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At this time of year John Greene is usually preparing to welcome dozens of Slovakian strawberry pickers for another harvest at his farm in County Wexford in south-east Ireland.

The work is arduous and repetitive and he relies on their experience and stamina to get the fruit picked, packed and sold.

Greene surveyed his fields this week with foreboding. “I look out my window and there’s no one to pick it. None of them are on site at the moment.”

His pickers remain in Slovakia, immobilised by a continent-wide lockdown. It is a similar story for hundreds of thousands of other seasonal agricultural workers who cannot travel just at a time when Europe needs them for harvests.

Fruit and vegetable crops in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the UK and other countries risk rotting in the fields – putrefying testaments to the coronavirus pandemic.

“It won’t be pretty,” said Eamonn Kehoe, a soft fruit specialist with Ireland’s agri-food agency, Teagasc. “If they don’t have the staff it won’t be picked. It’s a nightmare, a perfect storm.”

He was referring to Ireland’s growers, but farmers and agriculture officials across Europe have equally grim warnings about abandoned fields and lost crops unless they can conjure improvised armies of pickers.

Spain, which is the EU’s biggest exporter of fruit and vegetables, is already feeling the impact. “We’re very limited at the moment when it comes to having enough hands to pick and harvest,” said Pedro Barato, the president of Spain’s largest farming association, Asaja.

The pandemic, and the restrictions to combat it, were affecting every region in Spain, he said. “The need for workers is only going to increase as the season wears on. We need people to be working in the fields, while also taking all the necessary health precautions. If we don’t have anyone in the countryside to harvest the products, they’re just going to stay there and there could be shortages.”

In the Andalucían province of Huelva, for instance, only 7,000 of the 19,000 Moroccan workers who normally come had arrived before Morocco closed its border to passenger traffic.

In Italy the need is even greater. Some 90% of its agricultural workers are seasonal, the majority from Romania.

Finland has enlisted social influencers in the government’s efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic, arguing that they are just as useful as mainstream media in a crisis when it needs to inform the population fast, clearly and accurately.

“We can reach a large part of the public in Finland through official communications and traditional media, but it’s clear the authorities’ messaging doesn’t always reach all population groups,” the government communications director, Päivi Anttikoski, said.

“The aim of this cooperation is to provide better access to information for those who are difficult to reach through traditional channels. As far as we know, Finland is the only country in the world to have defined social media as ‘critical operators’,” – along with doctors, bus drivers and supermarket workers.

The project is a joint initiative by the office of Finland’s 34-year-old prime minister, Sanna Marin, a Helsinki social media consultancy, and Mediapool, a network of media companies tasked with helping ensure citizens’ access to reliable information at all times.

Hungary’s emergency law that enables the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to rule by decree without time limits is incompatible with being in the EU, the European parliament’s liberal group said on Tuesday.

Passing measures ostensibly to tackle coronavirus, the Hungarian parliament on Monday voted to give Orbán the power to rule by decree with no clear end-date. The law also introduces jail terms for spreading disinformation about the virus, raising fears it could be used to neuter critics of the government’s approach.

Sophie in’t Veld, a Dutch liberal MEP, who chairs the European parliament’s rule of law group, said: “Viktor Orbán has completed his project of killing democracy and the rule of law in Hungary. Clearly, the actions of the Hungarian government are incompatible with EU membership.”

Dacian Çiolos, a former Romanian prime minister and EU commissioner who now leads the liberal group, said it was “shameful this dreadful corona is abused in such a manner”.

The European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, issued a statement on Tuesday calling for all emergency measures to be “limited to what is necessary and strictly proportionate” and not lasting indefinitely. “It is of utmost importance that emergency measures are not at the expense of our fundamental principles and values as set out in the treaties,” Von der Leyen said in a statement that did not mention Hungary.

The message from Washington was more direct. Eliot L Engel, the chairman of the US House of Representatives’ foreign affairs committee, said Orbán was making “a blatant power grab in the face of the worst global health crisis in recent history. This legislation marginalises the Hungarian parliament and allows prime minister Orbán to rule by decree like a dictator.

“Such a serious affront to democracy anywhere is outrageous, and particularly within a Nato ally and EU member.”

Katalin Cseh, an Hungarian MEP for the centrist Momentum party, urged the commission to engage with Hungary over the law last week once it was clear Orbán was on course to secure the law with his two-thirds majority in the Hungarian parliament.

“In a democracy, we should never give anyone unlimited powers or unlimited time. It’s not a matter of whether I trust Orbán. It’s really about our basic perception of democracy … There should always be checks and balances. Such a law is against my perception of parliamentary democracy.”

Norbert Röttgen, the head of the German Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee and a candidate in the race to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor, also condemned the law, writing on Twitter that it “effectively eliminates opposition” and was a breach of basic principles the EU “cannot accept”.

Others accused EU authorities and member states in the EU council of ministers of failing to speak out, following Hungary’s sharp decline in democratic freedoms over the last 10 years, as measured by international organisations, such as Freedom House and article 19. “The silence from the president of the commission and the council is deafening,” in’t Veld said.

Responding to Von der Leyen’s statement, Orbán’s spokesman Zoltán Kovács said the Hungarian state of emergency and extraordinary measures were “congruent with the treaties and the Hungarian constitution and targeted exclusively at fighting the coronavirus”.

He said the law upheld EU values, rule of law, press freedom, while accusing critics of being misinformed.

“Immunity passports” for key workers could be a way of getting people who have had coronavirus back into the workforce more quickly, scientists and politicians in the UK have suggested.

Researchers in Germany are currently preparing a mass study into how many people are already immune to the Covid-19 virus, allowing authorities to eventually issue passes to exclude workers from restrictive measures currently in place.

The study, which is yet to finalise funding, would involve testing the blood of more than 100,000 volunteers for coronavirus antibodies from mid-April. The test would then be repeated at regular intervals on an accumulatively larger sample of the population, to track the pandemic’s progress.

The shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, said: “Germany appears to be leading the way in the testing and we have much to learn from their approach. I’ve repeatedly called for more testing and contact tracing in the UK, and we should be looking at initiatives like this closely.”

The results of the German study, organised by the government’s public health body, the Robert Koch Institute, the German Centre for Infection Research, the Institute for Virology at Berlin’s Charite hospital and blood donation services, would make it easier to decide when and where schools in the country could reopen, and which people are safe to go back to work.

“Those who are immune could be issued with a kind of vaccination pass that would for example allow them to exempted from restrictions on their activity,” said Gerard Krause, head of epidemiology at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig. The German government has not yet officially commented on the proposal for such a certificate made by scientists.

Dr Philippa Whitford, an SNP MP and former surgeon, said immunity passports could be used specifically for key workers in healthcare in the UK but would be difficult to roll out more widely across the country because of the level of administration needed.

Whitford, who is also chair of the all-party parliamentary group for vaccines, said the length of time someone may have immunity after they have had Covid-19 was still largely unknown. Someone contracting Sars, which is also a coronavirus, did not have long-term immunity – potentially only up to a year after the infection.

Prof Peter Openshaw, a member of the government’s new and emerging respiratory virus threats advisory group, said people who have recovered and test positive for coronavirus antibodies should no longer be infectious themselves and would be expected to have at least some immunity to the virus.

He said the worse case scenario – based on what is known about immunity to coronaviruses that cause common colds – is that former patients would have only partial resistance for about three months.

“It could be that this coronavirus causes a pretty robust immune response, which is durable and protective for much longer, maybe a year or even five years, but we don’t know because it’s a new virus,” he said.

Immunity passports are a “reasonable provisional measure”, Openshaw said, but he stressed that people granted the passports would have to be kept under close observation to ensure they were not becoming reinfected.

“In subsequent monitoring, it would be really important to determine whether those who do return to normal circulation are in fact protected,” he said.

The squares of Europe’s capitals are deserted, its bars and restaurants empty, once bustling roads now silent. With no one around to talk to, the only option is to surf the internet in search of nostalgic memories and answers to the unanswerable causes of a catastrophe that has changed the world as we knew it.

When the Austrian author Thomas Glavinic came up with this post-apocalyptic scenario for his harrowing and critically acclaimed 2006 novel Night Work, translated into English by John Brownjohn in 2008, he had no idea how closely it would come to resemble the real world 14 years later.

As reality has caught up with fiction, Glavinic may not be the only writer to embark on a work of fiction based on Covid-19, but his is probably the first work in progress already being published. The German newspaper Die Welt has been printing his “corona novel” in daily instalments.

Glavinic said he planned for the work eventually to take a fictional turn. “It’s a hybrid of a diary and a novel. Capturing the moment also involves inventing things if they want to be invented.”

Many of his previous works were written in a seemingly non-literary style only to veer off to explore more existential questions. They include Der Kameramörder , or The Camera Killer, a thriller published in 2001 and written in the exacting prose of a legal protocol, and Wie Man Leben Soll , or How One Should Live, a novel published in 2004 in the form of a self-help manual.

“My intention with every novel is to create a piece of literature that is written from the heart of our society, but also captures the essence of this society without necessarily being able to put a name to it,” he said.

Glavinic, who was born in Graz, is approaching the current crisis from an unusual angle not only because he once wrote a book about a similar scenario, but also because he has, by his own account, already spent the last three years living in de facto self-isolation.

“Three and a half years ago a lot of things happened in my life at the same time. I managed to liberate myself from a long-term addiction to cocaine and alcohol, and I realised that I was a couple of hundred thousand euros in debt,” he said on the phone from his apartment in Vienna.

The resulting depression led him increasingly to avoid social contact and hole himself up at home, where he often stayed awake for days on end.

“If you are inside a clinical depression, you can’t even write an email or pick up the phone. I lived off stock cubes and went for three and a half years without reading a newspaper. I didn’t even know who had won the World Cup,” he said.

In the kitchen of the four-star Château de Courban hotel in the heart of Burgundy’s vineyards, chef Takashi Kinoshita would normally be preparing the three, five and seven-course gastronomic menus that have earned him a coveted Michelin star. On an ordinary weekend, the restaurant would be fully booked with diners travelling hundreds of miles, including from the UK, to sample Kinoshita’s food.

But this is no ordinary weekend.

With the hotel closed because of the coronavirus crisis, Kinoshita is technically – if temporarily – out of work. So, instead of cooking for his usual guests, he is turning out dishes for the doctors, nurses and staff working round the clock at the nearest main hospital in the eastern French city of Dijon.

On Sunday, the chef will set off in a borrowed refrigerated van to deliver 100 simple three-course meals to hospital staff. “In Japan, if there is a catastrophe the cultural response is to make something to eat, so I’m very happy to be doing this. I was wondering what I could do to help at this time, and cooking for the health workers is a pleasure,” Kinoshita, 40, told the Observer. “Besides, it’s my job. Where else would I be but in my kitchen?”

True, it is not the usual fare of oysters à la japonaise or cerise de l’Yonne and foie gras. For the hungry medics, Takashi – who is cooking while wearing a mask and gloves as well as his chef’s whites – is creating a more hearty repast of quiche with vegetables and trout, mixed salad spring rolls in soft wraps and cream-filled choux pastries.

An Indonesian man forced to watch his father’s summary execution by a Dutch soldier when he was 10 years old has spoken of his gratitude after a court in The Hague ordered the Dutch state to pay compensation to victims of colonial massacres in the 1940s.

Andi Monji, 83, who travelled to the Netherlands to tell his story to the court, was awarded €10,000 (£9,000) while eight widows and three children of other executed men, mainly farmers, were awarded compensation of between €123.48 and €3,634 for loss of income.

The cases concerned men killed by soldiers in the Indonesian province of South Sulawesi between December 1946 and April 1947 during so-called “cleansing actions” as the Dutch sought to repress moves towards independence.

The court found that 11 men had been killed as a result of misbehaviour by Dutch soldiers, mostly by summary executions. One man was randomly shot.

Monji’s father was executed on 28 January 1947 in the village of Suppa. More than 200 men are believed to have been executed by the Dutch military that day.

Monji, who still lives in Suppa, said: “I’m grateful for the court’s ruling. I was 10 years old when I was forced to witness my father being executed by Dutch military after first being heavily beaten. I was crying.

“I’m also grateful that I had the chance to travel to the Netherlands to attend the court hearing so I could explain the court what had happened.”

Japan occupied the then Dutch colony of the Dutch East Indies during the second world war, and after its capitulation the nationalist leaders Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed the Republic of Indonesia on 17 August 1945.

For the following four years, the Netherlands fought to prolong its 350 years of colonial rule of the country, often through barbaric means.

The Dutch state had argued for the claims to be struck out given the time that had passed since the acts were committed.

At the beginning of February, Ilaria Santi, a councillor in the Italian city of Prato, in Tuscany, visited the canteen of an elementary school. A Chinese girl asked her: “Aren’t you afraid of eating next to me?”

“I replied: ‘Why should I be afraid?’ and she said: ‘Afraid that I infect you with the coronavirus.’” I replied that the virus was unfortunately in the minds of too many people,” said Santi.

“Another Chinese boy asked: ‘So can I sit here too?’ and I said: ‘Yes’.”

It was a revealing conversation in this region with a large Chinese population, in a country in lockdown over coronavirus.

“In the past few weeks, we have seen Chinese children at school [being] called ‘Cinavirus’, [as well as] verbal confrontations between classmates and physical attacks [on pupils],” said Davide Finizio, secretary of the buddhist Pu Hua Si temple, a hub for the Chinese community in Prato.

Finizio is monitoring cases of discrimination, and is attempting to counter prejudice by encouraging Chinese people to donate face masks and sanitiser to Italian hospitals.

“I know of people who have decided to go back to China, where they feel safer,” he said.

Some have already left, others have bought plane tickets home.

The past few weeks have brought numerous reports of xenophobia in northern Italy, which is home to more than 50% of Italy’s Chinese population. Last month Qian Zhang, 26, who owns a bar with his wife near Bassano del Grappa, told Il Giornale di Vicenza that he was attacked with a bottle and told he was not allowed to enter a petrol station because: “You’re Chinese, you have coronavirus.”

Manu Dibango, the Cameroonian musician celebrated for his blend of jazz, funk and traditional west African styles, has died aged 86 in a Paris hospital after contracting Covid-19.

A message on his Facebook page announced the news with “deep sadness”, and added: “His funeral service will be held in strict privacy, and a tribute to his memory will be organised when possible.”

Dibango was born in 1933 in Douala, Cameroon. He attended high school in France and began learning instruments: first the piano, then saxophone – for which he became best known – and vibraphone. “The blacks that we saw [in France] were either boxers like Sugar Ray Robinson – or jazzmen,” he remembered in a 2018 interview. “So, we ended up going down to the cellars in Paris, where we could see the [Louis] Armstrongs and the Count Basies with whom we identified.”

He moved to Brussels and toured Europe with Africa Jazz under bandleader Joseph Kabasele, and spent time in Congo and Cameroon before returning to Paris in 1965.

He blended the cosmopolitan styles from Africa and Europe into his own fusion, resulting in his biggest hit, Soul Makossa, with a blazing saxophone line over a breakbeat and Dibango’s spoken vocals, originally written for the 1972 African Cup of Nations football tournament.

Russia may be forced to put off a public vote on amendments allowing Vladimir Putin to hold office potentially until 2036 as the coronavirus threatens to upend a busy political season in Russia.

The Kremlin so far has not rescheduled the 22 April vote that was intended as a public endorsement for Putin’s surprise plan to “reset” his term limits, allowing him to run for a fifth or even sixth term as president under a revised constitution.

But as Moscow and other Russian cities introduce stricter preventative measures against the coronavirus, election officials have discussed the possibility of home voting or other ways to pull off a nationwide plebiscite in a country of 140 million when health officials desperately want to reduce face-to-face contact.

“The vote is set for 22 April, but the health of the country’s citizens is most important,” said Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. “If the growth of the epidemiological situation gives cause to reschedule then it will be done.”

On Monday the business daily Vedomosti reported the vote was likely to be rescheduled to June because of fears of the disease spreading in Russia. The decision would probably be announced this week, the newspaper said, citing three sources in the presidential administration. One of the sources said the vote as scheduled could coincide with the projected peak for the number of coronavirus cases in Russia.

The spread of the disease could also threaten Russia’s celebration of the 75th anniversary of Victory Day on 9 May, which the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the US national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, have pledged to attend. The event serves as both a memorial to second world war veterans and as a showcase for Russian military hardware, including aircraft and intercontinental ballistic missile carriers. Russia has already cancelled the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, an important business conference scheduled for June.