LONDON (AP) — Chaos and confusion over travel rules and measures to contain new virus outbreaks are contributing to another cruel summer for Europe’s battered tourism industry.

Popular destination countries are grappling with surging COVID-19 variants, but the patchwork and last-minute nature of the efforts as the peak season gets underway threatens to derail another summer. 
 In France, the world’s most visited country, visitors to cultural and tourist sites were confronted this week with a new requirement for a special COVID-19 pass. 
 To get the pass, which comes in paper or digital form, people must prove they’re either fully vaccinated or recently recovered from an infection, or produce a negative virus test. Use of the pass could extend next month to restaurants and cafes. 
 Italy said Thursday that people will need a similar pass to access museums and movie theaters, dine inside restaurants and cafes, and get into pools, casinos and a range of other venues. 
 At the Eiffel Tower, unprepared tourists lined up for quick virus tests so they could get the pass to visit the Paris landmark. Johnny Nielsen, visiting from Denmark with his wife and two children, questioned the usefulness of the French rules. 
 ”If I get tested now, I can go but then I (could) get corona in the queue right here,” Nielsen said, though he added they wouldn’t change their plans because of it. 
 Juan Truque, a tourist from Miami, said he wasn’t vaccinated but took a test so he could travel to France via Spain with his mother. 
 ”Now they are forcing you to wear masks and to do similar kind of things that are impositions to you. To me, they are violations to your freedom.” he said. 
 Europe’s vital travel and tourism industry is desperate to make up after a disastrous 2020. International tourist arrivals to Europe last year plunged by nearly 70%, and for the first five months of this year, they’re down 85%, according to U.N. World Tourism Organization figures. 
 American, Japanese and Chinese travelers aren’t confident it will be possible to visit and move freely within Europe, the European Travel Commission said. International arrivals are forecast to remain at nearly half their 2019 level this year, though domestic demand will help make up the shortfall. 
 The U.K.’s statistics office suspended its monthly international passenger data, because it said there aren’t enough people arriving ”to provide robust estimates.” 
 The United States this week upgraded its travel warning for Britain to the highest level. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised Americans to avoid traveling to the country because of the risk of contracting COVID-19 variants, while the U.S. State Department raised its alert level to ”do not travel” from the previous less severe ”reconsider travel” advisory. 
 The recommendations are constantly under review and not binding, although they may affect group tours and insurance rates. Britain’s warning has fluctuated several times this year already. 
 Some countries are showing signs of a rebound, however. 
 Spain, the world’s second-most visited country, received 3.2 million tourists from January to May — a tenth of the amount in the same period of 2019. But visits surged in June with 2.3 million arrivals, the best monthly figure since the start of the pandemic, although still only 75% of the figure from two years ago. 
 Spain’s secretary of state for tourism, Fernando Valdés, credited the European Union’s deployment in June of its digital COVID-19 vaccine passport for having a ”a positive impact” on foreign arrivals. That, and the U.K. move to allow nonessential travel, ”allowed us to start the 2021 summer season in the best conditions,” he said. 
 The EU app allows the bloc’s residents to show they’ve been vaccinated, tested negative or recovered from the virus. 
 In Greece, where COVID-19 infections are also rising sharply, authorities have openly expressed concern that slowing vaccination rates could hurt the struggling tourism industry, a mainstay of the economy. Authorities have tightened restrictions for unvaccinated tourists and residents, banning their entry to all indoor dining and entertainment venues. 
 Development Minister Adonis Georgiadis urged the travel industry to put on a brave face. 
 ”It’s very important that we do not give the impression that we have lost control of the pandemic,” Georgiadis said last week. 
 Some countries sparked chaos with last-minute changes to entry rules. 
 Denmark’s decision to upgrade Britain to its ”red” list of countries with tighter travel restrictions threw London resident Richard Moorby’s vacation plans into disarray. 
 Moorby originally planned to go to Copenhagen in August to meet up with his Danish wife and their two children visiting his in-laws — like they did last summer. But under current rules Moorby wouldn’t have been able to travel separately because he’s not Danish. They planned instead to travel together, which they thought would be allowed even after the change — but they missed the announcement’s fine print prohibiting non-Danes from ”red list” countries including the U.K. from visiting without a worthy purpose, which doesn’t include tourism. 
 ”It was going to be a bit of a non-holiday anyway,” Moorby said. But ”it went from, ’We’d have a nice holiday in Denmark,’ to ’well, maybe I can just about get there,’ to ’I can’t even travel’.” 
 Meanwhile, the U.K. government unexpectedly announced that travelers coming from France would still have to self-isolate for up 10 days because of worries about the beta variant, frustrating travelers and angering the tourism industry and French government. 
 Emma and Ben Heywood, the British owners of adventure travel company Undiscovered Montenegro, said booking inquiries are surging after the U.K. government said in the same announcement it would stop advising against travel to countries on its ”amber list” and dropped the self-isolation rule for returning travelers. 
 The couple said bookings last summer plunged to 10% of their usual level but now they’re at 30% and rising fast. Montenegro has a relatively low infection rate and relaxed entry requirements. 
 ”It’s so hard keeping everybody up to date with what’s required to go where, with so many countries and so many different rules involved,” said Ben Heywood. 
 ”It’s a total minefield. Half the emails I’m fielding now are people saying, ’We definitely want to come. What do we need to do?’”

A passenger of a flight arriving at Faro leaves the airport, outside Faro, in Portugal’s southern Algarve region, Monday, May 17, 2021. British vacationers began arriving in large numbers in southern Portugal on Monday for the first time in more than a year, after governments in the two countries eased their COVID-19 pandemic travel restrictions. Photo: Ana Brigida/AP

In June, Spain had its best tourist month since pandemic started.

Europe’s summer tourism outlook dimmed by variants, rules

Most Americans who haven’t been vaccinated against COVID-19 say they are unlikely to get the shots and doubt they would work against the aggressive delta variant despite evidence they do, according to a new poll that underscores the challenges facing public health officials amid soaring infections in some states.

Among American adults who have not yet received a vaccine, 35% say they probably will not, and 45% say they definitely will not, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Just 3% say they definitely will get the shots, though another 16% say they probably will.

AP-NORC poll: Most unvaccinated Americans don’t want shots

The old Nicaraguan revolutionary, with his receding hairline and the goatee that he had finally let turn grey, spoke calmly into the camera as police swarmed toward his house, hidden behind a high wall in a leafy Managua neighborhood. Surveillance drones, he said, were watching overhead.

Decades earlier, Hugo Torres had been a revered guerrilla in the fight against right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza. In 1974, he’d taken a group of top officials hostage, then traded them for the release of imprisoned comrades. Among those prisoners was Daniel Ortega, a Marxist bank robber who would become Nicaragua’s elected president and later its authoritarian ruler. 
 And on this hot Sunday in mid-June, amid a weekslong clampdown to obliterate nearly every hint of opposition, Ortega had his old savior arrested. 
 ”History is on our side,” Torres said in the video, which was quickly uploaded onto social media. ”The end of the dictatorship is close.” 
 But history -- at least recent history -- is not on Torres’ side. In the last few months, the growing ranks of dictators have flexed their muscles, and freedom has been in retreat. 
 The list is grim: a draconian crackdown in Nicaragua, with laws that now let the government paint nearly any critic as a traitor; a military takeover in Myanmar, with bloody repression that the United Nations says has left more than 850 people dead since Feb. 1 and more than 4,800 arbitrarily detained; a tightening grip by Beijing on Hong Kong, the semi-autonomous enclave where activists and journalists have been harassed and imprisoned under a sweeping national security law. 
 In mid-June, Hong Kong’s last remaining pro-democracy newspaper shut down operations after police froze $2.3 million of its assets and arrested five top editors and executives, accusing them of foreign collusion. 
 ”Why does it have to end up like this?” asked an Apple Daily graphic designer, Dickson Ng. 
 The backsliding of democracy, though, goes back far before 2021, with a long string of countries where democratic rule has been abandoned or dialed back, or where democratically elected leaders now make no secret of their authoritarianism. 
 2020 was ”another year of decline for liberal democracy,” said a recent report from the V-Dem Institute, a Sweden-based research center. ”The world is still more democratic than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, but the global decline in liberal democracy has been steep during the past 10 years.” 
 Countries like Sweden, Germany and the United States can seem like democratic outliers in a world increasingly dominated by authoritarian leaders. 
 ”It’s an open question if we as a democratic grouping can push back against the Russias or the Chinas of the world and `win’ the 21st century,” said Torrey Taussig, a scholar of authoritarianism and great power politics at the Harvard Kennedy School. ”Can the democracies rally to push back against this authoritarian tide that we’ve seen resurgent?” 
 It wasn’t supposed to be like this. 
 The late 20th and early 21st centuries saw country after country transition to democratic rule. The Soviet Union collapsed amid Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts at political and economic reform. Eastern European nations that had long been controlled by Moscow became independent. In Latin America, decades of military dictatorships gave way to elected governments. A wave of democratization swept across Africa, from South Africa to Nigeria to Ghana. 
 ”We had the largest number of democracies that ever existed in the world. It was unparalleled,” said Sheri Berman, a political science professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. ”It seemed that liberal democracy was the way of the future.” 
 But within just a few years the cracks began to show. 
 Maybe the world was just too optimistic. Democracy is messy. 
 ”It takes a lot to make democracy work,” said Berman. ”Getting rid of the dictators is not the end. It’s the beginning.” 
 As a result, many scholars aren’t too surprised when countries like Nicaragua or Myanmar stumble into authoritarianism. Both are very poor, with little history of democracy. 
 Hard times and turmoil are mother’s milk for authoritarians. 
 Russia’s experiment with democracy, for example, was short lived after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A plunging standard of living, a weak leader in Boris Yeltsin, thug businessmen and budding oligarchs fighting for control of state-owned businesses opened the way for Vladimir Putin. 
 Then came the financial crisis of 2007-2008, which began in the U.S. and rippled around the world. In the U.S., banks teetered on the verge of collapse and top officials worried about another Great Depression. In the European Union, America’s troubles helped lead to a debt crisis that sucked in Greece, Ireland and other nations that needed outside economic bailouts. 
 Those financial troubles, combined later with the political firestorms of the Trump administration and years of angry negotiations over Britain’s exit from the European Union, made liberal democracy look risky. 
 ”The more attractive the U.S. and Europe looks, the better that is for the folks fighting for democracy,” said Berman. And the opposite is also true. 
 Frustration has grown, with a 2019 Pew Research Center survey of 34 countries showing a median of 64% of people believing elected officials don’t care about them. 
 Today, a man like Viktor Orban can look very attractive to many voters. 
 Orban, the nationalist Hungarian prime minister who returned to power in the wake of the financial crisis, feeding on an electorate that distrusted the traditional elite, spoke proudly of leading an ”illiberal democracy.” 
 He now talks about Hungary’s ”system of national cooperation,” a process that has hobbled the court system, re-written the constitution and given immense power to himself and his party. The country’s media is largely now a factory producing pro-Orban content. 
 Rival parties are regularly investigated by government auditors and sometimes fined to the brink of bankruptcy. 
 ”We have replaced a shipwrecked liberal democracy with a 21st-century Christian democracy,” Orban proudly told lawmakers after a landslide 2018 election victory. 
 The world has a string of such leaders. 
 Some are authoritarians of varying degrees of power, from Putin in Russia to Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey to Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. Others are in the politically foggy wilderness between a one-party state and a solid democracy, like Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who runs the ruling party in Poland and Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, whose father ruled the country for three decades and turned it into an affluent city-state. 
 The pandemic has sped up a democratic decline in Africa, scholars say, with elections postponed or opposition figures silenced from Ethiopia to Zimbabwe. 
 But in a world where democracy is often swimming against the political tide, scholars also see some good news. It just requires a longer view of history. 
 Eighty years ago, there were perhaps 12 fully functioning democracies. Today, the Democracy Index put out by the Economist Intelligence Unit says there are 23 full democracies, and nearly half the planet lives in some form of democracy. 
 Then there are the protesters, perhaps the most visible sign of a thirst for democratic rule. 
 Thousands of Russians flooded the streets earlier this year after opposition leader Alexei Navalny was imprisoned. Neighboring Belarus was shaken by months of protests sparked by the 2020 reelection of President Alexander Lukashenko, which were widely seen as rigged. Political protests are common in Poland and Hungary. 
 Such protests regularly fail. The demonstrations in Russia and Belarus, for instance, ended with heavy-handed crackdowns. 
 But political scientists say even suppressed protests can be important political sparks. 
 Plus, sometimes they succeed. 
 In Sudan, 2019 mass protests against the autocratic president, Omar al-Bashir, led to his ouster by the military. The country is now on a fragile path to democracy, ruled by a transitional government. 
 In a recent report, the U.S.-based rights watchdog Freedom House, saw signs of hope in the European Union’s sanctions against the Belarusian regime, exile Central Asian journalists and bloggers continuing their work from overseas, and the way a string of eastern European governments have slowed business ties with China, concerned about transparency and national security. Meanwhile, Hungary’s Orban faced surprisingly united opposition. 
 Some scholars also see hope in the way President Joe Biden has reached out to America’s longtime European allies, reversing the approach of the Trump administration. 
 Biden’s recent trip to Europe, said Taussig, the Harvard Kennedy School scholar, was ”an attempt to rally America’s democratic partners” against the authoritarian tide. 
 So maybe that old, arrested Nicaraguan revolutionary does have reason for optimism. 
 ”These are the desperate blows of a regime that feels itself dying,” Torres said in the video before his arrest. 
 Maybe. As summer wore on, he remained in prison.

In this Nov. 4, 2016 file photo, children swing in a park next to an election billboard for President Daniel Ortega and his running mate, his wife, Rosario Murillo in Managua, Nicaragua. In June 2021, amid a weekslong clampdown to obliterate nearly every hint of opposition, Ortega ordered the arrest of Hugo Torres, a revered guerrilla in the fight against right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza. In 1974, Torres had taken a group of top officials hostage, then traded them for the release of imprisoned comrades, among them, Daniel Ortega. Photo: Esteban Felix

Late 20th and early 21st centuries saw record numbers of democracies, numbers are waning.

For democracy, it’s a time of swimming against the tide

Landscaping was hardly Alton Lucas’ lifelong dream.

As a teenager, Alton Lucas believed basketball or music would pluck him out of North Carolina and take him around the world. In the late 1980s, he was the right-hand man to his musical best friend, Youtha Anthony Fowler, who many hip hop and R&amp;B heads know as DJ Nabs. 
 But rather than jet-setting with Fowler, Lucas discovered drugs and the drug trade at the height of the so-called war on drugs. Addicted to crack cocaine and involved in trafficking the drug, he faced decades-long imprisonment at a time when the drug abuse and violence plaguing major cities and working class Black communities were not seen as the public health issue that opioids are today. 
 By chance, Lucas received a rare bit of mercy. He got the kind of help that many Black and Latino Americans struggling through the crack epidemic did not: treatment, early release and what many would consider a fresh start. 
 ”I started the landscaping company, to be honest with you, because nobody would hire me because I have a felony,” said Lucas. His Sunflower Landscaping got a boost in 2019 with the help of Inmates to Entrepreneurs, a national nonprofit assisting people with criminal backgrounds by providing practical entrepreneurship education. 
 Lucas was caught up in a system that imposes lifetime limits on most people who have served time for drug crimes, with little thought given to their ability to rehabilitate. In addition to being denied employment, those with criminal records can be limited in their access to business and educational loans, housing, child custody rights, voting rights and gun rights. 
 It’s a system that was born when Lucas was barely out of diapers.

Alton Lucas sits on the porch of his home outside of Raleigh, N.C., on Friday, June 18, 2021. As a teenager, Alton Lucas believed basketball or music would pluck him out of North Carolina and take him around the world. In the late 1980s, he was already the right-hand man to his musically inclined best friend, Youtha Anthony Fowler, who many hip hop and R&B heads know today as DJ Nabs. Photo: Allen G. Breed

Richard Nixon declared war on drugs in 1971.