Free Republic

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.

TikTok said on Thursday that it will set up its first European data center in Ireland. The announcement comes amid increasing scrutiny over the video app’s privacy and security risks. U.S. President Donald Trump, citing national security concerns, on July 31 gave TikTok’s owner, Beijing-based internet giant Bytedance Technology, an ultimatum: either sell TikTok’s U.S. operations to Microsoft or any other U.S. company by Sept. 15, or get banned in the United States. Until recently, TikTok Inc., the company’s U.S. entity, was the official data controller of TikTok. After July 29, the service provider for European Economic Area (EEA)-Swiss users...

The European Union needs to “work hand in hand” with China as a matter of necessity given the economic havoc wreaked by the coronavirus pandemic, said a top EU official in charge of Tuesday’s trade talks with Beijing. Chaired by Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He, the meeting comes as Brussels is hoping to clinch a landmark investment deal with China this year, though progress has been slow. “By pulling together, we can recover more quickly economically, and make progress on areas of mutual interest such as trade and investment relations,” European Commission Executive Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis told Politico ahead of the...

Saturday’s huge demo in Berlin against Germany’s coronavirus measures has raked up a new debate about the boundaries between the right to assemble and the protection of public health. Inevitably, given that the organizers of the “Day of Freedom” were arguing that the German government was wilfully overestimating the threat of the coronavirus, most of the 17,000–20,000 protesters made no attempt to wear face masks or stick to social distancing guidelines. That was why the Berlin police eventually disbanded the main demo, as it did many of the counter-demos also staged on Saturday. All in all, Saturday’s various protests were...

Germany’s gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 10.1% in the second quarter of 2020, according to economic data released on Thursday. The data from Germany’s Federal Statistic Office comes amid fears of a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic across Europe. “This was the sharpest decline since the quarterly GDP calculations for Germany began in 1970,” the statistics office said. Compared with last year, Thursday’s figures were even worse. GDP was down 11.7% for April to June, with an overall collapse of exports and household spending alongside an increase in state spending. “It’s clear that it was a really horrible...

The European Commission has signed a contract with US pharmaceutical giant Gilead, securing 30,000 doses of the COVID-19 drug remdesivir for EU member states and Britain. Remdesivir is the first drug that received EU approval to treat severe cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The €63-million ($74-million) contract will be paid for with an emergency instrument from the European Union’s shared budget, the EU’s executive body announced on Wednesday. Stella Kyriakides, EU Commissioner for health, called this move “another important step forward in our fight to overcome this disease”, and said the contract between the commission and...

Europe’s Airbus said on Friday it would increase loan repayments to France and Spain in a “final” bid to reverse U.S. tariffs and jog the United States into settling a 16-year-old dispute over billions of dollars of aircraft subsidies. The European Union, France and Spain said the move to raise interest rates paid by Airbus on A350 aircraft development loans should settle the row at the World Trade Organization and urged Washington to withdraw tariffs on EU goods. “In the absence of a settlement, the EU will be ready to fully avail itself of its own sanction rights,” EU Trade...

President Donald Trump distanced himself late Thursday night from Jeff Lyash, his appointee running the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), who is now using H-1B outsourcing to discard American professionals even as Trump tries to revive his poll numbers. Another one of many Fake T.V. Ads, this one about the Tennessee Valley Authority, which for years has paid its top executive a ridiculous FORTUNE. Not run by the U.S., but I have long been fighting that crazy “salary” & its polices. Strange ad paid for (?) by “U.S. Tech Workers”.— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 17, 2020 The TVA is a...