Sports goods retailer Decathlon has said it won’t be selling canoes in its stores in northern France anymore because the light vessels are increasingly being used by migrants trying to cross into England.
“Given the current context… the purchase of canoes will no longer be possible” in Decathlon stores in Calais and Grande-Synthe, outside Dunkirk, the French retailer announced.
The two cities overlook the Strait of Dover, which is the narrowest point in the English Channel. Thousands of migrants have been using this spot in recent years to try to make the dangerous 34-kilometer-long sea journey from France to the UK.A lot of canoes aren’t being purchased for their original sporting purpose, Decathlon complained.
They “could be used to cross the Channel” and as a result of this, “people’s lives would be endangered,” it pointed out.
“We are committed to never putting our customers at risk in the use of our products, whatever the circumstances,” the company said.
The initiative to remove canoes from the shelves came from the stores themselves and was backed by the head office, according to the retailer. However, Decathlon will keep selling the vessels online and in its other shops across France.
Last Thursday, two canoes were found adrift in the Channel near Calais, while two migrants were rescued from the water. The next day, three more people were reported missing after attempting to get to England using canoes.
Tensions between London and Paris are high after a record number of migrants – 1,185 – were able to cross the Channel a week ago.
Britain said it was “unacceptable” that France had let so many people slip through, but the French government insisted they were “neither their collaborators nor their assistants” and blamed the soaring crossings on the smugglers and the UK’s labor market, which makes the country attractive to people eager to “work at low cost.”
An official inquiry has found that Germany’s justice system was staffed with former Nazis for decades after the Second World War, At one point, three out of four top officials at the prosecutor’s office were former party members.
Released on Thursday, the 600-page report was compiled by historian Friedrich Kiessling and legal scholar Christoph Safferling, and covers the Cold War period running from the early 1950s until 1974. The work was commissioned by the federal prosecutor’s office.
The researchers found that, at one point during the 1950s, roughly three in four top officials in the federal prosecutor’s office had been members of the Nazi Party. It took until 1972 before former Nazis were no longer in the majority in that office, and until 1992 before the judicial system had been fully purged of ex-members of the fascist party.
“There was no break, let alone a conscious break, with the Nazi past,” the researchers said of the situation.
Presenting the inquiry’s findings, state secretary at the justice ministry Margaretha Sudhof said the country has “long remained blind” to the presence of ex-Nazis in senior positions after the end of the Second World War.
“On the face of it they were highly competent lawyers… but that came against the backdrop of the death sentences and race laws in which they were involved,” Sudhof commented.
In a statement about the study’s publication, Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht said she welcomed “the fact that the Federal Prosecutor’s Office is also grappling with its troubled past and is shedding more light on its own Nazi entanglements in the post-war period.”
The federal prosecutor’s office is Germany’s highest prosecutorial authority, responsible for pursuing those who violate international law and commit alleged crimes relating to state security.
The latest study follows an earlier report published in 2016, which stated that in 1957 – more than a decade after the war had ended – 77% of senior officials in the justice ministry were former Nazis. At the time of that publication, then-Justice Minister Heiko Maas stated that the “Nazi-era lawyers went on to cover up old injustice rather than to uncover it, and thereby created new injustice.”
Australia’s Jewish community has condemned the repeated displays of Nazi references at anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown rallies in Victoria, some of which saw the state premier depicted as Adolf Hitler.
Daniel Aghion, the president of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, claims that references to the genocidal regime of the Nazis amid the current unrest over pandemic rules is a false equivalence.
“The Nazis had the intention of wiping from the face of the Earth a race or religion simply because of what they were,” Aghion told Guardian Australia. “Nothing in the current proposals is remotely like that, and the comparison to Nazi Germany is therefore shocking, inappropriate and wrong,” he added.
Aghion’s comments come after demonstrators, protesting against pandemic laws, referenced Nazi Germany in an effort to make their point. Some carried placards depicting state premier, Daniel Andrews, as Hitler.
I don’t agree with Daniel Andrews Pandemic Bill. It’s overreach & has rightly been condemned. But placards depicting the Premier in Nazi uniform is offensive & wrong.
It shows a lack of understanding of history. It fuels hatred. It’s dangerous & has no place in public debate. pic.twitter.com/9QN5rj5hym
Wendy Lovell, a Liberal MP, had also claimed laws proposed to govern future pandemics were similar to Germany’s 1933 Enabling Act – which allowed the Reich government to issue laws without the consent of parliament and preceded atrocities, most notably the Holocaust.
MP Bernie Finn had gone as far as to share a social media post depicting the state premier as Hitler. It was later deleted.Laws proposed by Andrews seek to grant powers to the state leaders in the event of another pandemic. Under the move, the minister “may make any order… that the minister believes is reasonably necessary to protect public health.”
Opponents claim the legislation, which would see power concentrated with the head of state and health minister, is too broad and far reaching.
A gunman injured two civilians, one of them fatally, and two police officers before being shot dead by security forces near Jerusalem’s Western Wall on Sunday morning, Israeli police said.
The civilian victims were taken to Shaare Zedek Medical Center. One, who was in his 30s, succumbed to his injuries at the hospital. The other, a 46-year-old, is said to have suffered moderate injuries. Two police officers were hurt by shrapnel.
Two civilians were critically and seriously wounded this morning, Sunday, and two policemen were lightly wounded in a shooting attack in the area of the Chain Gate near the Western Wall and the entrance to the Temple Mount. pic.twitter.com/MRN6MLckj3
In a video clip shared on social media and purportedly filmed at the scene, multiple gunshots could be heard amid agitated shouting. Security officers could then be seen standing around what appears to be a dead body. Witnesses speculated it was that of a “terrorist.”
Scenes and sounds of shooting in the Old City of Jerusalem captured on Live Cam. Initial reports are attack is near the Temple Mount area 2 Israelis wounded one apparently seriously the terrorist has been neutralised pic.twitter.com/UKWSOqCu8D
— ElBluemountain MossadDolphin 🇮🇱🐬🇮🇱🐬🇮🇱 (@EBluemountain1) November 21, 2021
The gunman, whose identity was not immediately disclosed, was killed during the incident. Police said he had used a homemade submachine gun.
Just three days after restrictions were announced for unvaccinated Austrians, a provincial governor is pressing for a nationwide lockdown of all residents as Covid-19 infections continue to hit record highs.
“If no national lockdown is ordered tomorrow, there will definitely have to be a lockdown of several weeks in Upper Austria, together with our neighboring province Salzburg as of next week,” Upper Austria Governor Thomas Stelzer told lawmakers on Thursday.
That will mean at least two of Austria’s nine provinces will be in full lockdown mode just days after the nation created a two-tier society by locking down approximately two million unvaccinated Austrians.
“We must raise the vaccination rate. It is shamefully low,” Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said on Sunday, announcing that unvaccinated residents would only be allowed to leave their homes for “essential” purposes, such as to buy groceries or go to a doctor’s office.
Police are now doing random checks for proof of vaccination on Austrian streets. Those unvaccinated residents who are found to be in violation of the lockdown order face steep fines of up to €500. Those who refuse to go through a vaccination status check will have to pay about three times as much.
Stelzer and other Austrian governors are scheduled to meet with Schallenberg and Health Minister Wolfgang Mueckstein on Friday, when a full lockdown will likely be considered.
New Covid-19 cases in the country passed the 15,000 mark for the first time on Thursday, far surpassing 2020’s daily high of 9,586, set when no vaccines were available. Upper Austria and Salzburg have been hit the hardest, putting hospitals at risk of bed shortages. With some 66% of its population fully vaccinated, Austria lags behind other Western European countries in terms of the Covid-19 vaccination rate.
While Austria is the first to impose a lockdown on the unvaccinated, other EU countries – including Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Greece – have imposed increasingly tight restrictions on people who haven’t accepted a Covid vaccine.
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NEW YORK, Nov 19 (IPS) – A week has gone by since COP 26 with 197 Parties ended in the Scottish city of Glasgow on extended time last Saturday. Climate change which covers wide array of issues affecting all living beings engaged the people around the world for COP 26 in a way never experienced since COP1 was held in Berlin in 1995.
China has accused the Philippines of breaching its territory, saying two supply ships were blocked by Beijing’s coast guard as they approached a disputed shoal. Manila protested over the run-in, citing its own claim to the area.
The two Philippines vessels “trespassed” into waters near the Nansha island chain – also known as the Spratly Islands – on November 16, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijan told reporters on Friday, noting that they entered the area “without China’s consent.”
“Chinese coast guard vessels performed official duties in accordance with law and upheld China’s territorial sovereignty and maritime order,” Zhao said, adding that the area is now “generally tranquil” and that the two countries are in communication about the encounter.
The comments from Beijing come just one day after Manila first publicized the incident, with the Philippines Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin claiming Chinese vessels fired water cannon on the two supply boats and forced them to abandon their mission near a disputed shoal in the Spratlys. He called on China to “back off” and “take heed” of Philippines claims to the region.
While both countries regard the Ayungin shoal – alternatively referred to as the Second Thomas or Renai Jiao shoal – as their own territory, The Hague’s Permanent Court of Arbitration settled the dispute in the Philippines’ favor in 2016. However, despite that ruling, as well as the fact that Manila has maintained a presence on the shoal since 1999, Beijing has not abandoned its claims to the area.
As infections are rising again, scientists all around the world are rushing to fight the danger, offering a choice of new treatments and unusual variants of vaccines.
Levels of contagion are setting new records, hospitals are overwhelmed, governments are starting to introduce lockdowns, and not only for unvaccinated people – the picture of the fight against Covid-19 looks quite disappointing. However, there’s still a place for good news: Research teams report positive results while trialling new medicines and vaccine types.
Nasal vaccines
Vaccination will remain one of the most effective tools against Covid-19. As Professor David Dockrell, from the Center for Inflammation Research of the University of Edinburgh, told RT, “vaccines will continue to be a central part of how we control the virus.”
“If we can dampen down the number of infections, and the severity of infections, and also the extent to which the virus can replicate in people when they become infected, then we are slowing down the ability of the virus to change and to mutate,” he explains.
So I think the vaccines still will be a very important part of the preventive strategy. It’s vital that they are available to all the world’s population, irrespective of where people live, and the wealth of the country in which they live.
However, vaccination doesn’t always mean you have to get an injection. For instance, several intranasal Covid-19 vaccines are currently being developed. As the virus gets into the body through the nose, a nasal spray or drops are aimed to produce mucosal immune response and prevent it from getting into the lungs.
In India, a vaccine of this type is already completing Phase 2 of clinical trials. In Russia, a nasal vaccine is undergoing a clinical trial on volunteers. In Thailand, a home-developed product is expected to be trialed on humans next spring. In the US, Universities of Houston and Stanford recently reported good results of their experiments carried out on mice.
Intranasal vaccines can have several potential benefits compared to inoculation.
“They would be easier to use, because they can be self-administered. They wouldn’t need a nurse or clinical settings,” Swedish professor emeritus of epidemiology Marcello Ferrada de Noli explained to RT. As a result, he says, there’s hope that fewer people will be reluctant to be immunized. Not so many of us find it pleasant to get a jab – and after all, there are those who are just afraid of needles. Also, it would be much easier to vaccinate children with nasal substances.
However, what concerns Prof. de Noli the most is the duration of the effect of a vaccine of this type. Still, scientists can’t say for sure whether a nasal substance may completely replace a shot. According to Alexander Gintsburg, the head of Moscow’s Gamaleya Center biomedical research institute, which created the Sputnik V vaccine, the nasal version they are working on would serve for an additional protection against the virus, but would not replace the injections.
Chew the virus away?
A nasal vaccine is not the only one being developed. In summer, it was revealed that Russian Defense Ministry scientists were creating a ‘chewing gum’ vaccine, also targeting the mucosal immune response. Meanwhile, a UK firm announced this month that it would conduct a human trial of a skin patch that uses T-cells to confront the virus. Developers hope it would offer longer-lasting immunity than the existing vaccines. Work on a similar project is being done in the University of Queensland, Australia.
While it all looks so promising, Prof. de Noli warns that it would still take a lot of time until these products become available to the public. “I think that discoveries in this field are a very good thing. But if we say ‘We discovered a new type of vaccine’, people will say ‘Aha, so I’m going to wait’. But we need to vaccinate people now,” he points out.
Improving Covid treatment
Vaccines are not a silver bullet, unfortunately, given the not-so-high level of global immunization and the constantly emerging new strains of the virus. “People might get infected despite having had a vaccine, but I still think the vaccine strategy is going to be central to how we manage this kind of virus going forward,” Prof. Dockrell says. “But we will have other strategies that will be very important. We will have other elements. When we put them all together, it gives us the best opportunity that people can live with coronaviruses, and hopefully, the mortality can be limited to much lower extense than what we’ve sadly seen in the last eighteen months.”
Monoclonal antibodies will be central to the ongoing vaccine strategy, Prof. Dockrell explains. These are the antibodies similar to those the body uses to fight the virus. They are produced in labs and given via infusion or injection to boost the patient’s response against certain diseases. Monoclonal antibody treatment is used for people under a high risk of developing severe infection (including older patients 65+ years old or those with chronic medical conditions). It’s already being used in the US, following last year’s FDA approval. Earlier in November, the European Medicines agency recommended authorizing two monoclonal antibody medicines.
In October, UK’s AstraZeneca reported positive results of a Phase 3 study of its antibody combination, which, according to developers, is highly effective in both prevention and treatment of coronavirus.
Researchers are also working on a possibility to save Covid-infected patients from the so-called ‘cytokine storm’ – a situation when the immune system reacts so intensely that kills not only the virus, but the whole organism itself. A drug to ‘calm the storm’ was registered in Russia this year, and it’s already being used on patients.
Another way to fight Covid-19 is to use antiviral drugs. When the pandemic started, medics had to use something already existing (like anti-influenza Favipiravir) or something being authorized for emergency use (like remdesivir). Now, more than a year on, the work to create a special drug to specifically cure Covid-19 is giving its results. This month, Russia registered its first injectable anti-Covid medicine. A bit earlier, the UK became the first country to approve an antiviral pill produced by the US-based companies Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics. Another American firm, Pfizer, got positive results from trials of its drug of the same kind. Both firms hope that with a drug in the form of a pill it would be easier to treat people at home.
Appreciating all the efforts on the field of developing anti-Covid treatment, Prof. de Noli points out that still, the key issue now is to reduce the spreading of the virus. “The new medicines are developed for people who already got the disease,” he says.
But we need to prevent people from getting the infection, not let them get infected because we have some new medicine that can cure them.
The same idea is echoed by scientists all over the world quoted in plenty of articles dedicated to the medical gains: it’s great to have the treatment, but none of the drugs may substitute vaccination, as first and foremost, humanity has to adopt preventive measures and stop the pandemic.
France’s education minister has announced plans to boost the teaching of ancient Greek and Latin in an effort to fight the proliferation of wokeism and “develop the culture” of the country’s younger generations.
Speaking on Monday, Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer, a leading figure in France’s war on woke, said that ancient Greek and Latin would become available to sixth formers pursuing vocational courses next year, as well as middle school students.
Blanquer wants sixth formers to have the opportunity to “develop their culture” by reading ancient philosophers while gaining the technical qualifications that the economy demands.
Speaking at a charter signing, alongside counterparts from Italy, Greece, and Cyprus, the minister claimed their joint commitment to the promotion of the classics came at a time when ancient languages were being threatened by American wokeism.
The targeting of the dead languages has been most prominent in the US with Princeton University announcing this summer that it would no longer require classics students to study ancient Greek and Latin; the two vernaculars are often considered the core pillars of the discipline.
Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an associate professor of classics at Princeton, claimed the ancient languages had been used as a justification of slavery, colonialism, and fascism for 2,000 years.
In a similar move, a Massachusetts high school boasted that it had removed Homer’s Odyssey from the school curriculum as it conflicted with the anti-racist agenda it wanted to teach. “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year,” a teacher wrote on social media.
Blanquer told Le Point that such interpretations of the classics were “completely mind boggling.” “To stick categories and a contemporary world view on writings dating back two millennia is an abyssal absurdity,” he added, noting that these civilizations brought us “openness and a search for the universal.”
The minister believes that ancient languages are a common bond for contemporary European nations, noting that the “common linguistic fund” would help spread “common values.”
Blanquer also claimed the classics respond to a demand for logos (language as a tool for reason), in a world where “a lack of reason is spreading like wildfire.”
Last month, the education minister set up a think tank dedicated to President Emmanuel Macron’s war on wokeism.
The liberal or woke agenda, which some in France claim is an Anglo-Saxon import, is likely to be a major feature in the 2022 presidential election, where Macron’s main competitor is likely to hail from the far right of the political spectrum.
