Europe struggling a year into COVID-19 pandemic
By Christina Boyle, Erik Kirschbaum and Laura King
Los Angeles Times/TNS
LONDON - A year after COVID-19 began its devastating march across Europe, reversals of fortune, political quarrels and vexing public-health paradoxes are complicating efforts to contain a deadly third wave of contagion.
Germany, widely touted as a success story last year in the outbreak s initial months, is struggling with a sluggish vaccine rollout, soaring deaths and widespread discontent, while Britain, whose early coronavirus response was criticized as haphazard, has inoculated more than a fifth of its population.
France is watching with alarm as a new variant gains a foothold in the country s east. In Italy, ravaged in the pandemic s early months, a new government is raising hackles with the prospect of tightened health measures. Portugal, which fared relatively well last year while the caseload soared in neighboring Spain, now has one of the world s hig
Germany and US eye extremist movements
By Erik Kirschbaum and Laura King
Los Angeles Times/TNS
BERLIN - In the heart of the capital, the crowd was amped up and angry, shouting hoarsely that the people had been betrayed. Brandishing smartphones and waving flags emblazoned with far-right symbols, a breakaway faction from a larger protest shoved aside barriers and scrambled up stone steps leading to the country’s best-known symbol of its democracy, the seat of government.
Just over four months before a mob overran the U.S. Capitol, triggering the second Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, Germany was shaken by chaotic scenes outside its own parliament building, the Reichstag. The country’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, called the spectacle an “unbearable attack on the heart of our democracy.”
FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA
Protesters storm the Capitol and halt a joint session of the 117th Congress, Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/TNS)
‘This is not America’: World gapes in horror at pro-Trump attack on Capitol
By Shashank Bengali, Kate Linthicum and Erik Kirschbaum, Los Angeles Times, (TNS)
SINGAPORE For four years, the world has watched with surprise, horror and in some places glee as President Donald Trump battered one democratic norm after another, exposing the so-called leader of the free world as just another troubled and deeply divided nation.
Still, the planet was little prepared for the stunning scenes Wednesday, when a pro-Trump mob, some flying Confederate flags, stormed the U.S. Capitol to disrupt a congressional vote certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral victory.