Italy's northern region of Piedmont said on Sunday it would stop using a batch of AstraZeneca coronavirus shots after a teacher died following his vaccination on Saturday.

The region, around the northern city of Turin, had initially suspended all AstraZeneca vaccines in order to identify and isolate the batch from which the jab administered to the teacher, from the town of Biella, came.

The decision, following similar moves elsewhere in Europe, was precautionary and the region is awaiting the results of checks which will verify whether there is a connection between the death and the vaccination, the regional government said in an online statement.

A court in the remote Far Eastern Russian region of Chukotka has handed down a fine to a resident accused of spreading fake news online about 5G, a next-generation cellular network that promises faster connections for users.

The local regional prosecutor announced on Monday that "routine monitoring of the internet revealed that a resident of [the city of] Anadyr disseminated inaccurate information about the dangers of cellular communication devices in a public messenger group."

The capital of the sparsely-populated Chukotka region, Anadyr is home to 13,000 people and located over 6,000 kilometers from Moscow. The area is unlikely to be among the first to see 5G networks rolled out in Russia.

Police clashed with rioters in Seattle and Los Angeles on Saturday night during demonstrations marking the one-year anniversary of the death of Breonna Taylor, an African-American resident of Louisville, Ky., in a police shooting.

Seattle police made a number of arrests during the clashes, as seen in footage captured by the Daily Caller. The police said 13 people were arrested on Saturday.

Rioters also vandalized businesses including a Starbucks, smashing the store's windows.

The crew at the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) have done an analysis of excess mortality for 2020 across 32 countries to get a clearer picture of the impact of the pandemic and lockdowns. They used excess mortality instead of "Covid deaths", they explain, to avoid problems with recording and classification of deaths and include any impact of anti-Covid measures. They used age-adjusted mortality to take into account differences in the average age of populations. They compared 2020's figures to the average of the previous five years to give a percentage increase or excess during the pandemic year (they have made the tool they used to analyse the data publicly available).

Hundreds of anti-lockdown protesters clashed with police in Stockholm on Saturday as they took to the streets in defiance of Sweden's coronavirus ban on gatherings.

Swedish police dispersed opponents of coronavirus measures that came after the government - which initially took a hands-off approach to Covid-19 rules - tightened restrictions further as cases continue to rise.

The tighter measures come after Sweden this week reported a ten percent rise in the number of Covid-19 cases for a third week in a row, increasing fears that the country is in its third wave of the virus.

Police blocked a bridge in the centre of the city and said on their website they were in dialogue with organisers to persuade demonstrators to disperse. TV images showed police shoving some protesters, while the police said one officer had been slightly injured and taken to hospital.

A protest against police brutality in Liege, Belgium has spiraled into clashes and looting, after an initially peaceful demonstration was hijacked by around 200 hooligans who went on to wreck the city center, police said.

Demonstrators took to the streets of the eastern Belgian city on Saturday to protest the arrest of a black woman by police earlier this week. The march was peaceful until a group of rowdy youth joined in, and then spread through the city center, wreaking havoc.

Ted Cruz (R-TX) has requested a meeting with the head of the Marines, accusing the Pentagon of launching a coordinated PR offensive against Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others critical of the military's social justice agenda.

"Under Biden, the military is launching political attacks to intimidate Tucker Carlson & other civilians who criticize their policy decisions. Officials in uniform are being used for the campaign," Cruz tweeted on Sunday, announcing that he had penned a letter to US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, requesting a meeting with the Commandant of the Marine Corps. He also sought policy changes that ensure the US military won't be "similarly mobilized against the speech of American citizens or in the service of left wing political causes."

"Instead of allowing the debate to run its course in public among American citizens and their elected leaders, military officials over the last week have repeatedly launched attacks on Carlson," Cruz charged, denouncing the military's conduct as alternating "between being ostentatiously childish and simply outrageous."

Massive crowds of college students and other vacationers on spring break have flocked to Miami, resulting in dozens of arrests, police being injured and fears rising over visitors ignoring Covid-19 social-distancing guidelines.

Photos and videos posted on social media show Miami's beaches jammed with people, none of whom appear to be wearing a mask.

Critics are blasting CNN over a segment deeming Fox News host Tucker Carlson "the new Donald Trump," claiming the dig is a desperate attempt to win back viewers.

"Tucker Carlson is the new Donald Trump," Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter declared on Sunday. The segment later ran on CNN's website, touting Stelter as the network's "chief media correspondent."

"Tucker has taken Trump's place as a right-wing leader, as an outrage generator as a fire-starter, and it's all taking place on Fox, just as Trump's campaign did," Stelter said, claiming Carlson is "tapping into white male rage and resentment" and "stoking distrust of Big Tech and the media."

Social justice activists have been arguing for some time that scientific societies and institutions need to address systemic sexism and racism in STEM disciplines. However, their rationale is often anything but scientific. For example, whenever percentages in faculty positions, test scores, or grant recipients in various disciplines do not match percentages of national average populations, racism or sexism is generally said to be the cause. This is in spite of the fact that no explicit examples of racism or sexism generally accompany the statistics. Correlation, after all, is not causation. Without some underlying mechanism or independent evidence to explain a correlation of observed outcomes with population statistics, inferring racism or sexism in academia as the cause is inappropriate.

One might have hoped for more rigor from the leadership of scientific societies and research institutions. Alas, this has not been the case. In the current climate, many have simply adopted popular rhetoric and the jargon of critical theory has begun to dominate communications by these institutions. Pandering and virtue signalling have begun to generate proactive initiatives by the highest levels of the scientific community, often replacing the focus on science itself. Here are a few examples from the past few weeks alone.

In December, the American Physical Society (APS), the largest society of physicists in the world, sent out a letter to its membership arguing that Trump's Presidential Executive Order 13950 on Combatting Race and Sex Stereotyping was "in direct opposition to the core values of the American Physical Society." The order therefore needed to be rescinded in order to "strengthen America's scientific enterprise." The order (since rescinded by Biden) quoted Martin Luther King, stating that in government-supported scientific institutions people should "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." It argued that materials from places like Argonne National Laboratories that equate "color blindness" and "meritocracy" with "actions of bias," or from Sandia National Laboratories which state that an emphasis on "rationality over emotionality" is a characteristic of "white male[s]," were inappropriate training materials for government-supported science institutions. It concluded that "it shall be the policy of the United States not to promote race or sex stereotyping or scapegoating in the Federal workforce."