President Trump has announced a program to speed up the development of a vaccine against Covid-19. He said the program named "Operation Warp Speed" aimed to develop, produce and distribute a safe vaccine as fast as possible. He called it the biggest cross-government project the United States had undertaken since it developed nuclear weapons.
Brazil's Health Minister Nelson Teich has resigned after less a month in the job, following disagreements about the government's handling of the coronavirus crisis. He told reporters that he'd done his best to help the country deal with the pandemic.
The British government has denied that travelers from France will be exempted from quarantine measures it plans to introduce to prevent further cases of the pandemic. A joint statement by London and Paris on Monday said the quarantine would not apply to travelers coming from France.
The city authorities in Moscow have launched a mass screening program to tackle one of the world's worst ongoing outbreaks of the virus. More than 30 clinics are collecting blood samples from residents summoned at random by text message.
In other news, the European Union has indicated that it will try to stop a possible Israeli annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank. Donald Trump's peace proposals for the region envisage Israeli annexation of tracks of the territory.
Zimbabwe's second-biggest city Bulawayo has limited access to tap water to one day a week, as the country faces its worst drought in years. Reservoirs have sunk to dangerously low levels.
Astrid Kirchherr, the photographer whose pictures of the Beatles turned them into icons, has died in Germany at the age of 81. She took the first photo of the band in Hamburg in 1962 and is also credited with giving the Beatles their mop top hair styles.
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