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On 9 November, a migrant rescue boat came across a red backpack floating in the Mediterranean alongside other remains from a shipwreck that took place weeks before. The rucksack, covered with sea snails and reeking of petrol, contained two wedding rings, inscribed with the names Ahmed and Doudou.

“We thought it was proof of yet another love story that ended up at the bottom of the sea,” said Riccardo Gatti, the president of the NGO Open Arms in Italy, who recovered the personal items. “Unfortunately we find many of these. Most of the time suitcases and bags, floating in the sea, are nothing more than symbols of yet another journey that began in Libya and ended in tragedy.”

Nevertheless, as it always does, Open Arms activated a procedure to try to trace the owners of the belongings by sharing the photos on their social channels and among their networks of contacts. “What happened next was exciting,” Gatti said.

Thanks to an article published in the newspaper La Repubblica that carried photos of the rings, the charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) discovered they belonged to a newlywed Algerian couple, Ahmed, 25, and Doudou, 20.

The couple, who were staying at a reception centre in Sicily, were among 15 survivors of a shipwreck that took place off the coast of the island of Lampedusa on 21 October in which five people died.

The contents of a rucksack belonging to Algerian couple Ahmed and Doudou, which was found in the Mediterranean by the NGO Open Arms in Italy. Photograph: Open Arms

“As soon as they showed us the photos of the rings, I couldn’t believe it,” Ahmed said in a message passed on by MSF. ‘‘We had lost everything and now the few things we set out with on the journey have been found. It’s incredible.

As G20 leaders pledged to ensure the equitable distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, drugs and tests so that poorer countries are not left out, the US, UK and Germany each announced plans to begin vaccinations in their countries in December, while Spain said it would start administering the vaccine to its citizens in January.

Britain could give regulatory approval to Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine as early as this week, even before the US authorises it, the UK’s Telegraph newspaper reported on Sunday. Pfizer and BioNTech could secure emergency US and European authorisation for their Covid-19 vaccine next month after final trial results showed a 95% success rate and no serious side effects.

Moderna last week released preliminary data for its vaccine showing 94.5% effectiveness.

“Our plan is to be able to ship vaccines to the immunisation sites within 24 hours from the approval, so I expect maybe on day two after approval on the 11th or the 12th of December,” he said in an interview to CNN.

Citing government sources, the Telegraph also said the UK’s National Health Service had been told to be ready to administer it by 1 December.

Britain formally asked its medical regulator, the MHRA, last week to assess the suitability of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The UK Department of Health had no comment on Sunday on when the first vaccinations would be administered.

Britain has ordered 40m doses and expects to have 10m doses, enough to protect 5 million people, available by the end of the year if regulators approve it.

Germany could also start administering shots of Covid-19 vaccines as soon as next month, health minister Jens Spahn was quoted as saying on Sunday. He said Spain and Germany were the first European Union countries to have a complete vaccination plan in place.

“There is reason to be optimistic that there will be approval for a vaccine in Europe this year,” Spahn said in an interview with publishing group RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland. “And then we can start right away.”

Spahn said he had asked Germany’s federal states to have their vaccination centres ready by mid-December and that this was going well. “I would rather have a vaccination centre ready a few days early than an approved vaccine that isn’t being used immediately.”

Germany has secured more than 300m vaccine doses via the European Commission, bilateral contracts and options, Spahn said, adding that this was more than enough and even left room to share doses with other countries.

Spain will begin a comprehensive vaccination programme in January and expects to have covered a substantial part of the population within three months, the prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, said on Sunday.

“The campaign will start in January and have 13,000 vaccination points,” Sanchez told a news conference after a two-day online summit of G20 leaders. “A very substantial part of the population will be able to be vaccinated, with all guarantees, in the first quarter of the year.”

It was the London home of the 19th-century Decadent poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, two of France’s greatest literary heroes, whose tempestuous love affair ended with a shooting and prison. A Georgian building in Camden, where they rented lodgings in 1873, was to have become “a poetry house”, an arts and education centre in one of the capital’s most deprived areas, after a campaign involving some of Britain’s foremost arts figures.

But the arts charity behind the project has been dismayed to discover that Michael Corby, the benefactor who promised to bequeath the historic building to the charity a decade ago, has changed his mind without warning, deciding instead to sell it on the open market.

The Rimbaud and Verlaine Foundation (R&V) never imagined that he would withdraw his 2011 legacy gift of No 8 Royal College Street.

Graham Henderson, R&V’s chief executive, found out about the sale only after an estate agent’s sign went up: “That was the first I heard about it.” The charity is now seeking legal advice.

The campaign for a poetry house had attracted widespread support from leading figures such as the novelists Julian Barnes and Tracy Chevalier, the poet Sir Andrew Motion and the actor Simon Callow.

It also included Sir Christopher Hampton, the playwright and screenwriter whose Total Eclipse was inspired by these poets and their near-fatal affair. He told the Observer: “It would be a terrible shame if [Corby] wasn’t able to go through with his generous original offer.”

Corby, 76, confirmed that he has changed his will. His circumstances have changed as he has become an “invalid”, he said, noting that a house that he had bought for his retirement is no longer practical.

It is now on the market for £1.95m, advertised as a “gorgeous” Grade II-listed Georgian home, built about 1790.

The estate agent’s description does not mention the poets, referring only to former “colourful” residents. Rimbaud and Verlaine were certainly colourful. They came to London after scandalising Paris with their absinthe and hashish-fuelled affair.

“They were deeply problematic,” Henderson said. “Drugs, alcohol, violent fights … [Their] reputation as decadent characters has been part of their appeal, particularly to rock stars – everybody from Marc Bolan to Bob Dylan. We’re talking about two characters of enormous cultural significance.”

He added that they lived in this house for only three months: “Yet the seismic importance of events that happened there, people are still writing books about. These events have achieved mythic status.”

He was referring to the poets’ devastating quarrel: “Rimbaud leant out of the window as Verlaine was walking back from Camden market … and shouted a stream of abuse. Verlaine hit Rimbaud with a fish he’d acquired in the market [and] fled to Brussels. Rimbaud, contrite, immediately followed … Verlaine shot Rimbaud, wounding him … and went to prison for a couple of years for that.

“Rimbaud shortly afterwards gave up poetry for ever, which is still a matter of huge regret because what little work we have from him is so revolutionary.”

Doctors euthanising a patient with severe dementia may slip a sedative into their food or drink if there are concerns they will become “disturbed, agitated or aggressive”, under a change to the codes of practice in the Netherlands.

The review committee for cases of euthanasia refreshed its guidance in response to the case of a former nursing home doctor, Marinou Arends, who was prosecuted for murder and cleared after putting a sedative in her 74-year-old patient’s coffee before giving a lethal injection.

Arends was given a written reprimand by the Dutch medical board for acting on the basis of two “advance directives” in which the patient said only that she wished to die when she considered the time was right.

One person is dying from coronavirus every 17 seconds in Europe, the regional head of the World Health Organization has said, as the pandemic continues to threaten to overwhelm national health systems around the continent.

Dr Hans Kluge said on Thursday the 53 countries that make up the WHO’s European region had recorded more than 15.7m Covid-19 cases – including 4m this month alone – and nearly 355,000 deaths.

More than 80% of countries were reporting high 14-day incidence rates greater than 100 per 100,000 people, Kluge said, with nearly a third recording very high rates of greater than 700 per 100,000.

Recent news on the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines also represented “a great hope in the war against this virus”, Kluge said, as did recent developments in rapid diagnostic or antigen tests.

He said the WHO still believed strict lockdowns should be a last resort because of their “significant collateral damage”, including mental health problems, substance abuse and domestic violence, and said that if mask use reached 95% lockdowns should not be needed.

Generalised lockdowns also had a negative impact when they were lifted too fast, he said, often requiring the reimposition of strict measures. They would be better replaced with tier systems based on local levels of community transmission.

It was particularly vital to keep schools open, Kluge said. “Children are not considered primary drivers of transmission and, as such, school closures are not considered to be an effective measure for the control of Covid-19.”

He asked countries considering closing schools to consider the adverse effects in terms of educational outcomes and mental and social wellbeing, and at least ensure children in vulnerable situations and with special needs received full support.

The consumer rights activist Max Schrems has filed a formal privacy case against Apple, arguing that an ID generated by iPhones that lets advertisers track users violates privacy regulations.

Schrems, whose lawsuit against Facebook led to a landmark ruling restricting data transfers from the EU to the US, has made the case through his privacy rights non-profit Noyb, which has filed formal complaints in Spain and Berlin against Apple.

At the core of the complaint is Apple’s generation of the IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) on each iPhone. Advertisers can then use the IDFA to track users across various apps, and better target them for personalised advertising.

The idea behind the tool is to improve user privacy by stopping advertisers using other identifiers to track users, and allowing users to reset the IDFA at will.

But, Noyb argues, simply generating it could breach EU privacy law, since it is created without the user’s “knowledge or consent”. And while users are given control over whether they reset the identifier, and allowed to prevent individual apps from accessing it, they cannot, Noyb says, prevent it from being generated in the first place.

Facing protests in the Muslim world over his response to terror attacks in France, President Emmanuel Macron phoned a New York Times media columnist to rail against “bias” in the English-language media and accuse some newspapers of “legitimising this violence”.

The capacity of the EU’s offshore windfarms in the North Sea, the Baltic, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea will be increased by 250%, under a draft plan drawn up by the European commission.

The move follows Boris Johnson’s announcement this year of his intention to generate enough electricity to power every home in the UK within a decade from the country’s offshore sites.

Both the UK and the EU are seeking to make progress on the target of carbon emission neutrality by 2050 and pioneer potentially rival innovations that will put its industry at the forefront of the growing sector.

A doctor left badly burned in a Romanian hospital fire that left 10 dead was been hailed as a hero after it emerged he had tried to help Covid-19 patients to safety.

After suffering second and third degree burns to 40%, the doctor, named in local media as Catalin Denciu, was transferred to Belgium’s Queen Astrid military hospital on Sunday for specialised treatment.

Ten people suffering from Covid-19 died in the fire late on Saturday in an intensive care unit of a hospital in the north-eastern town of Piatra Neamt. The seven men and three women ranged in age from 67 to 86, the hospital said.

Six others were seriously injured.

The prosecutor general has opened an enquiry into the tragedy, while the health ministry has suggested the fire could have been caused by an electrical short circuit.

The government said public health inspectors and the agency for emergency situations would check the conditions under which medical equipment was operating in all ICUs from Monday.

Almost 13,000 Covid-19 patients were in hospital across Romania as of Sunday, including 1,169 in ICU. The country has reported 360,281 coronavirus cases since February and 8,926 deaths.

Even before the pandemic, Romania’s healthcare system had been under pressure, dogged by corruption, inefficiencies and politicised management.

The country has one of the EU’s least developed healthcare infrastructures. One in four Romanians have insufficient access to essential healthcare as tens of thousands of doctors, nurses and pharmacists have left since the country joined the EU in 2007.

On Sunday, the Romanian doctors’ association said a strategy was needed to build new medical infrastructure regardless of who was in government.

According to Digi24 TV, the hospital is seeking temporary storage for the victims’ bodies as the hospital morgue was already full before the fire.

“At least now, let’s do things that are organised and planned … so that such tragedies don’t happen again,” it said.

Saturday’s fire was Romania’s deadliest since 2015, when 65 people were killed in a nightclub blaze in Bucharest.

Public libraries across the Netherlands are removing from the shelves children’s books depicting a black-faced Zwarte Piet, a side-kick to Sinterklaas, in the latest sign that the country is turning the page on a festive figure widely seen as being racist.

For at least a decade, there have been protests against the practice of white people with blackened faces, curly wigs and exaggerated bright red lips depicting the character at the nationwide parades held in early December to herald the feast of Saint Nicholas.

The need to socially distance due to the coronavirus pandemic has ensured that such high-street festivities will not be possible this year. But the debate over the portrayal of Zwarte Piet has continued, not least in response to the decision by librarians to start removing books containing images of the character, which first appeared in print in 1850, for being “contrary to good morals”.

“Everywhere there is a growing awareness that Zwarte Piet gives a stereotypical image of a certain part of the population and the libraries are moving along with this,” the director at the Association of Public Libraries, Anton Kok, told the Het Algemeen Dagblad newspaper.

“Numerous books have been taken down over time for being ‘contrary to morals’. I am thinking, for example, of the children’s books in which the population of the Dutch East Indies was dismissed as patjakkers [low-life rascals]. Zwarte Piet is also contrary to good morals as far as I am concerned. It is more that [libraries] are linking up with the spirit of the times.”

There has been a slow but unmistakeable shift in public opinion in recent years about the depiction of Zwarte Piet, Sinterklaas’s Moor servant, expressed most significantly by the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Rutte, who has dressed up as Zwarte Piet in the past and has defended the practice on the grounds that it is a simple representation of a figure that “is black”, said this summer that his opinions had changed. “When I met people who said, ‘I feel incredibly discriminated against because the Piet is black,’ I thought: that is the last thing you want at the Sinterklaas party,” he said.

A survey released last week by the current affairs programme EenVandaag of 29,000 members of its longstanding opinion panel found that support for the traditional depiction of Piet has fallen from 89% in 2013 to 55%.

A book with ‘Sinterklaas’ and ‘Zwarte Piet’ in an Amsterdam library. Photograph: Ramon van Flymen/ANP

The Belgian publisher Clavis, the largest supplier of Dutch language children’s books, has said it will no longer support authors who include a Zwarte Piet in their pages with red lips, a frizzy wig and gold earrings.

The company destroyed 7,000 books containing such images at the end of last month, and Zwarte Piet is being represented in a host of new ways including as a white boy with soot on the face in a reference to his trips down chimneys to hand out sweets to children.

There has also been international pressure for change. In 2015, a United Nations committee on the elimination of racial discrimination urged the Dutch government to “actively promote the elimination” of the racial stereotyping implicit in the character. Google said last month that it would not allow adverts to be shown on web pages or videos featuring a “black face” Zwarte Piet.

Kok said the Dutch Association of Public Libraries could not order all its members to remove the offending books but that librarians were making the right decisions without need for guidance.

He said: “White children don’t care about another Pete and black children find it strange and nasty, and that is what matters. Some people also like fascism. And yes, that sounds crude, but I mean that a tribe cannot determine our policy. We see that libraries are taking on that responsibility en masse.”