Truckers and other motorists have been trapped in a four-mile-long traffic jam on the outskirts of the Dutch city of Rotterdam amid a protest against the government’s Covid measures.
According to local media, as many as 200 activists blocked the gates of a major port in the city’s harbor on Thursday. For several hours, they prevented any vehicles from driving in and out of the cargo hub, which, in turn, led to massive traffic congestion on the highway leading to the port. Police engaged in negotiations with the protesters, who eventually relented and left the site later in the evening.
The group behind the protest action is reportedly Dockers United, who are staunchly opposed to government Covid policies. The organization’s biggest concern is that authorities could soon make it mandatory for employees to have a vaccination or recovery certificate to enter the workplace, which, as the group argues, would be tantamount to excluding people from society on an “unconstitutional basis.” They are also generally unhappy with the curbs introduced by the Dutch government, with ‘Don’t normalize what’s not normal’ being a translation of one of their slogans.
In fact, the Dutch government did announce earlier this month that it was working on introducing a ‘corona pass’ for the workplace, though it isn’t clear yet when this measure will be rolled out and how strict it will be.
Meanwhile, on Friday the EU country logged its highest-ever number of new Covid cases within 24 hours, with that figure reaching 23,591. Medics say they are working at capacity.
Amid the spike, the Dutch prime minister imposed a partial lockdown last Saturday, which requires bars, restaurants, cafes and supermarkets to close at 8pm, while shops selling non-essential goods are to shut by 6pm. Public gatherings are banned altogether.
Instagram is looking to channel the anger of its users by introducing a new feature that allows them to report various problems with the app by shaking their phones.
“Have you ever used Instagram and it wasn’t working like it was supposed to? It was just really getting you… really just pissing you off?” Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri asked his followers in a clip uploaded to Twitter on Wednesday.
Well, precisely for infuriating situations like that, the platform has developed a feature it’s calling “rage shake,” he announced.
Shaking your phone will, from now on, cause a special form to pop up on screen, allowing you to instantly report issues such as photos not uploading or audio not playing.
The form is also the perfect place to let out “all the emotions and feels you’ve got going on,” Mosseri insisted, assuring Instagrammers that these reports would be promptly dealt with.
Thanks to their feedback, Instagram will be able to optimize its bug-fixing process, he said. The option, which he described as a “hidden gem,” is so far available only in the US, on both iOS and Android.
The Instagram boss gently shook his own cellphone in the clip to demonstrate the feature in action. However, it’s likely upset users may well end up rage-shaking with a good deal more passion, which could increase the risk of a gadget being damaged, or their owner or even a passerby being struck should the phone fly out of their hand.
Mosseri also didn’t advise the public what to do with their rage over media revelations about alleged shady practices by Instagram and the platform’s owner, Facebook.
Among the trove of papers recently leaked by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen was an internal study from 2020 reporting that Instagram was causing many of its young users, particularly teen girls, to suffer mental health issues and suicidal thoughts. However, the platform kept operating in the same manner despite this finding, with changes being promised only after the study made headlines this September.
American billionaire Bill Gates has claimed Covid-19 deaths and infections may drop below seasonal flu levels next year as more people get vaccinated and treatment improves, unless we encounter a new, more deadly variant.
Speaking on Thursday in a virtual interview at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore, founder of Microsoft stated that vaccines, natural immunity and emerging oral treatments mean that “the death rate and the disease rate ought to be coming down pretty dramatically.”
The tech mogul, who has been particularly vocal during the pandemic, said issues around vaccine-production capacity are likely to be replaced by distribution challenges and even waning demand.
“The vaccines are very good news, and the supply constraints will be largely solved as we get out in the middle of next year, and so we’ll be limited by the logistics and the demand,” he noted.
He also told his audience that it remains to be seen how much demand there is for Covid-19 shots in places like Sub-Saharan Africa.
Calling for more work to eradicate flu, Gates claimed Covid-19 rates and deaths would possibly fall below those of flu by the middle of next year, unless more deadly coronavirus variants emerge.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has involved itself in the development of vaccines and virus surveillance, calling for a global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The foundation has invested hundreds of millions dollars in the development and distribution of potentially lifesaving shots.
According to the World Health Organization, influenza kills up to 650,000 people each year. At least five million people have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic began in late 2019.
An exoplanet some 70% the mass of Jupiter and about 1.4 times its size has been discovered by astronomers at India’s Physical Research Laboratory (PRL). The behemoth is 752 light years away from Earth, and has an incredible orbit.
The new discovery was revealed by the Indian Space Research Organization on Tuesday in a statement saying the country’s PRL Advanced Radial-velocity Abu-sky Search (PARAS) had measured the movements of the newly-discovered exoplanet between December 2020 and March 2021.
The planet, named either HD 82139 or TOI 1789 depending on which cataloguing method is used, is ultra-hot – with a surface temperature up to 2,000 degrees Kelvin.
India’s PRL Advanced Radial-velocity Abu-sky Search (PARAS), an optical fiber-fed spectrograph, observed t he exoplanet and its movements from the Mt. Abu Observatory, according to the space agency. Not only is the planet ultra-hot, but it is also one of the closest to an orbiting star yet discovered.
The measurements obtained via PARAS were confirmed by Germany’s TCES spectrograph in April, and further verified by independent photometric observations from the PRL’s 43cm telescope, also located at Mt. Abu.
The exoplanet has an unusually quick orbit – a mere 3.2 days. The pace indicates that its distance from its host star is one-tenth the distance between Mercury and the Sun. This makes the exoplanet one of fewer than 10 such solar systems discovered thus far. Given the closeness to its host star – an aging orb 1.5 times the mass of the Sun – the new planet is also one of the lowest density planets yet discovered.
Planets so close to their host stars, with a distance less than 0.1 AU and masses between 0.25 to several times the mass of Jupiter, are known as “hot-Jupiters.”
The Indian space agency hailed the detection of the new planet as an opportunity to “enhance our understanding of various mechanisms responsible for inflation in hot-Jupiters and the formation and evolution of planetary systems around evolving and aging stars.” It is the second planet to be discovered by PARAS, with a previous discovery taking place in 2018.
Israeli and UAE defense suppliers have agreed to jointly develop unmanned vessels that can be tailored for a range of military roles, including anti-sub warfare. The move comes after the two countries held naval drills last week.
Emirati state-owned weapons maker EDGE group and the government-run Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) announced the partnership in Dubai on Thursday. In a joint statement, the firms said they would design the 170 m-USV (modular-unmanned surface vessels) series for both military and commercial applications.
The vessels, which can apparently operate remotely or with partial and complete autonomy, are expected to be used for “maritime security operations,” intelligence-gathering, surveillance, detecting and countering submarines and mines, and as a deployment platform for vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft such as helicopters and certain types of drones.
For commercial use, the manufacturers noted that they can be customized to serve in a variety of roles, including oceanography, pollution monitoring, oil and gas exploration, transportation, search and rescue, firefighting, and first interventions.
While not specifying the sources and amount of the project’s funding, or when production would begin, EDGE Chief Executive Faisal Al Bannai described the deal as an “important milestone” that would “open many doors” for the company in “local and global markets, military and commercial alike.”
According to the statement, the EDGE-owned Abu Dhabi Ship Building (ADSB) will design the vessel and integrate the platform’s control systems and payload. IAI will develop the autonomous control systems and provide various mission-requirement payloads to the control system units.
In March, the two companies had partnered up to develop an autonomous drone defense system to “detect, identify and intercept a broad range of threats.”
Last week, the UAE and Bahrain conducted their first-ever joint maritime drill with Israel’s navy. The US Fifth Fleet also participated in the five-day show of force in the Red Sea, which was reported by Israeli media outlets as sending a message to Iran.
The naval exercises came a little more than a year after Israel and the UAE established diplomatic ties in normalization agreements brokered by the Trump administration. The Abraham Accords broke decades of Arab consensus to not formally recognize Israel until the issue of a Palestinian state was settled.
Covid-battered global supply chains are being threatened by organized criminals, including drug cartels and con artists posing as legit suppliers, a new study has found, warning that the situation is set to get worse.
The international supply chain woes amid the Covid-19 pandemic are highlighted in a new annual report, released this week by the British Standards Institution (BSI).
The document, titled the ‘Supply Chain Risk Insights Report’, highlights Covid’s impact on supply chains, with the experts also warning that organized crime has increasingly preyed on this crucial area during the pandemic. On multiple instances, criminals were posing as legitimate logistics providers, stealing goods during shipment.
“I’m seeing a significant number of false suppliers acting as genuine potential suppliers in supply chain logistics provision – warehousing distribution, distribution centres, transportation companies – and actually, they are criminal groups trying to infiltrate the logistics supply chain,” said David Fairnie, BSI’s principal consultant in supply chain security. He urged producers to “continuously monitor” the supply chain and to not immediately trust new logistics providers – especially those contacted only remotely.
So, arguably today more than ever, you do need to know your suppliers. So far in 2021, BSI has noted this issue of fake carriers in an increasing number of countries in both the Americas and Europe.
Criminals have apparently been trying to steal goods in various ways, with phony truck drivers loading up items and taking off with them, while conmen “posing as legitimate employees” have reportedly been observed lurking around delivery destinations to steal cargo.
At the same time, the report found that trade in illicit goods has also been on the rise lately, with the illegal drug industry in particular appearing to flourish. While the supply chain for drug cartels, which require large amounts of assorted chemicals to produce narcotics, was disrupted due to the pandemic lockdowns and border closures impacted trafficking routes, organized crime quickly overcame these problems, the BSI noted.
“Drug cartels around the world did not miss a beat,” Chris Tomas, BSI lead intelligence analyst, said.
While many cartels shifted their production towards synthetic drugs, namely amphetamine, amid the pandemic, the apparent “lack of eradication of coca crops in Latin American countries” also remains an issue, the BSI said. The flow of cocaine has grown over the past year and is expected to increase even further, the organization warned.
“The numbers and quantities of cocaine seizures in Europe increased steadily in 2020 and 2021 and are expected to continue to rise in 2022,” the report reads.
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UK Home Secretary Priti Patel has acted to proscribe the Palestinian group Hamas “in its entirety,” stating that it has significant capacity to carry out terrorist acts and has facilities to train attackers.
In a tweet on Friday, Patel stated that she had banned the Palestinian group Hamas and designated it a terrorist organization, as she reiterated the British government’s commitment to “tackling extremism and terrorism wherever it occurs.”
“Hamas has significant terrorist capability, including access to extensive and sophisticated weaponry, as well as terrorist training facilities,” she wrote.
The home secretary’s tweet came during her visit to Washington and followed speculation on Friday morning that she was soon to outlaw the group.
Pre-empting Patel’s announcement, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett welcomed Britain’s “intention” on Twitter.
“Hamas is a radical Islamic group that targets innocent Israelis & seeks Israel’s destruction. I welcome the UK’s intention to declare Hamas a terrorist organization in its entirety – because that’s exactly what it is,” Bennett wrote, thanking the leadership of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Yair Lapid, Israel’s foreign minister, also hailed the expected move against Hamas, saying it was “part of strengthening ties with Britain.”
Until now, only Hamas’ military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, had been outlawed by the British government. The EU and the US have already proscribed all of Hamas.
Hamas political official Sami Abu Zuhri rejected Britain’s move, claiming it showed “absolute bias toward the Israeli occupation and is a submission to Israeli blackmail and dictations.”
In a separate statement, the group claimed it had a right to resist occupation by all available means, “including armed resistance.”
Hamas seized total control of Gaza in 2007, on the back of an election victory in 2006.
Extinction Rebellion has targeted Colombian diplomatic missions across several EU countries, including France and Italy, demanding that the nation address deforestation, coal mining, and indigenous peoples’ rights.
The hard-line climate activist group staged simultaneous protests outside several of Colombia’s diplomatic missions on Tuesday, calling on Bogota to protect biodiversity and stop deforestation. It also urged the country’s government to take action against the El Descanso open-pit coal mine, which is said to be threatening the Yukpa indigenous people.
The French branch of the activist group targeted the Colombian Embassy in Paris, vandalizing its entrance. Footage from the scene shows activists dousing the mission’s entrance in black paint, while plastering placards over its walls.
Action de @xrFrance a l’ambassade de Colombie à #Paris pour dénoncer l’inaction du gouvernement Colombien pour la protection de la biodiversité et des peuples indigènes. pic.twitter.com/1hpf3vVxK4
Another protest held outside Colombia’s consulate in Milan, Italy, saw that mission vandalized too. The building’s entrance was covered in fake blood, with a pile of a black substance, which looked like charcoal or coal, left by its doors.
#ATENCIÓN| Así se vive la Minga Internacional en el Consulado de Colombia en la ciudad de Milán, Italia, donde defensores del medio ambiente alzan su voz por el respeto a la vida y del territorio ancestral del Pueblo Yukpa.
— Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia – ONIC (@ONIC_Colombia) November 16, 2021
Demonstrations also took place outside Colombia’s missions in Germany’s capital, Berlin, as well as in Madrid, Spain. Those protests appeared to be more civil, with activists rallying outside of the missions without vandalizing them.
Taiwan’s president unveiled the country’s combat wing of advanced US-made F-16 fighters in a ceremony on Thursday, showing its new Air Force capabilities against mainland China.
The event, held at an air base in the southern Taiwanese city of Chiayi, saw the island commission the first combat wing of F-16 fighters, developed with US support.
The F-16 upgrades, costing T$110 billion (USD$3.95 billion), have been jointly completed by American manufacturer Lockheed Martin Corp and Taiwan’s Aerospace Industrial Development Corp.
Taiwan’s leader, Tsai Ing-wen, touted the new F-16s as ensuring that the island’s defenses would be “even stronger” in the face of increased tensions with China.
In October, Beijing sent a record 150 warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in four straight days of incursions. Over the past year, China’s Air Force has increased military activity in and around Taiwan’s ADIZ, according to Taipei.
Despite Taipei claiming it does not want to provoke a confrontation with China, the island’s president pledged that it will “do whatever it takes to defend itself.”
China has rejected claims that it is provoking conflict in Taiwan, which it sees as an integral part of its country, accusing America of “inflating” the island separatist movement, firmly stating that “Taiwan independence” is a dead end and Beijing will “take all steps” to ensure the island remains under its control. In recent years, China has become increasingly assertive about reuniting its wealthy island neighbor with the mainland.
The successful F-16 development process has been seen by Taiwan as the latest visible sign of the military partnership between Washington, DC and Taipei. Back in 2019, America approved an $8 billion sale of F-16s to Taiwan, which would bring the total number of jets in the island’s fleet to 200.
During the event, the Taiwanese president praised America for remaining steadfast in its cooperation with the island despite opposition from China. “As long as we adhere to the values of democracy and freedom, there will be more like-minded countries standing on the same front with us,” Tsai said alongside US diplomat Sandra Oudkirk.
In 2019, after the US and Taiwan agreed to upgrade the F-16 fighter jets, then-Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang threatened to sanction American firms unless the deal was halted. Beijing opposed the military partnership between Taipei and Washington, DC, arguing that the sale violated international law, harmed relations between the countries, and breached the One China policy, which America recognizes.
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Australia’s Defense Minister derided a senior Chinese diplomat’s comments as “silly” and “comical,” after the latter dubbed Canberra’s trilateral nuclear-powered submarine pact with the US and UK a threat to peace.
During a television interview on Friday, Peter Dutton said acting Chinese Ambassador Wang Xining was “probably reading off a script from the Communist Party” when he warned that Australia would become the “naughty guy” if it procured the stealth-combat vessels through the AUKUS deal.
Wang, who is China’s most senior representative to the country after the previous ambassador’s term ended last month, told The Guardian on Thursday that Australia would be labeled a “sabre-wielder” rather than a “peace defender.” He said the Australian public “should be more worried” about the impact of the security pact their nation had made with the UK and the US.
There’s zero nuclear capacity, technologically, in Australia, that would guarantee you will be trouble free, that you will be incident free. And if anything happened, are the politicians ready to say sorry to people in Melbourne and in Adelaide?
However, Dutton “dismissed” the comments and countered that “most Australians [would] see through [their] non-productive nature.”
“We don’t see it from any other ambassador here in Australia. It’s quite remarkable,” the minister told the Nine Network, adding that “this type of diplomacy” was seen elsewhere in the world too.
“These provocative comical statements – it’s just so silly. It’s funny,” he added.
In September, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the deal to obtain at least eight nuclear-powered vessels as part of its new defense alliance. The pact angered not only China but also France, which claimed it had been “stabbed in the back” after Canberra unilaterally scrapped a multi-billion-dollar diesel-electric submarine contract with Paris.
Last weekend, Dutton had irked Beijing by stating that he could not conceive of a situation in which Australia would hesitate to support the US should armed conflict with China break out over Taiwan. Under its ‘One China’ policy, Beijing has pledged to reunify the island with the mainland.
Wang warned Australian politicians on Thursday not to do anything that would be “destructive to our relationship.”
