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EU rejects Putin call for Gerhard Schröder role in Ukraine peace talks

The EU on Monday dismissed Vladimir Putin’s suggestion that the Kremlin-friendly former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder could serve as a European mediator in peace talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine. Over the weekend, the Russian leader put forward Schröder – a longtime ally – as a possible figure to help restart talks with Europe, saying he would “personally” favour the former German leader for the role. Schröder, 82, previously held senior positions in Russian energy projects, including work on the Nord Stream gas pipelines and a seat on the board of Russian oil company Rosneft. He stepped down from the role several months after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine under mounting pressure, but has never explicitly condemned Putin over the invasion. Responding to the proposal, Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, told journalists in Brussels before a meeting of foreign ministers: “First, if we give Russia the right to appoint a negotiator on our behalf, that would not be very wise.” Kallas added that Schröder could not be considered an impartial mediator given his past work as a “high-level lobbyist for Russian state-owned companies”. “It is clear why Putin wants him to be the person, so that actually he would be sitting on both sides of the table,” she said. Putin’s surprise pitch comes as the Russian president suggested the conflict in Ukraine could be drawing to a close – a rare instance in which Putin appeared to hint at a possible timeline for ending the invasion. But Putin’s top advisers have stressed that the Kremlin continues to demand that Ukraine withdraw its troops from the eastern Donbas region as a precondition for future negotiations. The Russian president remains determined to seize the remaining parts of the region by force this year before any serious talks begin, people familiar with his thinking told the Guardian. Ukraine has flatly rejected any suggestion it would unilaterally withdraw from its own territory, a position bolstered by recent battlefield dynamics in which Russian advances have largely ground to a halt. The two armies are showing mounting signs of exhaustion and continuing to sustain heavy casualties, while trading strikes on each other’s energy infrastructure. Against that backdrop, analysts say a diplomatic breakthrough is unlikely. A US-brokered ceasefire is due to expire on Tuesday and Moscow has rejected prolonging the truce. But EU leaders have in recent months stepped up efforts to secure the bloc a seat at the table in any future substantive peace negotiations. European capitals have long insisted that no discussions or decisions about Ukraine should take place without Kyiv’s involvement. Many across the continent now fear that talks between the US, Russia and Ukraine aimed at ending the more than four-year-long war have made little progress, while leaving the EU increasingly sidelined and vulnerable to pressure to accept a deal it does not support. There is little prospect of Schröder emerging as Europe’s representative with the Kremlin. Schröder’s record of defending Moscow has repeatedly put him at odds with mainstream European opinion. After evidence of mass killings emerged in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha in April 2022, he said he did not believe the massacre had been ordered by the Kremlin. Germany’s Europe minister, Gunther Krichbaum, said that Schröder “has not necessarily demonstrated in the past that he could act as a neutral mediator, as an honest broker, so to speak,” as he was “heavily influenced” by Putin. “Close friendships may be legitimate everywhere in the world, but they don’t contribute to being perceived as an honest negotiating partner.” Margus Tsahkna, Estonia’s foreign minister, said: “Gerhard Schröder is Putin’s idea. I think they are very close. Gerhard Schröder will not be representing Europe.” Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian politics, described the suggestion as a “classic Putin idea”. “He tries to sound reasonable, but frames any potential dialogue in terms most comfortable to him,” Galeotti told Times Radio. Schröder has not publicly commented on the idea.

EU’s Kallas criticises Putin’s ‘very cynical’ Ukraine ceasefire calls and rejects suggestion of Schröder as mediator – Europe live

Meanwhile, the European Union has imposed sanctions on 16 individuals and seven entities in Russia for systematic unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children. It is estimated that Russia “have deported and forcibly transferred nearly 20 500 Ukrainian children,” the statement said. In a statement, the council said the decision “targets those responsible for the systematic unlawful deportation, forced transfer, forced assimilation, including indoctrination and militarised education, of Ukrainian minors, as well as their unlawful adoption and removal to the Russian Federation.” The sanctioned entities include “federal state institutions” from Russia and officials and politicians from territories occupied by Russia. “Those listed today are subject to an asset freeze, and EU citizens and companies are forbidden from making funds, financial assets or economic resources available to them. Natural persons are additionally subject to a travel ban that prohibits them from entering or transiting through EU territories.” The move comes just hours before a separate discussion on the issue of Ukrainian children this afternoon.

‘Truly terrifying’: Alberta voter data breach raises fears for Canada’s electoral integrity

The illegal use of voter information by rightwing separatists in the province of Alberta has raised fresh fears over Canada’s electoral integrity by making valuable and “incredibly confidential” personal data easily accessible to malicious actors, security experts have warned. The data breach, one of the largest in Canadian history, has prompted warnings of a “truly terrifying” new battleground over information, persuasion and foreign interference in already weakened democratic systems. Activists in the oil-rich province have in recent months increased their effort to force an independence referendum. But debates over secession – already rife with accusations of treason and internecine feuding – have been overshadowed by revelations that a separatist-linked organization gained illegal access to Alberta’s official list of electors. The database contains the names, home addresses and contact information for roughly 2.9 million voters. Elections Alberta, the body that administers the vote in the province, says it has launched an investigation into how how a far-right group was able to access the database and use it for a campaign to reach voters. Separatist leaders recently unveiled an initiative using data-driven campaigning and grassroots mobilization to connect with voters. During an online meeting with supporters, Centurion Project organizer Emmott Kelsey told attendees the app would “revolutionize” how campaigns are run. He boasted that the software underpinning it is “so groundbreaking” that it had been presented to Donald Trump’s White House. “And we’re kind of the guinea pigs with it,” he said. The Guardian asked Kelsey to clarify his remarks but did not receive a response. One of the key figures of the Centurion Project is David Parker, a veteran Alberta political organizer with deep ties to the separatist movement, and to US MAGA activists and far-right figures such as Tucker Carlson. Parker has previously faced hefty fines from Elections Alberta over violations of voting laws. “Parker is a shockingly effective political organizer. What he was doing was attempting to create a digital grassroots organizational tool. And on its face, there’s nothing wrong with that,” said Jen Gerson, an Alberta-based journalist. “But in order to populate the app that underlies the Centurion Project, he needed data.” In March, Gerson was tipped off that the Centurion Project had obtained a copy of the province’s voter list. Her source said they had been able to access the Centurion Project’s database without using their real name name or any traceable personal information. Gerson said the absence of any security or protection was astounding. “Anybody with a burner account and no credentials could then access the file and potentially download information from it,” she said. “If you knew about it, you could anonymously access the entire data root file.” Gerson reported her concerns to Elections Alberta in late March. But the oversight body responded that while her report was “compelling”, Parker could have obtained the list legally from a data broker and concluded there were “no reasonable grounds” to investigate. A month later, however, EA obtained a court order to shut the database down and launched an investigation. Canada’s federal police, the RCMP, and Alberta privacy commissioner are also investigating the breach. In order to prevent the improper sharing of voter lists, EA “seeds” voter lists with fake names, and the body was able to confirm that the CP list had originally been provided legally to the Republican party of Alberta, a fringe rightwing party, and then improperly shared. The party said it had told Centurion Project not to use the data but did not say if the list had come from within the party. “We were proactive on that before the injunction today, and we’ll be fully complying with Elections Alberta,” leader Cam Davies told the Canadian Press. The provincial government has blamed the elections agency for failing to investigate the breach when first notified. But EA says the provincial government weakened its investigative powers last year. Elections Alberta says nearly 600 people accessed the voter list which it described as “incredibly confidential”, adding in a statement that it understood Albertans were “unhappy, scared and anxious” about the situation. “We have heard countless stories about the risks people face having their information made public, including stories from domestic violence survivors, law enforcement, marginalized communities, and more,” the group said, calling on the government to amend existing laws to prevent a similar breach in the future. Parker has denied that he used the Republican Party voter list and suggested the database was compiled from a third party. “We have taken action to shut down the app until we can ensure that the dataset is compliant with Alberta and Federal privacy laws. The Centurion Project plans to fully comply with Elections Alberta’s investigation,” Parker said in a statement. In the statement, Parker said volunteers with the Centurion Project “did not have access to phone numbers or emails” and the dataset was from a third party. But during an online demonstration of the database for volunteers at an April 16 event , Parker showed how the personal information of any voter could be found on the database. One witness at the event – a member of the opposition NDP – was shocked when Parker pulled up the home address and phone number of Alberta’s former premier Jason Kenney. That witness then filed a report with the police. Kenney has said he is hiring a lawyer for advice, warning that the breach may affect domestic violence survivors, journalists, activists, judges, and other public servants for years to come. “This has been a real wake up call to the risks that we’re playing with here. We have to assume that all of our personal information and address are potentially available to bad actors,” said Gerson. “People are very angry and they’re very scared. But if you don’t want these guys in your house, why are you even thinking about letting them run your country?” The leak has become a political flashpoint in Alberta, but the efforts to subvert election and privacy laws expose the immense value in voter lists and mirror a similar battle unfolding in the US. In recent months, the US department of justice has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for failing to turn over full copies of their voter registration lists. States, including some controlled by Republicans, have pushed back, citing constitutionally guaranteed authority over election administration and worries over data security and privacy laws. Voting rights groups have sued the Trump administration over the requests for voter rolls, accusing it of laying the groundwork for voter purges ahead of the November midterms. “Data is a major force in modern politics, especially in the ways it can be leveraged. Powerful actors and authoritarian regimes are very creative and have real designs on taking apart the last remaining liberal democracy in North America,” said Patrick Lennox, former manager of criminal intelligence for the RCMP’s federal policing programs in Alberta. “Since Trump came back into power, he has destabilized that democracy to the point where I don’t think you can legitimately call it a democracy any more … And I worry that’s exactly what the play is in Alberta.” The Centurion Project has not said which company developed the underlying software it relies on, but sources familiar with the investigation say the company is based in the United States. When asked for comment by the Guardian, the company did not respond. Lennox warned that if the file was stored without proper protections, it could be captured by American data brokers who are governed by less stringent privacy laws than in Canada. The breach also comes as the Trump administration has threatened to subjugate Canada and signalled its support for Alberta’s separatists. “It’s not like the Americans will put put in digital sovereignty precautions for the voter list,” he said. “Because it’s important to remember: the United States is also trying to break our country.” Washington is not the only outside actor paying close attention to Alberta’s secession movement. Researchers recently warned that the province is being targeted by covert influence campaigns run by countries such as Russia and China. The Global Centre for Democratic Resilience, the University of Regina and DisinfoWatch recently documented the scope of foreign interference campaigns alongside the proliferation of AI-generated videos and the threat over threats and interference from Donald Trump and his allies. Brian McQuinn, co-director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Data, and Conflict at the University of Regina pointed out that before Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, researchers documented a spike in discussions about sovereignty in the country. “There was this narrative that it was not actually its own sovereign country, that it’s just this sort of mistake of history. This is the exact same language the Americans are using around Canada,” he said. Covert meetings between separatist activists in the Canadian province of Alberta and members of Donald Trump’s administration have already roiled the province. “The Americans would like us to be as weak as possible – and a separation movement that harms us in negotiations is obviously really important,” said McQuinn. “They are advancing their own interests around this, when it comes to trade, when it just comes to weakening us in any way they can.”

Researchers find 42% drop in Canadians visiting US metro areas amid Trump 2.0

A new research tool that tracks cell phone activity has found a 42% drop in visitors from Canada to big metropolitan areas in the US that is much higher than official border-crossing data, suggesting Canadians during the second Trump administration are avoiding US cities in particular. Researchers from the University of Toronto said the tool showed a “year-over-year median decline of approximately 42% in Canadian visits to US metropolitan areas – significantly higher than official border-crossing data, which showed a roughly 25% decline”. The economies of US border towns reliant on Canadian traffic have been slammed as their northerly neighbours think twice about travelling to the US, put off by immigration enforcement operations and border crackdowns, and anger at Donald Trump’s tariffs and his threats of making Canada “the 51st state”. But the researchers said that their data also showed steep declines in Canadian visitors to cities, in states such as New York, New Hampshire and Vermont. It also found declines to major tourist destinations such as Las Vegas and Walt Disney World, and to winter recreation areas, including in Florida – typically a central destination for overwintering Canadians. The researchers analyzed Canadian devices travelling to US metro areas between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2026. As potential explanations of why the 42% figure is so much higher than border crossing estimates, they noted that cell phone data also captured freight traffic, which border crossings do not, and could also track changes in Canadians previously living in the US who left. On the blog that accompanies the tool, the researchers said they were struck by “the marked decline in visits to large metropolitan economies”. “High-tech and financial centers like San Francisco and Houston appear to be experiencing reductions not only in tourists but also in business-related travel, reflecting changing travel preferences due to broader economic uncertainties on both sides of the border,” they wrote. Karen Chapple, director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto and a co-author of the report, said one finding that popped out to her immediately was the decline in travel to Grand Rapids, Michigan, a city with “deep economic connections with Ontario because of the auto industry”. “There used to be a lot of back and forth between the two places” for work purposes, Chapple said. Since the US imposed tariffs on some Canadian goods including vehicles, however, fewer Canadians appeared to be travelling there. The researchers also noted that their data measured “not only Canadians crossing the border, but also Canadians living temporarily in the US, suggesting that the decrease in activity may reflect return migration to Canada”. According to data from the Canadian government, the number of Canadian-resident return trips from the US was down 25% in 2025, while the number of trips to Canada by US residents also decreased, albeit by 7.5%.

Disappearances in Mexico involving state at ‘alarming’ rate, says report

State actors are involved in disappearances in Mexico at an “alarming” rate, according to a report from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). The sweeping investigation, to which the Guardian was given exclusive access, presents a dire picture of the crisis of disappearances in Mexico, where more than 130,000 people have gone missing, mostly in the last 20 years since the government declared its war on drug cartels. While criminal gangs are responsible for the vast majority of disappearances, the IACHR report found that “many of the disappearances committed by organised crime occur in deep collusion and coordination with state agents”. Meanwhile, “disappearances committed [directly] by state agents have not yet been eradicated”, the report reads, noting that, in some parts of the country, at times there were almost as many disappearances carried out by government officials as there were by criminals. The report also described an “alarming” number of cases involving “torture, forced disappearances and disappearances which include state security actors”. Forced disappearance – where a person is detained, extrajudicially killed by the state and their body then destroyed or hidden – has a long history in Mexico, going back to the country’s so-called dirty war of the 1960s and 70s where dissidents were even thrown out of planes and into the Pacific Ocean. In more recent years, the tactic has been adopted by organised crime groups to sow terror in local communities, intimidate rivals or erase evidence of homicides by burning bodies, burying them in mass graves or dissolving them in vats of acid. In the last 10 years, disappearances have increased by more than 200%. However, as the IACHR report makes clear, state actors are often involved, either directly by snatching people from their homes or cars without warrants and handing them off to criminal groups, or indirectly by looking the other way as these crimes take place. The IACHR also found that “organised crime in Mexico recruits state agents in charge of security tasks, law enforcement, and even political authorities”. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and her government have repeatedly rejected such assertions. When the United Nations intimated last year that there was possible evidence of enforced disappearance in Mexico “being practised on a widespread or systematic basis”, Sheinbaum did not mince words. “In Mexico there is no forced disappearance by the state,” the president said during a press conference. “We have fought against that all our lives; that does not exist in Mexico.” When the UN last month stated that there were “indications that enforced disappearances in Mexico have been and continue to be committed as crimes against humanity”, the Mexican government was equally prickly, rejecting the report as “biased and dismissive”. Activists say this is part of a wider effort to underplay the seriousness of the issue. In March, the authorities presented a report suggesting that a third of disappearance cases lacked sufficient data to be found, in effect washing their hands of about 40,000 missing people. “They were trying to minimise the scale of the problem and put the responsibility on families to carry out the search,” said Maria Luisa Aguilar Rodríguez, the head of the Centro Prodh human rights centre. This too is a critical issue according to the IACHR, which said: “Given the magnitude of disappearances and the meagre state response, it has been the families themselves who have organised into collectives to search for their loved ones. As a result, they face a series of institutional challenges and risk their lives.” Chillingly, the report describes how “disappearance affects entire families in Mexico, several of whom have lost almost all their relatives because of this crime, or by searching for them, other family members have also been disappeared or killed”. Since 2010, at least 27 people who were looking for lost family members have been killed, most of them mothers. The IACHR report did recognise that, in the last few years, the Mexican government had “adopted a series of actions to confront disappearances”, including reactivating the National Search Commission to find the missing, and recognising the problem as a humanitarian crisis. But the country continues to grapple with a forensics fiasco; there are 70,000 dead bodies in state custody that are yet to be identified, according to the report. Meanwhile, Mexico’s feeble justice system has been unable to meet the demands of such a catastrophic crisis. “Impunity in Mexico is an insurmountable problem,” the IACHR said. Since 2014, just 357 people have been charged with the crime of disappearance or enforced disappearance and of those, just nine have been convicted. “The numbers are staggering,” said Aguilar.

Evacuated US and French MV Hondius passengers test positive for hantavirus

A French woman and an American national evacuated from the cruise ship at the centre of a deadly hantavirus outbreak have tested positive for the virus, as the complex operation to repatriate those onboard continued on Monday. The French woman was one of five French passengers who disembarked from the ship in Tenerife on Sunday before being flown to a hospital in Paris. The French health minister, Stéphanie Rist, said the woman was in a serious condition on Monday. Rist said the woman started to feel very unwell on Sunday night and “tests came back positive”. Rist told France Inter radio: “Unfortunately, her symptoms worsened overnight.” She is being treated in a specialised infectious diseases unit of a hospital in Paris. An American passenger who was flown to Nebraska along with 16 others on Sunday evening also tested positive but had no symptoms. The US health department said one American national evacuated from the ship had tested positive for the Andes strain – the only hantavirus strain that is transmissible between humans – and another had “mild symptoms”. Personnel in full-body protective gear and breathing masks began escorting the travellers from ship to shore in Tenerife in the Canary Islands on Sunday in an effort that was continuing on Monday. More than 100 people of 23 nationalities are to be evacuated in less than 48 hours in an operation described by Spanish authorities as “complex” and “unprecedented”. Three passengers from the MV Hondius – a Dutch couple and a German woman – have died, while others have fallen sick with the rare disease, which usually spreads among rodents. No vaccines or specific treatments exist for hantavirus, which is endemic in Argentina, from where the ship departed in April. But health officials have said the risk for global public health is low and played down comparisons with the Covid-19 pandemic. Rist said 22 more contact cases had been identified among French nationals, including eight people who had travelled on a 25 April flight between Saint Helena and Johannesburg, and 14 more on a flight between Johannesburg and Amsterdam. The Dutch woman who died was on the flight to Johannesburg and later briefly boarded a flight to Amsterdam but was removed before takeoff. Health authorities in several countries have been tracking passengers who had already disembarked from the ship, plus anyone who may have come into contact with them. The French prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, will hold a meeting of medical advisers and ministers this afternoon to follow the issue. The French government spokesperson, Maud Bregeon, told BFMTV that it was important not to spread a sense of “panic”. She said: “We’re following the situation with the greatest vigilance, on the basis that it is a virus that we know, that a 42-day isolation period has been decided and the objective remains the same: protecting the French people.” The repatriation operation in Tenerife evacuated 94 people of 19 different nationalities on Sunday, the Spanish health minister, Mónica García, said. Spanish officials said the evacuation of most of the ship’s nearly 150 passengers and crew, which includes 23 nationalities, would continue until the final repatriation flights to Australia and the Netherlands on Monday afternoon. The ship will refuel in the morning and is expected to depart for the Netherlands with about 30 crew members on Monday evening. Passengers wearing blue medical suits began disembarking the Dutch-flagged vessel on Sunday to reach the small industrial port of Granadilla on Tenerife. They boarded Spanish army buses and travelled to Tenerife South airport in a convoy before boarding their repatriation flights. The World Health Organization recommends a 42-day quarantine and “active follow-up”, including daily checks for symptoms such as fever, the UN body’s lead for epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention, Maria Van Kerkhove, said in Geneva.

Hantavirus cruise ship passengers enter isolation facility after evacuation to UK

Passengers evacuated to the UK from a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak are spending their first day at an isolation facility after being repatriated from Tenerife. A chartered Titan Airways flight transported the MV Hondius passengers from the Canary Islands to Manchester airport on Sunday evening. The evacuation of passengers of all nationalities will be completed on Monday, with flights arriving from Australia and the Netherlands, Spain’s health minister has said. The UK’s initial Covid quarantine site at Arrowe Park hospital in Wirral, Merseyside, is being used to house 20 British passengers who were tested for hantavirus before boarding the flight. One German national, who is a UK resident, and one Japanese passenger are also being monitored there. The Japanese passenger, whom the UK government took at Tokyo’s request, will complete their isolation in line with UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) guidance. A flight from Australia will evacuate six passengers from Tenerife and another from the Netherlands will take 18 passengers, with both flights also carrying passengers from other countries that did not send their own repatriation flights, officials have said. Eight people no longer on the ship have fallen ill, according to a World Health Organization tally from Friday, of whom six are confirmed to have contracted the virus. Three people have died – a Dutch couple and a German national. On Sunday, the US Department of Health and Human Services said one of the 17 Americans being repatriated had tested positive for the Andes strain of the virus while a second had mild symptoms. The French health minister said a French passenger had tested positive for the virus, and that their health was deteriorating. It was unclear whether these two cases were included in the six reported by the WHO. For those on the journey back to the UK, strict infection control measures were in place, with passengers, crew, drivers and medical teams all wearing personal protective equipment such as face masks. Within a 72-hour period, the passengers are to receive clinical assessments and testing at the isolation facility, which has six floors of self-contained flats with their own bedrooms, en suite bathrooms, kitchen and lounge facilities. Janelle Holmes, the chief executive of Wirral university teaching hospital NHS foundation trust, told the media that Arrowe Park would carry out “welfare checks on each individual”. She said: “There’s nobody being transferred to us that has been symptomatic in any way. There’s no impact on the hospital. Services are running as normal, patients should still attend their appointments.” Holmes said that if passengers developed symptoms, they would be taken to Royal Liverpool university hospital, which houses the regional tropical and infectious diseases unit. She said hantavirus was “very different” to Covid and that the risk to the general public was “really low”. She added: “You’ve got to have really, really close contact. It’s not like Covid or flu or those types of viruses.” During the period passengers are at Arrowe Park, public health specialists will assess whether they can isolate at home or at another location, based on their living arrangements. Those returning to the UK will stay in self-isolation for 45 days and will not be allowed to take public transport to their homes. During their isolation period, passengers will have daily contact with UKHSA health protection teams to check on their wellbeing and ensure they are supported to isolate safely. The public health minister, Sharon Hodgson, said: “None of the passengers are symptomatic, but we will monitor them closely over the next 72 hours at the hospital, as part of a precautionary isolation period. With no cases or symptoms among them and both our stringent monitoring and isolation measures, the risk to the public remains extremely low.”

‘It was either this or the pool’: hantavirus ship becomes latest Tenerife tourist attraction

On a dusty hill overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in the south of Tenerife, groups of tourists and locals are gathered to witness one of the island’s best new attractions. Some are gazing through binoculars while others are taking photos on their phones of a vessel only a few hundreds metres away, anchored near the Granadillo commercial port. It is the MV Hondius, the small cruise ship at the centre of a giant global commotion. Christened the “rat virus boat” by the internet after three people travelling onboard died of hantavirus, a disease normally carried by rats and mice, its story has enraptured people all over the world. And now, after reaching the Canary Islands shortly before dawn on Sunday, the ship is finally being evacuated, ending the ordeal for the remaining 149 passengers and crew. The scene is watched from the hire car of Amy Byres and Emma Armitage from Sheffield, on holiday in Tenerife for Byres’s 22nd birthday. “We’ve got some time to kill before our flight later,” Armitage said. “It was either this or lay by the pool all day,” added Byres. The pair said they had spent their holiday fascinated by the story of the passengers trapped on board and confined to cabins, in between their whale-watching and quad biking activities. “We saw this at the start of our trip – we arrived on Monday – and we’ve been following it all week on TikTok,” Byres said. “We were looking at TikTok trying to find out where it was and then we saw the name of the port and came here. It’s just really interesting, isn’t it?” The novelty has attracted dozens of others who came to the island to enjoy sun, sand and cerveza (beer) – and stayed for the international rescue operation. But down at the dock, the mood is more sober. First, only a handful of Spanish passengers appear, looking dazed and bewildered, wearing face and hair coverings and large blue ponchos over their clothes. Clutched in one hand are small plastic bags containing only a few possessions. The rest of their luggage needs to remain on the ship to be taken to the Netherlands for decontamination. It is the first time many of them have been outside since they were locked down in their cabins several days ago, after the deaths of a Dutch couple and a German passenger. It took a while for the cause to be diagnosed as hantavirus. The disease, though not uncommon, is rarely spread person-to-person. The variant is not new, and health bodies have sought to reassure people that it is a known pathogen, not a new disease such as Covid-19. There are few parallels with the virus that caused the global pandemic in 2019 but all over the world people have feared what would happen if another disease was able to get out of control. The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus repeated the refrain that the outbreak was “not the start of a Covid pandemic” dozens of times in the lead up to the 24-hour evacuation period in Tenerife. The passengers and crew from 23 countries are being repatriated thanks to an enormous international effort led by the WHO and coordinated by the Spanish government, which offered Tenerife as a base to launch the rescue. It was Spain’s obligation under international law to offer the Canaries’ assistance as one of the closest territories that had the resources to help and, on Sunday, the plan appeared to be being successfully executed. Boatload after boatload of blue plasticky figures appeared, to be loaded on to coaches by health workers in hazmat suits and face masks. Inside, plastic sheets cover the seats and, in scenes reminiscent of the Covid-19 pandemic, hazard tape marks seats that cannot be used. Those leaving the ship are not allowed to sit next to each other. But what happens when each passenger gets home is a matter of some contention. While the WHO recommends each passenger isolate for 45 days from the last contact point, 6 May, it cannot enforce that. The UK and Spain have put in place hospital quarantines for those coming off the ship but many countries have not. Causing further concern is the absence of testing. Those onboard have had their temperatures taken by WHO tropical medicine doctors and have shown no symptoms of a possible infection. But only a PCR test would confirm whether hantavirus – which has an incubation period of up to eight weeks – is present in their systems. Every country would need to carry out their own. Among the media brought to the island by the MV Hondius’s arrival, questions were being asked about whether this was enough. Tedros was asked at a press conference at the Granadilla port late Saturday night whether allowing passengers to travel all over the world and relying on them to self-isolate with no oversight could cause further outbreaks. “Based on our assessment, what you have said is not going to happen,” he told the media. The planned approach by the US caused particular alarm, after the country’s withdrawal from the WHO last year. Returning passengers to the country are being asked to self isolate, something an American journalist asked Javier Padilla Bernáldez, the Spanish secretary of state for health, for his opinion on. He said the European Commission and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control were “trying to achieve a certain degree of coordination, and not a high variation among the different countries”. “But every country has its own confidences,” he said.