control, Mr. Haidai said in a telephone interview. They have broken through in some places and these areas are being reinforced.

The Russians seemed unlikely to successfully surround the town, according to the latest update from the Institute for the Study of War.

The apparent aim of Russias military is to seize Sievierodonetsk or cut it off from the bulk of Ukrainian forces fighting in the east, and continue a push south to the major industrial city of Kramatorsk.

Mr. Haidai said Russias military had deployed units with better training and more combat experience than the Russian soldiers who were initially thrown into the invasion.

In the beginning, they sent in newly mobilized soldiers from occupied territory, he said. But they cant fight. They arent dressed in flack jackets. And so they just died by the dozen or the hundred. But theyre running out of these.

Mr. Haidai said he had urged anyone who could to evacuate, but that about 15,000 people remained in Sievierodonetsk. Some, he said, are older and want to die in the place where they were born.

By contrast in the capital, Kyiv, and much of the countrys west, the atmosphere seemed worlds away from the constant bombardment of the war despite the occasional and unpredictable Russian missile strikes. Cars have returned to Kyivs streets and people living there have resumed some semblance of their normal routines.

In an apparent concern over complacency, President Volodymyr Zelensky reminded residents to heed local curfews and take air raid sirens seriously.

Please, this is your life, the life of your children, he implored Ukrainians in an overnight address.

Residents of towns and villages in the countrys east have often been shaken awake with bomb attacks, typically between 4 and 5 a.m.

On Saturday morning, the small village of Malotaranivka became a target. A bomb struck at about 4:15 a.m., blasting apart homes and a small bakery, leaving a crater at least 15 feet deep and a wide radius of destruction. While no one was killed, residents expressed fury at the Russians.

What kind of military target is this? said Tatyana Ostakhova, 38, speaking through the gaping hole in her goddaughters apartment where she was helping to clean up. A store that bakes bread so people dont die of hunger?

Such strikes have occurred with more frequency in the prelude to Victory Day in Russia, which Mr. Putin was expected to use as a platform for some kind of announcement about what he has called the special military operation in Ukraine.

Its like were in a dream, said Svetlana Golochenko, 43, who was cleaning up the remnants of her sons house. Its hard to imagine that this is happening to us.

Malotaranivka is a small village of single-family homes and wood-framed apartment buildings about eight miles from Kramatorsk. Residents said that aside from a few checkpoints there was no military presence in the area, making the bombings by Russians even more incomprehensible.

Who knows what they have in their empty heads, said Artur Serdyuk, 38, who was covered in dust and smoking a cigarette after spending the morning cleaning up what was left of his home.

Mr. Serdyuk said he had just returned to bed after going out for a middle-of-the-night cigarette when the explosion hit. The blast blew the roof off his home and incinerated his outhouse, leaving nothing but a roll of toilet paper sitting in a pile of dust near the hole for the latrine.

His neighbors home was opened like a dollhouse, allowing a reporter to peer into the remains of the kitchen decorated with wallpaper featuring green peacocks.

Michael Schwirtz reported from Sloviansk, and Cora Engelbrecht and Megan Specia reported from London. Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting from Tbilisi, Georgia.

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Heres What Happened on Day 73 of the War in Ukraine - The New York Times

Confirmed cases of COVID-19 have passed 517.3 million globally, according to Johns Hopkins University. The number of confirmed deaths has now passed 6.25 million. More than 11.65 billion vaccination doses have been administered globally, according to Our World in Data.

The Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention has urged those purchasing COVID-19 vaccines to place orders with South Africa's Aspen Pharmacare.

The European Union's drug regulator says it hopes to approve COVID-19 variant-adapted vaccines by September.

Major US airlines, businesses and travel groups have urged the US government to abandon COVID-19 pre-departure testing requirements for vaccinated international passengers traveling to the US.

It comes as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended travelers continue to wear masks on airplanes, trains and in airports.

Colombia will offer a second COVID-19 vaccine booster shot to those aged 50 and over, the government announced last week.

Infection with the Omicron variant of COVID-19 can significantly improve the immune system's ability to protect against other variants, but only in people who have been vaccinated, South African researchers have found.

The first World Trade Organization meeting to discuss a draft agreement to temporarily waive intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines went "very well", its chair said on 6 May, although some members voiced reservations.

China is setting up thousands of permanent PCR testing stations, with 9,000 completed in Shanghai alone already.

Daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases per million people in selected countries.

Image: Our World in Data

The COVID Response Alliance to Social Entrepreneurs - soon to continue its work as the Global Alliance for Social Entrepreneurship - was launched in April 2020 in response to the devastating effects of the pandemic. Co-founded by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship together with Ashoka, Echoing Green, GHR Foundation, Skoll Foundation, and Yunus Social Business.

The Alliance provides a trusted community for the worlds leading corporations, investors, governments, intermediaries, academics, and media who share a commitment to social entrepreneurship and innovation.

Since its inception, it has since grown to become the largest multi-stakeholder coalition in the social enterprise sector: its 90+ members collectively support over 100,000 social entrepreneurs across the world. These entrepreneurs, in turn, have a direct or indirect impact on the lives of an estimated 2 billion people.

Together, they work to (i) mobilize support for social entrepreneurs and their agendas; (ii) take action on urgent global agendas using the power of social entrepreneurship, and (iii) share insights from the sector so that social entrepreneurs can flourish and lead the way in shaping an inclusive, just and sustainable world.

The Alliance works closely together with member organizations Echoing Green and GHR Foundation, as well as the Centre for the New Economy and Society on the roll out of its 2022 roadmap (soon to be announced).

New WHO estimates suggest that the full death toll associated directly or indirectly with the COVID-19 pandemic (the "excess mortality") between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021 was approximately 14.9 million.

These sobering data not only point to the impact of the pandemic but also to the need for all countries to invest in more resilient health systems that can sustain essential health services during crises, including stronger health information systems, said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. WHO is committed to working with all countries to strengthen their health information systems to generate better data for better decisions and better outcomes."

Excess mortality is calculated as the difference between the number of deaths that have occurred and the number that would be expected in the absence of the pandemic based on data from earlier years.

COVID-19 cases in the Americas have continued to rise, notably in Central and North America, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said on 4 May.

The Americas reported more than 616,000 new cases in the week beginning 25 April, while the death toll was down by less than 1% in the same comparison to 4,200, the organization said.

PAHO's director, Dr. Carissa F. Etienne, called for stronger measures to tackle the pandemic as cases and hospitalizations rise.

"COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are rising in far too many places, which should prompt us to strengthen our measures to combat the virus, including surveillance and preparedness," Etienne told a news conference.

"We must reach those who remain unvaccinated with the full COVID-19 vaccine primary series, and ensure access to boosters, especially to the most vulnerable," she added.

Written by

Joe Myers, Writer, Formative Content

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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COVID-19: What you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic - World Economic Forum