Free Republic

UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Tuesday urged the world to prevent a Cold War and halt conflicts so it can focus on the coronavirus pandemic. He made the comments as he opened the almost entirely virtual UN General Assembly general debate, marking the organization’s 75th anniversary. “We must do everything to avoid a new Cold War,” Guterres said. “We are moving in a very dangerous direction. Our world cannot afford a future where the two largest economies split the globe in a great fracture — each with its own trade and financial rules and internet and artificial intelligence capacities,” he...

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced on Wednesday (16 September) the priorities for the EU’s upcoming anti-racism action plan. Earlier this year, the murder of George Floyd in the US brought into focus racial discrimination and police brutality also existing in Europe. Now the commission wants to identify gaps in the bloc’s 2000 Race Equality Directive, especially regarding policing and law enforcement. “Hate is hate and no one should have to put up with it,” von der Leyen said in her first State of the Union speech, adding that in the European Union “fighting racism...

Britain’s US trade deal is in jeopardy if the UK endangers Northern Ireland peace over Brexit, US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has said. “We can’t allow the [1998] Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit,” Biden said on Wednesday (16 September). “Any trade deal between the US and UK must be contingent upon respect for the agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period,” he added. Biden spoke out during a visit by British foreign secretary Dominic Raab to Washington. The Democrats’ concern comes after the UK threatened to...

There is considerable cross-border traffic between Germany and France. Daily, German and French nationals cross the 450-kilometer-long (280-mile) border, as many either work or live on the other side. In everyday life, the frontier is barely noticeable. But this cannot be said for France’s coronavirus tracing efforts. In the Northern Hemisphere’s spring months, France launched an app that does not utilize Google’s or Apple’s interface, and automatically stores a user’s contacts on a state-run server. Most other EU states reject this centralized approach, deeming it inimical to users’ data privacy. France, which has the highest volume of cross-border traffic in...

[Barf Alert] Catholics demanding Communion on the tongue a threat to public health, says priest Bishops advised ‘there must be limits to appeasement’ in dealings with alt-right views A Waterford priest has criticised as selfish the behaviour of Catholics who demand Communion on the tongue despite Covid-19 restrictions.Fr Liam Power, former communications officer with the diocese of Waterford and Lismore, said such people did not seem to “respect the danger this represented to others” and were a cause of “very serious embarrassment for priests, many of whom are elderly”.While the number making such demands was “not huge, reports were fairly...

European airlines on Tuesday urged national capitals to coordinate measures to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, saying the current patchwork of restrictions is hobbling a return to regular travel around the EU. The hurdles have included “chaotic border restrictions along with confusion about quarantines, varying passenger locator forms and test requirements,” Airlines For Europe (A4E) director Thomas Reynaert said in a press conference held by video. To overcome the piecemeal measures, A4E urged a “common approach”, backing calls from the European Commission for a central color-coded map of areas in the bloc where the virus risk, is high...

The European Union’s highest court has given its support to the bloc’s rules that stop internet providers from charging customers for preferential access to their networks. […] The rules require telecommunications providers to treat all data traffic the same, and prevent them from reserving better access for their own services, or selling bandwidth to big companies like Google and Netflix while leaving a slower Internet for everyone else. The Luxembourg-based court backed the principle of an open internet after Hungarian wireless carrier Telenor Magyarorszag had sought an interpretation of the rules. Hungarian regulators had stopped the company from offering two...

A proposed law giving Boris Johnson's government the power to override parts of the Brexit agreement with the EU has passed its first hurdle in the Commons. MPs backed the Internal Market Bill by 340 votes to 263. During a heated debate before the vote, Labour's Ed Miliband criticised the bill, saying the UK was backing away from a deal the prime minister himself had signed earlier this year.

Six European Union countries and the bloc’s executive Commission have begun testing a virtual “gateway” to ensure national coronavirus tracing apps can work across borders. The trial starting Monday will allow national computer systems that run tracing apps in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Latvia to communicate with each other via a central hub. If the tests succeed, travelers from each of the six countries will be able to use their own apps while abroad in the other five to ensure they’re notified if they have been in close contact to another user who tests positive. Tracing...

China announced Saturday it was banning imports of pork products from Germany after the European country confirmed its first case of African swine fever. Germany is Europe’s biggest pork producer and recently saw a surge in demand from China after it suffered an outbreak of the same disease. Scientists detected swine fever in a dead wild boar in the eastern state of Brandenburg, the German agricultural ministry said on Thursday. Authorities had been concerned about the disease crossing into the country from neighboring Poland after a spate of cases were detected there last year. China responded to the news by...

Published: August 25, 2020; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejim.2020.08.019 AbstractBackground Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was proposed as potential treatment for COVID-19. Objective We set-up a multicenter Italian collaboration to investigate the relationship between HCQ therapy and COVID-19 in-hospital mortality. Methods In a retrospective observational study, 3,451 unselected patients hospitalized in 33 clinical centers in Italy, from February 19, 2020 to May 23, 2020, with laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection, were analyzed. The primary end-point in a time-to event analysis was in-hospital death, comparing patients who received HCQ with patients who did not. We used multivariable Cox proportional-hazards regression models with inverse probability for treatment weighting by propensity...

Bruges mayor Dirk De fauw first realized something was desperately wrong with European tourism when on a brisk March morning he crossed the Burg square in front of the Gothic city hall and there was nothing but silence. “There are always people. Always,” De fauw said. That morning? “Nothing. Nobody is on that large square” at the heart of one of Europe’s most picturesque cities, he said. Six months later, as Europe’s leanest tourist summer season in recent history is starting to draw to a close, COVID-19 is yet to loosen its suffocating grip on the continent. If anything the...

The controversial French professor who vigorously defended the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to help beat the coronavirus has been targeted by an ethics complaint that could see him face sanctions or barred from practising, a medical association said Thursday. The Marseille-based Didier Raoult is accused in the complaint by medical peers of spreading false information about the benefits of hydroxychloroquine. US and Brazilian presidents Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro seized upon Raoult's promotion of hydroxychloroquine and have trumpeted its benefits since the pandemic erupted. But the method and conclusions of Raoult's studies were challenged from the start by critics and other...

Berlin authorities estimate that some 30,000 people attended the latest coronavirus skeptic demo. While most of the day was peaceful, hundreds of people attempted to storm the Reichstag parliament building. […] With some unidentifiable German pop music playing in the background, the feeling at the afternoon rally is reminiscent of a town festival, but a closer look at the T-shirts emblazoned with slogans suggests otherwise. Out the back of a hire truck, one man is closing a sale with an elderly, white-haired woman with a walking stick. “That’ll be €5 ($5.95),” he says, handing her a red T-shirt with the...

German lawmakers are calling for a ban on private parties, after the number of coronavirus infections in the country reached a four-month high. Saskia Esken, chairwoman of the Social Democratic Party, said those continuing to hold parties at home were risking the freedoms of others in society. “We must not risk forcing kindergartens and schools to close again and that children to stay at home for weeks because we have allowed an increased infection rate by holding family celebrations with too loose rules,” she told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS). Ralph Brinkhaus, parliamentary leader of the Christian Democratic Union, said...

The Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany’s health authority, reported 782 new infections on Sunday, bringing the nation’s case count to 232,864. The figure is a notable drop from the more than 2,000 infections reported on Saturday, which RKI said was due to returning travelers. The RKI also reported two new deaths, increasing Germany’s death toll from the virus to 9,269 since the pandemic began. Experts in Germany have claimed that not enough people are using the country’s coronavirus tracking app for it to be effective. More than 17 million people have downloaded the app since it was launched in June,...

The German agriculture minister has announced she will introduce a controversial new law that will require dog owners to walk their canine friends at least twice a day, for a total of at least one hour. The rules would also forbid owners from tying up dogs for long periods of time or leaving them alone all day. Around one in five German homes has a dog; over 9 million dogs are kept as pets in the country. “Pets are not cuddly toys — and their needs have to be considered,” Agriculture Minister Julia Klöckner said Monday. She said her ministry...

A disturbing movement to reform capitalism is gaining traction by those using the coronavirus tragedy to call for “The Great Reset”. These are not the ramblings of a few disgruntled teenagers or a wacky sociology professor from inner-city Sydney. The body pushing The Great Reset happens to be the World Economic Forum and its charismatic German leader Klaus Schwab who is calling for a return to Marxist principles, claiming that capitalism has empirically failed. Professor Schwab has just released a book titled The Great Reset and has dedicated a large portion of the official WEF website to such articles as...

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sealed a defense cooperation deal Saturday with Polish officials that will pave the way to deploy more American troops to Poland. Pompeo, in Warsaw at the end of a four-nation tour of central and eastern Europe, signed the deal with Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Błaszczak that sets out the legal framework for the additional troops. “This is going to be an extended guarantee: a guarantee that in case of a threat our soldiers are going to stand arm-in-arm,” Poland’s President Andrzej Duda said during the signing ceremony. “It will also serve to increase the...

A man in his late teens was slashed to death with a machete in broad daylight in central London, as violent crime levels return to pre-lockdown levels in the capital. The teen was hacked to death at around 5:30 on Monday evening, close to Oxford Street, one of the busiest shopping streets in the country.