The EU must quickly seal its external borders to stem the flow of migrants who are no longer welcome in the 27-member bloc, according to Slovenia’s interior minister, whose country currently holds the presidency of the EU Council.
Speaking at the ‘Sarajevo Migration Dialogue’ on Thursday, Interior Minister Ales Hojs said EU countries were preoccupied recently with the coronavirus pandemic, the fall of the government in Afghanistan, and now a migrant crisis on the Poland-Belarus border, which he said was a hybrid war waged by Minsk against the EU.
“All three have additionally contributed to the increase in numbers of illegal migrants moving towards Europe and the Balkans, destabilizing the European Union,” Hojs told reporters.
The Slovenian minister said the current situation was similar to the 2015 influx of refugees and migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, when the EU admitted over one million people across its borders.
This time the situation is different, Hojs said, warning that “there is no more ‘refugees welcome.’”
“I believe that external borders must be secured, even with fences if necessary,” Hojs said, saying that he supported a plan for Brussels to finance the building of fences to reinforce the bloc’s borders.
He said it was important to strengthen cooperation and partnership across the EU in order to better manage migration and maintain security.
Thousands of migrants have been trying to cross the Belarus-Poland border in an attempt to reach the EU. They have been stranded at barbed-wire fencing with Polish border guards repelling their attempts to cross. Warsaw has accused Belarus of orchestrating the crisis to destabilize the EU and “weaponize” migration in an effort to have sanctions lifted.
A spokesperson for Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko claimed on Thursday that Germany agreed to open a humanitarian corridor for 2,000 refugees on the border.
Japan’s fifth wave of Covid-19 has virtually disappeared so dramatically that some scientists are puzzled as to why it happened. One team suggests the highly infectious Delta strain mutated into extinction on the island nation.
In mid-August, Japan experienced a peak in Covid-19 infections, recording over 23,000 new cases per day. Now the metric is just around 170, with deaths attributed to the disease mostly remaining in single digits this month.
The decline has been attributed by many to high vaccination rates, public acceptance of masks, and other factors, but some researchers say the drop was uniquely significant, compared to other nations with similar conditions.
Ituro Inoue, a geneticist at the National Institute of Genetics, believes that Japan had the good fortune of witnessing the Delta strain mostly rooting out other variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus before then eradicating itself. He explained his team’s theory to the Japan Times newspaper this week.
For some time now, Inoue and his fellow scientists were researching mutations of SARS-CoV-2 and how they are affected by the protein nsp14, which is crucial for the reproduction of the virus.
RNA viruses, like the one causing Covid-19, tend to have a very high mutation rate, which helps them quickly adapt to changes in the environment. However, this opens the door for a so-called “error catastrophe,” when bad mutations pile up and finally cause the full extinction of a strain. The protein nsp14 appears to offer a form of error proofreading that helps the virus genome to stay below the threshold of the “error catastrophe.”
In the case of Japan’s fifth wave of Covid-19, the Delta variant’s nsp14 failed at this job, Inoue believes, based on the genetic study of specimens collected from June to October. Contrary to his team’s expectations, there was a lack of genetic diversity, while many samples had many genetic changes in the site called A394V, which is linked to the error-fixing protein.
“We were literally shocked to see the findings,” the researcher told the Japan Times. “The Delta variant in Japan was highly transmissible and [was] keeping other variants out. But as the mutations piled up, we believe it eventually became a faulty virus and it was unable to make copies of itself.”
The theory could be relevant to the previous SARS strain, which was identified in 2003, explaining why it didn’t cause a pandemic. But that would be hard to confirm, since the outbreak ended relatively quickly and didn’t result in the massive collection of genetic data necessary to test the hypothesis.
It’s not clear why Japan had this lucky turn of events, but nothing comparable happened in other East Asian countries like South Korea, where populations are genetically close to that of Japan. Virus mutations similar to those flagged by the scientists have been discovered in at least 24 countries, Inoue said. He and his team plan to publish a paper detailing their findings by the end of November.
Even if the natural extinction theory is confirmed, it is at best a temporary reprieve for the Japanese people. New, more successful strains are likely to eventually find their way into the country, though quarantine measures and immigration control could delay the emergence of new variants in Japan, Inoue believes.
Meanwhile, Tokyo is bracing for a new wave of Covid-19 this winter and is preparing to live with the virus. The government reportedly plans to ease travel restrictions by increasing the number of people it allows to enter the country per day from 3,500 to 5,000.
Once you’ve reached optimal cat lady status, there comes a time in your life where you think it’s necessary to start massaging your cat’s head. Luckily, someone has already created a cat head massager, and it is most likely the most specific niche product you could think of. You can get it on Amazon or AliExpress.
If your cat didn’t love you before, rest assured he will love you now. Your cat will be so thankful for the head massage that he might even ignore you for less time throughout the day, and if you’re really lucky, your cat may even acknowledge your existence. …Or you can use it on yourself if you have a particularly small head.
In case you feel like you should have this thing in your (and your cat’s) life, you can get it on Amazon or AliExpress.
A pack of wild boars were rounded up and euthanized after one of the animals attacked a police officer in the streets of Hong Kong – the opening shot in a pitched battle between the feral hogs and the city’s law enforcement.
A group of veterinarians took seven wild boars into custody, euthanizing the beasts after knocking them out with dart guns in an area near the financial center of the city, according to a statement from Hong Kong’s Agriculture, Fisheries, and Conservation Department on Thursday.
The pigs were captured after one attacked a police officer last week, an act which reflects the city’s new policy toward the animals: stop them before they attack again.
The aggressive boar knocked down a police officer by biting his leg last week as the two faced off in a residential car park, the pig only losing the battle after falling off the building to its death. The wild boars are apparently “accustomed” to wandering back and forth along the roadway, begging for food from pedestrians and vehicles alike. Previously, the city had handled the population by capturing and sedating the animals, then relocating them to “remote areas,” according to the the department.
Hong Kong CEO Carrie Lam vowed to increase penalties for those citizens found feeding the boars, which have reportedly been responsible for some 30 attacks in recent years. While residents are warned not to feed the boars so as not to encourage population growth or disease outbreaks, the animals are a favorite among some visitors. Still, Lam insisted “we can’t simply sit on our hands while things deteriorate.”
Animal rights groups have responded with a protest letter against a policy of euthanasia, pointing out that most visitors do not feed the boars and arguing resources should be directed toward stopping the human activity rather than blaming all the boars. Allowing the boars to be captured and killed “ignores their right to live and considers their existence in urban areas as a capital offense,” the letter read.
Scientists in Sweden claim that a single protein in the blood could predict the onset of Type 2 diabetes nearly 20 years in advance. The breakthrough potentially affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
Diabetes is the world’s ninth-leading cause of death, and affects nearly half a billion people worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). The vast majority of diabetes patients suffer from Type 2 diabetes, a condition that can lead to blindness, kidney failure, heart attacks, strokes, and lower limb amputation. Cases of diabetes quadrupled worldwide between 1980 and 2014, with unhealthy diets and lack of exercise blamed for the rise.
However, researchers at Lund University in Malmo, Sweden claim that elevated levels of a certain protein – follistatin – in the blood can predict the onset of Type 2 diabetes regardless of a person’s age, weight, diet or activity level. In a study published last week, the scientists wrote that high levels of follistatin can predict the condition up to 19 years before symptoms appear.
To discover the link between follistatin and diabetes, the researchers tracked 5,300 people from Sweden, Italy, and the UK for between four and 19 years. Follistatin helps break down body fat, while simultaneously leading to an increase in fat in the liver. This buildup can cause fatty liver disease and Type 2 diabetes.
“This study shows that follistatin has the potential to become an important biomarker to predict future Type 2 diabetes, and it also brings us one step closer to the understanding of the mechanisms behind the disease,” Dr. Yang De Marinis, associate professor at Lund University and lead author of the study, told a university newsletter. De Marinis added that the next step for her team would be to help develop an AI-based diagnostic tool that could analyze a patient’s blood sample and use their follistatin levels – and other biomarkers – to calculate their “risk score” for Type 2 diabetes.
As follistatin levels rise in response to food intake and activity levels, the same advice for prevention of diabetes still applies. “Balanced meals, eat[ing] healthy and regular exercise are important to decrease the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes,” De Marinis told StudyFinds.
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People around the world will need to get a jab against Covid-19 once a year, at least when it comes to the Pfizer vaccine, BioNTech’s CEO Ugur Sahin said in an interview on Sunday, as he praised the quality of its booster shot.
In an interview with Germany’s Bild newspaper on Sunday, Sahin said he considers the vaccine, co-developed by his company, to be “very effective.”
When asked whether people should be worried about the “breakthrough infections” – in which those vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine still developed Covid-19 symptoms – he dismissed such concerns, saying that the jab offers a “90 percent protection” against cases that require intensive care in those aged over 60.
A “very high” level of protection against severe illness lasts for up to nine months, the BioNTech CEO maintained. He said this level starts decreasing “from the fourth month,” however. To maintain the protection, Sahin strongly pushed for booster shots, arguing that they would not just restore levels of antibodies but would potentially help “to break … chains of infection.”
He also encouraged doctors to be “as pragmatic as possible” when it comes to greenlighting vaccination and “not to send people home unvaccinated even though they could be vaccinated without any problems.”
In the future, people might need to get booster shots once a year, the BioNTech CEO believes. He said that he expects protection from a booster shot to “last longer” than the initial immunity one acquires after getting two doses of the vaccine.
“Subsequent … vaccinations may only be needed every year – just like [with] influenza,” he said. Currently, the German Federal Center for Health Education – an agency subordinated to the Health Ministry – recommends a booster shot six months after one gets the second dose of a vaccine. It also says that “booster vaccination makes sense after a minimum interval of about four months.”
Sahin’s interview comes days after it was revealed that Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are making a combined profit of $65,000 every minute – all thanks to their Covid-19 jabs. That is according to estimates made by the People’s Vaccine Alliance (PVA) – a coalition demanding wider access to vaccines.
The PVA estimated that the three companies are to earn a total of $34 billion in combined pre-tax profits this year alone, which roughly translates into more than $1,000 a second and $93.5 million a day.
PVA has slammed the three companies over their refusal to allow vaccine technology transfer despite receiving a combined $8 billion in public funding. Such a move could increase global supply and save millions of lives as well as drive down prices, the coalition said.
“Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have used their monopolies to prioritize the most profitable contracts with the richest governments, leaving low-income countries out in the cold,” said Maaza Seyoum of the African Alliance and People’s Vaccine Alliance Africa.
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When you think the internet can’t get any more niche, it finds a way to get even more specific. We’re, of course, talking about an Instagram account @BagDogs that is solely dedicated to sharing people’s photos of dogs chilling in bags as they are being transported from point A to point B. Scroll down to see some of their best photos!
Hundreds of major websites returned ‘404: not found’ errors after an apparent problem with Google Cloud. Alphabet said the problem was “partially resolved” after about ten minutes, but it will take time for everything to update.
The site Downdetector began showing a spike in reports of outages starting at 12:40pm Eastern time on Tuesday, affecting Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Spotify, and TikTok, as well as e-commerce sites Target, Etsy, Shopify, and Home Depot, among others.
Amazon, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Cloudflare were also affected.
Google’s Status Dashboard reported an unspecified “issue” with the Cloud service starting at 10:10 Pacific, which was causing users to encounter errors when accessing websites.
“We believe the issue with Cloud Networking is partially resolved,” the company said by 10:17 PST, but it added that “Customers will be unable to apply changes to their load balancers until the issue is fully resolved,” and they did not have an estimate as to when that might be.
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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.”
When the PRC decides to move on Taiwan, it is unlikely to move in a manner that makes a US decision on intervention clear cut. Should China decide, initially at least, against a full-scale invasion of that island nation, it could instead opt to try to “win without fighting.” Beijing might do so by using its large, state-controlled fishing fleet to cut smaller Taipei-controlled islands off from Taiwan itself much as the PRC is now massing fishing boats to expand Chinese-controlled seas to press claims on the Japanese Senkakus and Whitsun Reef in Philippine waters. Chinese state-owned fisheries companies – part of the so-called ‘Maritime Militia’ – serve as fronts for PLA intelligence. Using their fleets to operate in a manner somewhere between peace and conflict in the gray zone of contested control around Taiwan would allow Beijing to test whether the US and its allies are willing to help defend the island’s independence without being seen to initiate open conflict.
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