Amid a surge in Covid-19 cases, Gibraltar has canceled official Christmas events and “strongly” discouraged people from hosting private gatherings for four weeks. Gibraltar’s entire eligible population is vaccinated.
The government of Gibraltar recently announced that “official Christmas parties, official receptions and similar gatherings” have been canceled, and advised the public to avoid social events and parties for the next four weeks. Outdoor spaces are recommended over indoor ones, touching and hugging is discouraged, and mask wearing is advised.
“The drastic increase in the numbers of people testing positive for Covid-19 in recent days is a stark reminder that the virus is still very prevalent in our community and that it is the responsibility of us all to take every reasonable precaution to protect ourselves and our loved ones,” Health Minister Samantha Sacramento said.
Gibraltar, a tiny British Overseas Territory sharing a land border with Spain, has seen an average of 56 Covid-19 cases per day over the last seven days, up from fewer than 10 per day in September. The rise in cases, described by the government as “exponential,” comes despite Gibraltar having the highest vaccination rate in the world.
More than 118% of Gibraltar’s population are fully vaccinated against Covid-19, with this figure stretching beyond 100% due to doses given to Spaniards who cross the border to work or visit the territory every day. Masks are still required in shops and on public transport.
The initial vaccine campaign on the British outpost came to a conclusion in early spring 2021, with a large proportion of the population fully inoculated against Covid-19. It became one of the first places in Europe to reduce restrictions following a winter of lockdowns, in what was dubbed ‘Operation Freedom’.
Gibraltar is currently doling out booster doses to the over-40s, healthcare workers, and other “vulnerable groups,” and administering vaccines to children aged between five and 12.
Similarly well-vaccinated countries have also reported surges in Covid-19 infections recently. In Singapore, where 94% of the eligible population have been inoculated, cases and deaths soared to record highs at the end of October, and have since subsided slightly. In Ireland, where around 92% of the adult population is fully vaccinated, cases of Covid-19 and deaths from the virus have roughly doubled since August.
Any apology for Nazism is unacceptable, Colombia’s president Ivan Duque has insisted, after photos of police academy cadets dressed up in Third Reich uniforms were uploaded online, causing outrage.
“Any apology for Nazism is unacceptable,” Duque stated in a tweet on Friday. The president said he condemned any references to those who were “responsible for the Jewish Holocaust that claimed the lives of more than 6 million people,” adding that “anti-Semitism has no place in the world.”
Policía colombiana homenajea a Alemania con una fiesta ‘nazi’
Indignación en Colombia por la fiesta que organizó un grupo de estudiantes de la Escuela de Policía Simón Bolívar en Tuluá, en la que varios uniformados recrearon escenas alusivas a la Alemania nazi pic.twitter.com/UnF4ajUd8z
Duque had earlier made demands for “heads to roll” at an academy that “promotes such criminal practices,” with its director, Lieutenant Colonel Jorge Ferney Bayona Sanchez, already having been sacked.
Toda una polémica ha provocado el evento realizado en las últimas horas en la escuela de Policía Simón Bolívar de Tuluá. Los uniformados se disfrazaron de Adolf Hitler, haciendo alusión al nazismo durante la semana de la internacionalización. #VocesySonidospic.twitter.com/EoS4JqvzrC
Colombia’s defense ministry, which oversees the country’s police, also insisted in a statement that that its training programs “don’t envisage in any way an activity such as the one which took place” at the academy.
The images of police cadets in Nazi uniforms caused anger and bewilderment among internet users.
The German and Israeli embassies in the country reacted by issuing a joint statement, in which they expressed “total rejection of any form of apology or demonstration of Nazism.” The US embassy in Bogota also said that it was “shocked and deeply disappointed” by the development.
The controversial images, in which aspiring officers were caught sporting black SS outfits with red swastika armbands and grey Wehrmacht uniforms from the World War II era, weren’t revealed in some bombshell media report, but were actually published on the official Twitter account of the Colombian police this Thursday.
The photos were taken as part of a “cultural exchange” event at the police academy in the city of Tulua, aimed at commemorating Germany and “strengthening the knowledge of our police students.” The cosplay was apparently intended to illustrate the history of German law enforcement, with more cadets pictured wearing more modern versions of the country’s police uniforms in the pictures.
A large settlement of migrants in the suburbs of Dunkirk in northern France has been dismantled, in the wake of yet another wave of tensions with the UK over the growing number of illegal crossings.
“At my instruction, the security forces are evacuating the illegal migrant camp in Grande-Synthe this morning,” French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Twitter on Tuesday. He added that state services in the region would provide shelter for the group.
Government spokesman Gabriel Attal said the decision to dismantle the camp was primarily based on the intention to put people into shelters ahead of the winter season.
Around 1,500 migrants were evacuated from the site via buses and their tents removed. According to Utopia 56, one of the charities monitoring the process of dismantling the camp, people “were forced to board buses, without being informed of their destination, and some of their personal belongings have been destroyed.”
Évacuation forcée et sans annonce du campement de Grande-Synthe depuis ce matin : plus de 500 personnes sont contraintes de monter dans des bus, sans être informées de leur destination : “police ou hôtel”. Une partie de leurs effets personnels est en cours de destruction. pic.twitter.com/EwFPR2yl2j
Tides changing on Channel crossings? French police began moving some 1,500 migrants on from a camp near Dunkirk amid talks yesterday between Priti Patel and her French counterpart agreeing to stop ‘100 percent’ of Channel crossings after record numbers reached the UK in 2021. pic.twitter.com/PUE9YDCTAY
In a separate tweet, Darmanin announced the arrest of 13 alleged migrant smugglers, “bringing the total to 1,308 since January.”
“These smugglers are criminals who exploit human misery, responsible for irregular immigration,” the minister wrote.
Tuesday’s actions by French authorities came in the wake of a phone call between Darmanin and his British counterpart Priti Patel. The two discussed the increasing number of illegal migrants attempting to cross the English Channel, and reiterated the importance of cooperation in making this route “unviable,” Patel said afterwards.
At Grande-Synthe, near Dunkirk, where demolition work has already begun on the migrant camp. Around 1,500 people, many of them Iraqi Kurds, have been moved out of the site@SkyNewspic.twitter.com/rHFDHHcxmf
The UK and France have a history of mutual accusations when it comes to illegal migration. While British officials have claimed that French authorities do not do enough to prevent migrants from embarking for the dangerous trip, France’s government has said that the UK should reform its labor market rules in order to become less attractive to migrants.
More than 23,000 people have crossed the Channel by boat this year, compared to 8,404 in 2020, according to Press Association figures.
New research has found that legalizing the sale and use of recreational cannabis could bring a €5 billion ($5.67 billion) boost to the German economy via annual tax revenues and cost savings within the police.
Should Germany proceed with legalization, the research estimates that it could bring in tax revenues of €3.4 billion ($3.86 billion) per year and save some €1.3 billion ($1.48 billion) in costs within the police and judicial system, alongside creating 27,000 new jobs.
The report, carried out by the Institute for Competition Economics (DICE) at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf and commissioned by the German Cannabis Association, comes amid ongoing discussions for the formation of a coalition federal government.
One of the areas under consideration in the three-way talks between the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, and the Free Democrats (FDP) is the potential regulation of the sale and use of recreational cannabis.
Using cannabis for medicinal purposes has been legal in Germany since 2017. However, its possession or distribution for recreational use remains illegal and can result in fines as well as time behind bars.
Earlier this year, research on the legalization of cannabis across Europe by market intel firm Prohibition Partners said that if Germany legalized its use by adults, the move would see that country alone constituting “over half of the European market until 2024.” It would also help propel the European cannabis market from its 2021 valuation of €400 million ($454 million) to some €3 billion ($3.4 billion) by 2025.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
Scientists have used artificial intelligence to “predict” formulas for new designer drugs, with the stated goal of helping to improve their regulation. The AI generated formulas for nearly nine million potential new drugs.
Researchers with the University of British Columbia (UBC) used a deep neural net for the job, teaching it to make up chemical structures of potential new drugs. According to their study, released this week, the computer intelligence fared better at the task than the scientists had expected.
The research team used a database of known designer drugs – synthetic psychoactive substances – to train the AI on their structures. The market for designer drugs is ever-changing, since their manufacturers are constantly tweaking their formulas to circumvent restrictions and produce new “legal” substances, while cracking their structure takes months for law enforcement agencies, the researchers said.
“The vast majority of these designer drugs have never been tested in humans and are completely unregulated. They are a major public-health concern to emergency departments across the world,” one of the researchers, UBC medical student Dr. Michael Skinnider has said.
After its training, the AI was able to generate some 8.9 million potential designer drugs. Afterwards, researchers ran a data sheet of some 196 new drugs, which had emerged in real life after the model was trained, and found that more than 90% of these have been already predicted by the computer.
“The fact that we can predict what designer drugs are likely to emerge on the market before they actually appear is a bit like the 2002 sci-fi movie, Minority Report, where foreknowledge about criminal activities about to take place helped significantly reduce crime in a future world,” senior author Dr. David Wishart, a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta, has said.
Identifying completely unknown substances remains an issue for the AI, the research team has noted, but they hope it might potentially help with that task, since the computer was also able to predict which formulas of designer drugs were more likely to be created and hit the market. The model “ranked the correct chemical structure of an unidentified designer drug among the top 10 candidates 72 percent of the time,” while throwing in spectrometry analysis, which is an easily obtained measurement, bumped the accuracy to some 86%.
“It was shocking to us that the model performed this well, because elucidating entire chemical structures from just an accurate mass measurement is generally thought to be an unsolvable problem,” Skinnider stated.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The French government has kicked off a €14 million national campaign to tackle underage prostitution and pimping. It comes months after a report found as many as 10,000 youngsters, mostly teen girls, are involved in the sex trade.
The campaign, launched by the Ministry for Solidarity and Health on Monday, is expected to be fully rolled out in 2022. The ministry described the problem as a “growing phenomenon that society can no longer ignore” and about which “too little is known.”
The government programme is expected to “increase awareness” while helping to “inform and provide a better understanding of the phenomenon.” It also aims to help “identify the young people involved” and “prosecute clients and pimps more effectively.”
According to RFI, the prevalence of underage prostitution has increased by as much as 70% over the past five years, with social media believed to be compounding the problem. The public broadcaster noted that the situation had worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic when young people spent more time online.
In July, a working group produced a damning report that found between 7,000 and 10,000 young people were involved in prostitution across the country. The majority are young girls aged between 15 and 17, but a ministry statement noted that the “entry point” into prostitution was increasingly becoming younger at around 14-15 years.
“There’s really a normalisation of prostitution of young people because girls say that selling sex is a way of making lots of money easily and that it can help them reach their dream life,” deputy public prosecutor Raphaelle Wach told the news outlet France 24.
In its statement, the ministry noted that many minors did not consider themselves victims and valued the “financial autonomy” and feelings of “belonging to a group” and “regaining control” over their lives.
“These minors are however in danger, both physically and psychologically,” the ministry warned.
“Covid played a considerable role because social networking provided new ways of being able to hook in underage girls very easily,” Geneviève Collas, who runs an NGO fighting human trafficking, told RFI. She added that recruiting minors has been made “easier” with short-term apartment rental apps like Airbnb helping mask the scale of the problem on the streets.
Rotterdam Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb has described an anti-lockdown protest in his city as an “orgy of violence.” The Dutch demonstration devolved into a violent riot that saw police open fire on protesters.
Aboutaleb described the events of Friday night as an “orgy of violence,” after protesters packed Rotterdam’s central Coolsingel shopping street to voice their opposition to an ongoing partial lockdown, a ban on New Year’s Eve fireworks displays, and the possibility of a two-tiered system of freedom in the Netherlands, one of liberty for the vaccinated and restrictions for those without the jab.
The protest soon got out of hand, and police said on Saturday that 57 people were arrested. Protesters were seen torching police vehicles and launching fireworks at police, who shot at them in response.
Aboutaleb said that the cops had been “forced” to use their weapons. “On a number of occasions the police felt it necessary to draw their weapons to defend themselves,” he told reporters. “They shot at protesters, people were injured.”
Police say at least seven people were injured. Two of these injuries were caused by police bullets, and the victims are still in hospital. One officer was hospitalized, while several others were treated at the scene for minor injuries.
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.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
Sporadic clashes broke out at massive Saturday demonstrations in major European cities, as thousands of people took to the streets of Vienna, Paris and Rome to express their discontent with Covid-19 restrictions.
The Austrian capital Vienna on Saturday saw the largest protest turnout since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. A total of 38,000 people took to the city streets to join a dozen demonstrations protesting government measures.
Austria se colocó en pleno apartheid sanitario esta semana, mirando a Viena ahora mismo, no lo pensarías, recuerda que dependen únicamente de la conformidad del pueblo, la resistencia es clave. pic.twitter.com/tKRAIJ2GLt
— Creo en la justicia divina y terrenal 💞💞🇪🇸🇪🇸 (@Ninita0011) November 20, 2021
Tens of thousands have taken to the streets today in one of the largest protests in the history of Vienna, Austria, after the government implemented a new COVID lockdown and became the first in the world to announce compulsory vaccination.pic.twitter.com/FFriWCZioG
The protests came a day after the Austrian authorities ordered nationwide compulsory vaccination from February 1 and imposed a full lockdown, starting Monday. The massive procession that spanned over several kilometers marched along Vienna’s central ring road. The city center was paralyzed for several hours as traffic was restricted.
Austria’s right-wing Freedom Party, whose members joined the rallies, put the number of protesters at 100,000. Some demonstrations were also attended by members of various far-right groups. The protests were generally peaceful but footage published by Ruptly video news agency showed several scuffles between the police and the demonstrators breaking out.
Law enforcement spoke of a total of five arrests. One incident saw a protester attempting to grab an officer’s gun and take it from its holster. In another incident, the officers were pelted with bottles and fireworks and had to use pepper spray in response.
#w2011 Die Situation in Wien eskaliert. Die Polizei scheint, trotz der bekannten Grossmobilisierung und zahllosen Gewaltaufrufen, äusserst schlecht vorbereitet. An mehreren Orten wurde die Polizei umzingelt und musste sich zurückziehen. pic.twitter.com/4VzZTbww2S
Hundreds of kilometers away from Vienna, in the French capital Paris, events took a more dramatic turn. There, a demonstration against the government Covid-19 measures coincided with the third anniversary of the Yellow Vests movement. Hundreds of protesters took part in the protest, which quickly turned into clashes between the demonstrators and law enforcement.
The protesters were building barricades and setting them on fire as well as pelting police with bottles and various other projectiles. Law enforcement responded with profuse amounts of tear gas, sometimes filling entire streets with thick smoke to disperse the crowds.
PARIS – Un conteneur est renversé pour utiliser les bouteilles comme projectiles.
Rome saw a massive demonstration against Italy’s Covid-19 health pass, also known as the Green Pass. Some 4,000 people gathered in the center of the Italian capital, according to the police. The demonstrators were waving national flags and chanting “Freedom” and “No Green Pass,” referring to the vaccination certificate needed to enter various public venues such as clubs or bars.
The crowd staged a sit-in in the Circus Maximus – an ancient Roman chariot-racing stadium converted into a modern-day park. They remained there after sunset, lighting the area with thousands of phones and colored smoke bombs. The rally was peaceful, though, as the police did not report any incidents.
Unlike Rome, Italy’s northern city of Milano saw clashes between protesters and the police as law enforcement officers sought to break up an unauthorized rally at the city center. Large police forces were deployed to the city center and several squares were cordoned off.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
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.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
