French teachers in the city of Nice have overwhelmingly rejected AstraZeneca's Covid jab after just 58 out of a possible 3,000 signed up to be vaccinated.

The jabs were being offered at a mass vaccination centre in Nice's Palais des Expositions this weekend, with 4,000 available to those aged over 55 in high-risk occupations, meaning 3,000 teachers eligible to take part.

But the centre was forced to close after just four hours on Saturday due to lack of demand with just 58 appointments registered, and did not reopen today despite being scheduled to do so.

That means the take-up rate among eligible teachers was just 2 per cent, with one local official blaming vaccine hesitancy caused by scaremongering around the British-made jab.

Anne Frackowiak-Jacobs, sub-prefect of nearby Grasse, said people had 'turned around' when they learned they would be given AstraZeneca.

More than 1,200 church leaders have urged PM Boris Johnson not to introduce Covid vaccine certificates, saying they are an "unethical form of coercion".

In an open letter, the leaders - who include Anglican and Catholic ministers - warn passports could create a "surveillance state".

The government says it is reviewing whether to use vaccine certificates and "no decisions have been taken".

The UK equality watchdog says passports could create a "two-tier society".

Mayo coroner Patrick O'Connor said that Ireland's daily figures do not have a "scientific basis" and said that he questioned the accuracy of NPHET's reporting.

A Mayo coroner has disputed the number of deaths reported by Ireland's National Public Health Emergency Team during the last year of the pandemic, claiming that the daily figures may be "inaccurate".

Patrick O'Connor, a solicitor and coroner based in Mayo, said that Ireland's daily reported coronavirus deaths "do not have a scientific basis".

Brussels has urged Ireland to consider easing tough restrictions that require many EU travelers to enter a minimum 10-day hotel quarantine.

The European Commission on Friday sent a letter to Ireland, voicing concern about a mandatory hotel quarantine regime for coronavirus for travelers from some member states.

Five EU countries — Austria, Belgium, France, Italy and Luxembourg — are on a list of countries from which travelers must pay almost 2,000 euros to quarantine for up to 14 days in secure hotels.

Spokesman Christian Wigand told journalists the issue raised "concerns" under principles of EU law when it came to proportionality and non-discrimination amid the pandemic.

"The commission believes that the objective pursued by Ireland, which is the protection of public health during the pandemic, could be achieved by less restrictive measures," Wigand said.

The letter asked for "clarifications on this matter and on the criteria used to determine the designated countries," Wigand said. He added that Ireland had 10 days to respond to the letter.

Sky News host Rowan Dean has assessed some of the freezing and record low temperatures currently being experienced across parts of the globe.

New Zealand is considering phasing out the legal sale of tobacco with a date-based ban on smoking products.

Lawmakers are mulling plans to gradually increase the legal age at which people can buy tobacco products as New Zealand aims to become smoke-free by 2025.


In a consultation document, the government said: "A smoke-free generation policy would prohibit the sale, and the supply in a public place, of smoked tobacco products to new cohorts from a specified date.

For at least three or four years now, I have, together with my closest colleagues, been recognized as something of an authority of the ideology most of us just refer to now as "Wokeness." Spanning that time, certainly at least as far back as early 2018, I have frequently faced the challenging question of "how did this Woke stuff escape the university and go mainstream?" While we were doing the Grievance Studies Affair, in fact, we ended up in an epic argument about the issue that led to us giving a kind of quirky name to the difficulty we had in answering this question. We called it "crossing the Tim Pool Gap."

This challenge in communications gained this name for us in February of 2018, when Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, Mike Nayna, Tim Pool, and I all met at Peter's house, rather by chance, to have a discussion about this exact topic. In a heated discussion that went on for hours, we hit a major impasse in which we could not satisfactorily convince Tim of our thesis, and neither could Tim convince us of his. Tim argued that activists, especially in media, were the primary agents of change in Wokifying everything. We insisted that, while this may be, there was a significant university component as well and, further, that it was the root of the activist mentality. "Ideas like 'hegemonic masculinity' didn't come out of the sky! They came out of academia!" I still remember Peter yelling in frustration. The thing is, Tim wasn't wrong, and neither were we (there's something like a revolving door of bad ideas between these groups, who all fancy themselves activists in the same causes). We were so alarmed and frustrated by our inability to communicate the university-to-culture pipeline (or lab leak, as it might better be understood) that we referred to this challenging comms problem ever after as a search for a way to bridge the Tim Pool Gap, or "TPGap," in our private communications.

This is a question that deserves an answer though, because when something this pernicious takes hold of the core of a culture, we have a duty to understand how it was able to do so, so that, whether our culture stands or falls by it, future societies will not so easily be threatened. As indicated by the existence of the Tim Pool Gap, though, the answer to that question is complex and probably deserves a book's length to get anything better than a very cursory treatment. Certainly, the roles played by the Internet (thus democratization of information), social media (thus decentralization of publishing and broadcasting), and other infrastructural changes are significant. They are also beyond my scope, and I recommend the reader consult Martin Gurri's admirable book The Revolt of the Public, if not works by Marshall McLuhan and even the postmodernist Jean Baudrillard, for insights in that regard. So too have intentional agents who funded or promoted Wokeness as a tool for facilitating their own agendas or for waging political warfare by turning the West simultaneously stupid and wholly against itself. That said, media and academia also both played a role, as we argued, and I would refer readers to Tim Pool's analysis of the former and Helen Pluckrose's analysis of the latter — though until someone (I know, I'm someone...) takes on the bear of Critical Pedagogy in sufficient detail, that latter domain will remain a bit mysterious. I will touch on that aspect here, but I will only touch.

French lawmakers have given their final support for a controversial "global security" law which has sparked widespread demonstrations.

The bill is centred on "Article 24", which will make it an offence to maliciously share images that identify police officers in operation by face or name.

Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said the law would protect police officers from online calls for violence. Police unions have also expressed their support for the measures.

But the legislation has been widely criticised by both humans rights and media organisations who say that it would curtail press freedom and lead to less police accountability.

Amid increasing concerns voiced by some scientists that climate change is fraught with dangerous implications for the Earth's natural ecosystem and the world economy, there may be other links to altering weather conditions that are no less threatening, claims a new study.

When extreme weather conditions manifest themselves in the form of droughts or excessive rainfall, it may be a sign of impending wars, claims new research.

As a team of scientists led by Santa Fe Institute External Professor Rajiv Sethi (Barnard College, Columbia University) and Tackseung Jun of Kyung Hee University in South Korea discovered the link as they pored over the oldest surviving document recording Korean history - the Samguk Sagi, or History of the Three Kingdoms.

Almost a quarter of registered Covid deaths were not caused by the virus, new official figures reveal.

Data from the Office for National Statistics shows 23 per cent of coronavirus fatalities are now people who have died "with" the virus rather than from an infection.

This means the disease was not the primary cause of death recorded on death certificates, despite the person who died testing positive for Covid.

Other data also shows an increasingly positive picture of the state of the pandemic in Britain.