Free Republic

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...

Lufthansa said Monday it will slash more jobs on top of 22,000 previously announced cuts, as well as put more planes out of service, because it is currently losing some €500 million a month. With demand set to be lower than expected through winter as the coronavirus pandemic continues to severely curtail travel, the airline said it now plans to reduce its fleet by 150 planes by 2025. It had previously estimated it would have to scrap 100 aircraft in response to the unprecedented crisis in the aviation sector. Lufthansa, which received a government bailout worth €9 billion in June,...

[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...

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has attracted fierce criticism after appearing to associate the word “monkey” with a racist term for a black person. Speaking on a television show on Thursday evening, Sarkozy was criticizing elites “who are like monkeys that listen to no one,” when he suddenly stopped. “I don’t know anymore, are we allowed to say ‘monkey’?”, he asked, adding: “Because… we’re no longer allowed to say… What do we say? ‘Ten Little Soldiers’ now? Is that it? Yeah… Society is really progressing.” “Maybe we’re allowed to say ‘monkey’ without insulting anyone.” Sarkozy was referring to Agatha Christie’s...

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...

A new political party inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement plans to contest seats at the next General Election, the Mail on Sunday can reveal. Among those spearheading the Taking The Initiative Party (TTIP) is Sasha Johnson, who has been whipping crowds into a frenzy during recent protests. Wearing camouflage trousers, a black beret and a stab-proof-style vest, she told supporters at last weekend’s Million People March in London that the TTIP “will be the first black-led political party in the UK. We want representation. This is what democracy looks like”. […] The party has been registered with the...

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...

The German economy, Europe’s largest, contracted by a record 9.7% in the second quarter as consumer spending, company investments and exports saw a steep decline due to the coronavirus pandemic. Although the contraction was the worst on record, it was still less than what economists initially anticipated, after the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) revised the quarter-on-quarter contraction in gross domestic product down from the 10.1% it initially reported at the end of July.  The economic slump was much stronger than during the 2007-08 financial crisis which saw a 4.7% decline in the first quarter of 2009, and it represented the...

The parents, uncle and aunt of a teenager of Bosnian Muslim origin will face trial in France on charges of violence against a minor for shaving her head over her relationship with a Christian Serbian boy, prosecutors said Friday. The girl had her hair shaven off and was also beaten in the eastern city of Besançon on Monday, judicial sources said. “Shaved and beaten because she ‘loved a Christian’. Deeply shocked by this act of torture on this 17-year-old girl,” French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin wrote on Twitter. “This barbarity calls for the most severe punishment,” he added. Police detained...

Danish police on Saturday night charged the first person for refusing to comply with new rules mandating face masks on public transport. Rail staff at Odense Station called the police at 9:15 pm after a 24-year-old man said he was not willing to wear a mask. “We got a message that they were having problems with someone who would not wear a face mask at the railway station. They reprimand him several times, but he would not put it on,” Hans Jørgen Larsen, a duty officer at Funen Police, told the Ritzau newswire. “When we arrived, our officer on the...

A group of people are to receive €1,200 “universal basic income” per month for three years in a new German study. Germany is launching a new trial to find out how universal basic income affects the attitude and lives of those who receive it. As part of the Pilotprojekt Grundeinkommen (Basic Income Pilot Project) study, 120 people will receive €1,200 each month for three years. Researchers will compare their experiences with another group of 1,380 people who will not receive the cash. […] The aim is to gain a scientific understanding on how people’s behavior and attitudes change when they...

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,...