 Hello and welcome to the International Daily Roundup with People's Dispatch where we bring you some of the top stories from across the globe. Let's take a look at today's headlines. Amnesty report documents violence against migrants by Greek border forces. US seizes Iranian and other news websites claiming disinformation. Republican lawmakers blocked key voting rights bill in the US Senate and in a video section we take a look at the COVID-19 Delta variant and the urgent need for vaccine equity. A new report by Amnesty has documented abuses against migrants and refugees by Greek border forces. It focuses on unlawful operations at the border between Turkey and Greece at the Evros region. These actions are in violation of EU and international law. The report documents 21 incidents of abuse and push-packs between June and December 2020. Its findings are based on the testimonies of 16 people. Violence was carried out by uniform Greek forces and men in civilian clothing. It included beatings with truncheons, slaps and pushes leading to severe injuries in some cases. Men were also often subjected to humiliating naked searches. People were also detained for hours without registration or lawyers present. Testimonies indicate that Greece used both official as well as unofficial detention sites. Moreover, four people who had a registered protected status or had been in the country for some time were apprehended in the mainland. Amnesty has stated that push-packs are Greece's de facto border policy and have affected around a thousand people. One person stated that they were forced off the border during a return operation and was stranded in the water for days. Amnesty has argued that these acts of violence could amount to torture or inhumane or degrading treatment. There have also been instances of violence by Turkish officials. A new report by Human Rights Watch has also shown the complicity of the European Union's border agency in these abuses. The agency known as Frontex has actively concealed and supported push-packs of migrants. Its operations in Greece is the largest with around 600 officers. Several rights groups and news agencies have been documenting violent and unlawful push-packs for years. Incidents have also been reported from Hungary and Croatia. However, Frontex has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. The year's government seized 36 news websites on June 22nd among these were Iran's state-owned press TV and its Arabic version Al-Alam. Others included Al-Masihra controlled by Yemen's Houthis and Palestine today. The pages of the seized websites now display a notice citing U.S. sanctioned laws and official seals of justice and commerce departments. The Justice Department stated that the websites were taken down due to the efforts to spread disinformation. There have also been accused of sowing discord among Americans. Over a hundred domains were also seized by the U.S. in October 2020 based on similar allegations of disinformation. The actions have been widely condemned as an attempt to censor the press. Some have also seen the move as a deliberate provocation leading to fears of rising hostilities between the U.S. and Iran. This is important especially against the backdrop of the ongoing nuclear deal talks in Vienna. Iran has maintained that it will return to full compliance only once the U.S. revokes all sanctions. Other parties to the nuclear deal have indicated promising outcomes following six rounds of talks. However, Iran's press TV cited sources on June 22nd stating that the U.S. has so far refused to remove all sanctions. These include arms, embargo and sanctions on oil, banking and transportation. Meanwhile, Iran's president Elect Ibrahim Raisi has also backed the ongoing nuclear talks. However, he has stated that he will not meet President Biden. Republican members of the U.S. Senate have blocked a major voting rights bill. The 100-member body held a vote to advance the Fourth People Act on June 22nd. The legislation needed 60 votes to be tabled for debate. However, all 50 Republican senators voted against the action. The bill was introduced at a time when an increasing number of states are passing restrictive voting laws. According to the Voting Rights Lab, 18 states have enacted over 30 laws considered to be anti-water. These laws expand the definition of criminal behavior by voters and election officials. For example, an act recently passed in Georgia makes it illegal to approach voters waiting in line with food or water. Other restrictions affect voter registration and mail-in voting. In total, these restrictions affect 36 million people of 15% of all eligible voters. A lot of these laws were passed after a Republican former President Donald Trump lost the election in November 2020. The Fourth People Act included provisions such as guarantees for early and mail-in voting and an automatic voter registration system. It also included additional disclosures for fundraising and political donors. It would have limited the ability of states to redistribute areas without federal approval. It also set up new ethics rules for federal posts including the Supreme Court and the presidency. The legislation was passed in a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives in March, with a majority vote of 220 to 210. And for a final story, we look at the latest in the COVID-19 pandemic. India's Health Ministry announced on June 23rd that around 40 cases of the Delta Plus variant had been detected. It is closely linked to the Delta variant, which has been classified as a variant of concern by the WHO. It is characterized by high transmissibility and a growing number of associated outbreaks. The Delta variant has been projected to account for 90% of all cases in the European Union by August. However, 57% of adults in Europe have received at least one dose. Some countries do not have enough supplies to vaccinate even 1% of the population. The G7 countries have now announced that 1 billion doses will be donated to poor countries by 2022. However, such donations do little to account for logistical issues such as limited infrastructure moreover the WHO has stated that 11 billion doses are needed to vaccinate at least 70% of the world. Health experts have also warned that low vaccine rates could soon lead to vaccine-resistant variants. Here is Dr Satyajit Rath to talk more about this issue. The loss of potency of last year's strain-based vaccines for this year's variants is not very high. It is not a lot of loss of potency. So, is there some loss? Yes, but it is moderate loss. And what that means is that because we all seem to be making a lot of antibody, both with natural infection and with vaccination, some amount of loss of potency will still provide us with pretty good protection. That is what the current evidence is. So, let me give you an actual real-life example of what this moderate loss of potency is. If we take Kovishiv as the vaccine, these are data I am quoting from the UK because, again, there is an intensive data collection which India does not seem to be doing very well, sadly. But if we take Kovishiv, last year's strains were protected quite well against by one dose of Kovishiv. The second dose improved matters, sure. But one dose also did a pretty good job. For the delta variant, one dose does a much worse job. The second dose, which increases antibody levels, now does a pretty good job because, as I said, the increase in the amount of antibodies compensates for the small loss of potency. And this is what I mean by a real-life consequence of this. So, do I think that all of these variants are losing, are a little bit vaccine resistant? Yes. Do I think that that means that these vaccines, current vaccines are useless against the variants? Not at all. They are pretty useful. And in order to appreciate that pretty useful, the second point that we need to keep in mind is that very low levels of antibodies still protect quite well against severe illness and death. Whereas, protecting against infection and transmission requires, seems to require even higher levels of antibodies. So, a loss of potency is first going to affect transmission. It is going to allow transmission. But it is not going to start sending people to hospital and killing people. And in that sense, also, we need to wrap our heads around the fact that these are going to be nuanced situations with multiple factors and dimensions to be considered when we think about public policy responses. The final point I'm going to make, and I'm going to make that because you raised the point of global equity. And I would actually point out that we in India should think about domestic equity between rural and urban and well-off and poor India as well for vaccination equity purposes. But here's the point. As we begin to vaccinate people more and more, if we do this slowly, then because of the lack of equity, what we are going to have geographically is populations with a lot of, with very high vaccination percentage, living very close to populations that have very low vaccination percentage. And we can imagine that this is a rich population and this is a working class poor population. The virus will be circulating in this population, but it will be testing. The variant variations will be tested against a vaccinated population. We are inviting by due to a lack of equity, due to a lack of social conscience, we are inviting a relatively earlier emergence of genuinely vaccine-resistant rate. The point is that we need to vaccinate widely and equitably in order to do two things simultaneously. We need to increase the proportion of vaccinated people and in those communities decrease the amount of circulating virus. And this needs to be done equitably and rapidly, equitably in a statistical sense, meaning uniformly across communities and rapidly, rather than creating islands of haves and have-nots in vaccine terms. Under those circumstances, the world doesn't seem to be getting anywhere near this perspective. Clearly, the rich countries have vaccinated themselves to the extent that their communities are willing to accept vaccination. They have an astonishing degree of anti-science irrational vaccine rejection, not to speak of hesitancy or apathy. But a consequence is going to be that we are going to keep doing this in patches rather than uniformly. And we are going to be doing this slowly. And that is all we have for this episode of the International Daily Roundup for more such stories and videos. Visit our website, peoplesisphage.org, subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Thank you for watching.