The International Criminal Court has halted an investigation into alleged rights abuses carried out by Philippines authorities as part of a harsh crackdown on the drug trade, saying it is reviewing a deferral request from Manila.
The ICC’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan said the probe was suspended after the Philippines government filed a request to defer the case earlier this month, according to court documents cited by Reuters on Friday.
“The prosecution has temporarily suspended its investigative activities while it assesses the scope and effect of the deferral request,” he wrote, adding that the court is seeking more information from the government in Manila.
Based in The Hague, the ICC allows states to ask for postponements if they conduct their own investigations into the charges in question. President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration filed its deferral request on November 10, while the country’s Justice Ministry announced its own investigation into the alleged abuses late last month.
The court initially opened the probe in September over allegations that Philippines police had carried out thousands of extrajudicial executions and used other brutal tactics against suspected drug dealers, and that Duterte gave implicit backing to those actions. Activists have accused authorities of killing innocent people, including children, though the police insist they only use violence in self-defense.
While Duterte has declined to cooperate with the ICC probe, saying it has no authority on the island nation, and even pulled the Philippines out of the international body in 2019, the court has jurisdiction to investigate alleged violations committed by the country while it was still a member.
The president’s chief legal counsel, Salvador Panelo, confirmed the deferral request in brief comments to Reuters, saying “There is no inconsistency with the request for suspension of action,” though he did not elaborate.
Since its founding some 20 years ago, the ICC has successfully convicted just five people of war crimes or crimes against humanity – all leaders of armed movements in Africa, including in Mali, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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Talk about a gift that keeps on giving; each month reveals yet another beautiful pooch answering nature’s call. Also important: $1 from each “Pooping Pooches 2022” calendar is donated to the Maui Humane Society to support animals in need. This tasteful calendar is available on Etsy and Amazon, but you can also get 500 piece jigsaw puzzle for those long, dark winter evenings!
This year’s latest addition is a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle which can also be purchased on Amazon (not suitable for babies and individuals who have a tendency to put things in their mouth and potentially choke on the pieces).
Just like the calendar, every puzzle sale will also contribute to Maui Humane Society to help animals in need (one poop at a time).
Anyways, if pooping dogs is something you would like to look at for a whole year, you can get this calendar on Etsy or Amazon.
Australia’s government could be forced to spend tens of millions in payouts after receiving more than 10,000 compensation claims from people who suffered side effects and loss of income due to Covid-19 vaccines.
Under its no-fault indemnity scheme, eligible claimants can apply for compensation amounts between AU$5,000 (US$3,646) to AU$20,000 (US$14,585) to cover medical costs and lost wages as a result of being hospitalized after getting the shot. The scheme’s online portal is scheduled to be launched next month.
Official figures suggest, however, that over 10,000 people have already indicated their intention to make a claim since registration opened on the health department’s website in September. If each claim was approved, the government could face a bill of at least AU$50 million (US$36.46 million).
There were around 78,880 adverse events to Covid-related vaccination in Australia as of November 7, according to the Therapeutic Goods Administration, which regulates national health products. The majority of side effects were minor, including headaches, nausea, and arm soreness.
Only people who experienced a moderate to significant adverse reaction that resulted in a hospital stay of at least one night are eligible for coverage under the government’s scheme. Those seeking $20,000 or less have to provide proof their claims are vaccine-related – although there has been no information as yet on exactly what evidence would be acceptable.
“Adverse events, even though they happen to a tiny proportion of people, for the people it does impact it’s really quite devastating,” Clare Eves, the head of medical negligence at injury compensation firm Shine Lawyers, told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Among the adverse reactions covered are the blood clotting disorder “thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS)” linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine and the “myocarditis and pericarditis” heart conditions associated with the Pfizer vaccine. Other reportedly accepted side effects are Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological condition, and immune thrombocytopenia (excessive bleeding due to low platelet levels).
Claims for over $20,000, including those for vaccine-related deaths, will be assessed by an independent legal panel of legal experts and compensation paid on its recommendations. Nine people have reportedly died after an adverse reaction to one of the three vaccines in the country.
Eves told the Morning Herald that her firm was representing a number of litigants over the vaccine side effects, including several who are not eligible for the scheme.
The planned introduction of chemical castration for serial rapists in Pakistan has been dropped due to objections from experts in Islamic law, who said such punishment would be counter to Sharia.
The controversial clause in a bill amending criminal law in Pakistan was dropped before the National Assembly voted on it on Wednesday, a parliament official said on Friday. If it were passed, it would have been unconstitutional, Parliamentary Secretary for Law and Justice Maleeka Bokhari explained. The basic law of the country requires all its laws to be in line with the Sharia and the Koran.
Bokhari said the decision to drop the clause was taken due to objections from the Council of Islamic Ideology, a constitutional body that advises the government of Pakistan on the intricacies of Islamic law.
The bill amends Pakistan’s Penal Code and Criminal Procedure Code to streamline investigations and prosecutions of sexual crimes as part of wider anti-rape reform. Some conservative lawmakers vocally argued against the castration clause as the piece of legislation was moving towards approval. Senator Mushtaq Ahmed from the Islamist Jamaat-i-Islami party argued that rapists should be hanged publicly, while castration was never mentioned in Sharia.
A separate bill also approved by the parliament on Wednesday introduces a system of special regional investigators for rape allegations to be appointed by the prime minister, as well as new protections for victims, and punishments for officials who fail to investigate their complaints properly. Among other things, it makes evidence that a victim is “generally of immoral character” inadmissible in court.
The reform is necessary because currently deterrence of sexual crimes in Pakistan is undermined by “poor investigation, archaic procedures and rules of evidence and delay in the trial,” the bill said.
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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Kids say the strangest and funniest things. We’ve always loved the frank, honest and unadulterated way that little humans choose to express themselves. They see things from a different perspective to us grownups whose thoughts have been shaped and molded by the world around us. NYC school teacher Alyssa Cowit was so fascinated by the questions and comments from her Kindergarteners that she decided to start an Instagram account, called Live From Snack Time, to chronicle them. Scroll down for some of the best ones!
Reuters has apologized for its poor choice of photo to illustrate a story about a monkey brain study that was deemed offensive and racist in China.
On Thursday, Reuters published a story titled “Monkey-brain study with link to China’s military roils top European university.” The report was about a Chinese professor studying how a monkey’s brain functions at extreme altitude.
The study was done with the help of Beijing’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with the aim of developing new drugs to prevent brain damage, Reuters said.
The news agency promoted the story on Twitter with a photo of smiling Chinese soldiers in an oxygen chamber.
The tweet prompted outrage in China, with people calling it racist on social media. Reuters responded on Friday night by deleting the original tweet because the photo of Chinese soldiers was unrelated to the story and “could have been read as offensive.”
PHOTO CORRECTION: We have deleted an earlier tweet that included a picture of Chinese soldiers in an oxygen chamber not described in the original tweet that could have been read as offensive https://t.co/Ahtv9fj8EQ 2/2
“As soon as we became aware of our mistake, the tweet was deleted and corrected, and we apologize for the offense it caused,” Reuters said in a statement to the Global Times, China’s state-run newspaper.
It was not the first time the leading Western news agency had run into trouble in China. In July, the Chinese Embassy in Sri Lanka criticized Reuters for using a photo of Chinese weightlifter and Tokyo 2020 Olympics gold medalist Hou Zhihui that the country’s state media described as “ugly” and “disrespectful to the athlete.”
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Those making and knowingly using fake vaccination certificates in Germany could soon face up to five years behind bars, as the country’s likely future coalition government is looking to tighten the screws.
Coming under the same category are also fake test results and Covid recovery certificates, with similar penalties for the counterfeiters and the holders. Everything envisaged in the new guidelines was drafted by the Social Democrats, along with the Free Democratic and Green Parties. The three are currently in coalition talks and expected to form a new government as early as next week.
The German Parliament will decide on the regulations this Thursday, though a draft has already been seen by the media outlet DPA.
According to German media, the manufacturing and sale of fake certificates has become a booming black-market industry in the country. In just one such case reported by Der Spiegel in late October, a counterfeiter working at a pharmacy in Munich and her accomplice had churned out more than 500 fake digital certificates in the span of one month, raking in €350 for each one sold.
Meanwhile, Berlin authorities are planning to further ramp up restrictions in the city, where, starting Monday, having either a vaccination or recovery certificate is a must to enter restaurants, cinemas, theaters, museums, galleries, swimming pools, gyms, as well as hairdressers and beauty salons. On Tuesday, Berlin Mayor Michael Müller confirmed that authorities want to “have an additional instrument” to contain the spread of the virus. However, he declined to elaborate on what the new measures will be. Local media speculate that starting next week, in addition to the requirement to have a vaccination or recovery certificate to enter public places, people inside the venues will also need to practice social distancing and wear a mask, or have a recent negative test result.
This comes after Covid-19 numbers in Berlin hit an all-time high last Thursday, with 2,874 new cases reported that day.
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People are weird. They cook and eat the strangest things. This time it’s an octopus stuffed inside a turkey, sitting on top of crab legs, and (optionally) garnished with bacon strips. This monstrous culinary invention was inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, and honestly… it looks like a crime against food.
If this gallery wasn’t disgusting enough for you, you should also check out pre-cooked canned chicken that we’ve previously featured on this fun and useful site. We know you’ll love it!
Covid-19 variants keep emerging in different parts of the world, causing experts to ask how long the pandemic will last, and how effective the current methods of protection really are.
Since the pandemic started in 2019, people have referred to the disease which has paralyzed the world simply as ‘coronavirus’. Now, in 2021, when we talk about it, we mean not just the original variant, but also its numerous mutations.
In May, the WHO decided to label the key variants with Greek letters. Since then, the Delta variant has been proclaimed the predominant strain across the world, and now we have titles that look like codes to detail the differences between variants. Last month, the UK was put on high alert over a fast-spreading Delta AY.4.2 variant. This week, Norway reported finding one more version of the Delta strain – AY. 63. The country’s experts suggest it’s not more dangerous than the Delta mutation itself. Meanwhile, another Covid variant, discovered in France (B.1.640), brought the researchers an unpleasant surprise: they said they’d never seen mutations like it.
Professor David Dockrell, from the Center for Inflammation Research of the University of Edinburgh, described to RT the reasons for the constant mutation of the coronavirus. “The areas in the virus that are most likely to change are those that come into contact with what we call ‘selective pressures’ – or factors that make them need to change,” he explains. “So, a version of the virus which mutates and changes to give it a selective advantage to escape from the immune system is more likely to prosper and become a dominant strain.”
That’s how it works: The part of the virus many of the immune responses (or antibodies, T-cells etc.) are responding to is called the spike protein (or the S-protein). So, the virus tries to change it in order to survive.
“We know that a variety of different viruses are able to mutate and change when exposed to the selective pressure of the immune system, whether it would be the human immune system or other species in which these viruses have evolved,” Prof. Dockrell says. “And of course, we’ve seen it most clearly with HIV, which is particularly good at changing and evolving. It does something called ‘reverse transcription’ – it copies material in the reversed direction from DNA to RNA.”
Covid is still seemingly running faster than humanity’s efforts to curb it, but Prof. Dockrell has some good news. “The coronavirus – and viruses like it – are not as able to make these changes. They are going to do it to some extent, but they are not going to be as successful as retroviruses and HIV.”
And the other major thing to say: When the viruses make changes, there’s always what we call ‘a fitness cost’. Many of the potential changes that the virus could make will actually not favor its survival. So there are only a certain number, potentially, of changes that the virus can make, before it starts affecting its fitness.
Now, unfortunately, we are still in a phase where Covid19 can continue to evolve and change. It’s not time to panic, though, because across the world various ways to adapt the current anti-Covid strategies are already in place. First of all, people should keep getting vaccines – maybe receiving slightly altered booster doses, Prof. Dockrell suggests, “in a way, that we, after all, have to do with influenza, by providing a seasonal influenza vaccine and changing it every year.”
“And maybe we have to keep changing some of the treatments like these new monoclonal antibodies against the virus, because they also may be limited by the emergence of a mutation of the virus evolving the S-protein,” he adds.
Sounds promising – but won’t it become a never-ending race against constantly emerging mutations?
Hopefully not. According to Prof. Dockrell, there are parts of viruses that scientists call ‘conserved areas’. With time, vaccines and monoclonal antibodies will target these areas, which the virus finds very hard to change. “Clearly, the direction of travel is to develop either vaccine responses that affect more different kinds of virus, or these ‘monoclonal antibodies’ that we could use to prevent or treat infection, that they will target more conserved areas and therefore will be less limited by the ability of these virus to evolve and change,” he concludes.
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