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Biaowiea National Park which spans 350,000 acres in Poland and Belarus is a protected UNESCO World Heritage Site. Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson/NPR hide caption

Biaowiea National Park which spans 350,000 acres in Poland and Belarus is a protected UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The lush, green canopy that is Bialowieza Forest spans 350,000 acres between Poland and Belarus. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is home to a variety of endangered species like the European bison, which is slightly larger and leaner than its American cousin.

It also has some of the last old-growth forest in Europe, untouched by human hands, and there is a great deal of international interest in preserving the forest's delicate ecology.

Polish journalist, author and naturalist Adam Wajrak said he never tires of seeing the complex life cycle in this forest up close.

"Look at there, here, you see?" he asked me, pointing to the top of a dead spruce trunk during a recent hike. "This is the little spruce growing on the body of dead spruce, this very often happens."

He peeled back the top layer of another dead trunk.

"If you look under the bark, there's a lot of beetles, a lot of spiders everything, whatever you want, and this is how it works," he says. "This is why I compare the Bialowieza Forest to coral reef because in coral reef, a lot of life is based also on the dead corals. So this works like that."

But the Polish government insists Mother Nature has lost control of Bialowieza Forest. Poland's Minister of the Environment Jan Szyszko has repeatedly warned of a spreading bark beetle infestation targeting spruce trees in particular.

The camp outside Biaowiea National Park where environmental activists are staying as they try to stop loggers. They've hung a sheet that says: "Bialowieza, Run Forest Run" playing on the popular Tom Hanks movie "Forrest Gump." Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson/NPR hide caption

The camp outside Biaowiea National Park where environmental activists are staying as they try to stop loggers. They've hung a sheet that says: "Bialowieza, Run Forest Run" playing on the popular Tom Hanks movie "Forrest Gump."

He says the forest must not be left to its own devices and that infected trees and those around them must be cut down. Last year, he approved a plan that triples the amount of logging in parts of the forest. It sparked an international outcry.

Foresters are planting less vulnerable oak saplings to replace the trees they are logging but that hasn't appeased critics, who complain the replanted woodlands look like man-made tree farms.

The Ministry of the Environment isn't budging on its claim that only human intervention can save this forest. It defends its plan on its official website, noting in big letters at the end: "We'll see who is right."

Mariusz Agiejczyk, the deputy chief in the Hajnowka district office overseeing state forests, firmly backs the ministry's plan. The General Directorate of the State Forests, a government agency, funds its activities from the $2 billion Polish logging industry.

Agiejczyk blames the bark beetle proliferation in the Bialowieza Forest on global warming and previous reductions of logging quotas there.

"The [Polish] foresters are here since 90 almost 100 years, and look how beautiful the forest is," he says. "This kind of criticism that says we are harming it is absurd, we did not do anything wrong."

The European Union's highest court is siding for now with the Polish government's opponents, who argue the beetle infestation must be left to nature. The European Commission which is the EU's executive arm and is leading the legal action in the Court of Justice case argues the Polish logging violates the bloc's wildlife protection laws.

On July 28, the court imposed a temporary injunction against logging in Bialowieza Forest to protect the trees while the case is being decided. But Szyszko said on July 31 that Poland won't abide by it, and that logging which he referred to as "protective measures" for the forest would continue.

Should Poland lose the case before the European Court of Justice, it could face fines of more than $4.7 million, plus possible penalties of around $350,000 each day.

Meanwhile, environmental activists are not waiting for officials. They've descended on Bialowieza Forest from around Europe in recent weeks to try and block the loggers.

Joanna Bienkowska, 30, of Greenpeace, is one of the activists who recently moved into a camp near the forest with other protesters. They've hung up a sheet that says "Bialowieza: Run, Forest, Run," playing on a line from Forrest Gump.

Bienkowska said she and the other activists spend their days hiking, biking and driving around the forest with maps, binoculars and GPS devices in search of the mechanical harvesters that cut down as many as 200 trees each day.

"We don't know where are harvesters, so we are looking for them," she says. "[They] are moving so fast with guards, so sometimes we don't know where they are."

Fellow activist Marcin Skopiski, a university student in cultural and social anthropology from Warsaw, says he recently helped form a human blockade that chained itself to a forest harvester.

Deputy superintendent of the Hajnowka Forest District cuts of bark of spruce to find woodworm and woodworm larvas in Biaowiea National Park. Wojtek Radwanski/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Deputy superintendent of the Hajnowka Forest District cuts of bark of spruce to find woodworm and woodworm larvas in Biaowiea National Park.

"During patrols, I've see a lot of places where logging [is] taking place and it's a very sad thing to see," says Skopinski, 25. "Like some of the parts are looking like a storm came in or some huge destruction happened."

The activists say it's increasingly difficult to get to the harvesters because of the armed foresters, scores of whom are being sent here from around Poland to protect the logging operations.

But what they show me is the aftermath of the logging. Felled trees stripped of their bark and bearing the harvester's signature gouges are piled high along roads and trails, where trucks will haul them away.

Nearby, dozens of other trees are marked with fluorescent pink dots. They will be cut down next.

Continue reading here:
Poland Clashes With European Union Over Logging In Primeval Forest - NPR

A record number of people in EU countries now personally feel like they are citizens of the European Union, according to a long-running survey monitoring the continents views on integration.

As Britain heads towards the exit door the rest of the continent feels more positive about European identity than ever, with a solid 68 per cent of the population telling the regular Eurobarometer poll that they feel they are a citizen of the EU.

The up-tick also comes alongside a sharp increase in optimism for future of the continent-wide bloc, with a big fall in people who foresee the continents economy worsening over the next 12 months compared to last year.

56 per cent of people across the continent are optimistic about the future of the EU in general a rise in six points on the previous survey published in the autumn of last year.

21 per cent also now think the EU economy will get worse, down from 28 per cent in the last poll, while 21 think it will get better, up from 18 per cent. 45 per cent believe it will stay the same.

There were sharp rises in EU optimism in France, where new president Emmanuel Macron saw off a far-right challenger, and Portugal, whose government has ended austerity and kick-started growth with an investment programme.

When the European Commission started asking about EU citizenship identity in 2010 62 per cent of people said they felt like EU citizens.

The latest results appear to contradict the narrative spun by the Leave campaign that Brexit would cause a domino-effect of other countries wanting to leave the bloc.

The new figures also come amid a solid increase in growth across the continent and a hardening of attitudes to secession from the union as the so-far shambolic nature of Britains exit becomes clear.

In the first quarter of the yearthe UKs economy fell to the bottom of the EU growth league, with first quarter GDP figures being beaten by every other EU country. The UKs 0.2 per cent growth rate in that period was well below the Eurozones 0.6 per cent rate.

Britain also lagged behind the eurozone in the first quarter, with 0.3 per cent growth compared to 0.6 per cent.

The Eurobarometer survey is conducted by the European Commission and polls the view33,000 people across the EU.

Read more from the original source:
More Europeans than ever say they feel like citizens of the EU - The Independent

Sweeping reforms are set to take charge of European consumers online privacy and data concerns next spring, but the impact could be global and a huge win for consumer privacy advocates. The regulation applies if the companies collecting or storing data are based in the European Union or deal with data of E.U. residents, even if their headquarters are elsewhere.

Passed by the European Union in April 2016, the regulation officially known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or known as PR-speak on Twitter as #GDPRubbish is supposed to give Internet users more control over the ways that their personal information is used.

As the BBC explained, Simply put, organisations need to keep records of all personal data, be able to prove that consent was given, show where the datas going, what its being used for, and how its being protected. If companies dont comply, they could face penalties of 20 million euros or up to 4 percent of annual global turnover (whichever is greater).

The European Parliament shared this breakdown when the regulation passed:

The new rules include provisions on:

The GDPR is scheduled to take effect in May 2018. Were in the middle of the two-year transition period for companies to come into compliance, but one survey found that more than 60 percent of organizations havent even started implementing their new protocols.

As Axios Sara Fischer pointed out, That means everyone from Google to your neighbor who sells shoes on eBay could be affected. Its also not just tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook that are involved, but data-collecting businesses across all sectors including publishers.

However, the tech companies will be leading the way. Were going to see innovative things from Google and Facebook in terms of how they deal with it, David Downing, executive vice president at ASG Technologies, told Axios.

Startups and smaller companies are worried about the regulation being overly burdersome.

We hold millions of datapoints on our users and we already take protecting this very seriously. Our customers trust us with their data on the assumption that we wont leak or lose it, which we dont, Tom Davenport, the CEO of a London technology company with 10 employees, told the Sun. Its fundamentally pretty straightforward. Its frustrating therefore to now be hit with such a massive and complex piece of legislation in this area.

European Union officials say its necessary: This is the kind of price we pay for a civilized way for the flow of personal data in the world, Wojciech Wiewlorowski, assistant supervisor at the European Data Protectionin Brussels, told Axios.

The new law equals bigger fines for getting it wrong but its important to recognize the business benefits of getting data protection right, a spokesperson for the U.K.s government agency in charge of enforcing the GDPR told the BBC.

A coalition to raise awareness of the regulation just launched today in Ireland, with a newsletter highlighting the buzz around the GDPR as its official implementation deadline approaches in May.

While the regulation is grounded in the European Union (and will still apply in the United Kingdom after it exits the group), analysts say the GDPR is a big step in securing consumer data worldwide.

I am optimistic that many of the GDPRs protections will trickle down from the EU to other western nations, wrote Simon Crosby, the cofounder of an global online security company, in a Forbes post. For a large enterprise such as a bank, implementing different controls and procedures for managing privacy for each geography in which it operates is likely to be onerous.

The regulation can be a bit jargon-heavy, which led to the popularity of the #GDPRubbish hashtag. (Weve included some of the more coherent and comprehensive breakdowns as links in this piece.) People have been fact-checking different claims about GDPR on Twitter, though we cant verify that all the tweets on the hashtags are accurate.

Go here to see the original:
The European Union's new data privacy rules will make companies worldwide clean up their online security, or else - Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard

One subject died and four others suffered from brain damage in a 2016 study run by Biotrial in Rennes, France.

David Vincent/ASSOCIATED PRESS

By Hinnerk Feldwisch-DrentrupAug. 1, 2017 , 4:36 PM

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has issued new, stricter rules for studies that test drugs in people for the first time. They aim to better protect participants in such first-in-human studiesoften healthy volunteers who receive a financial reward.

The guideline, which was issued on 25 July, will take effect in February 2018. It comes in the wake of a tragedy in a French drug study last year that led to the death of one man and serious neurological damage in four others. But some say the revision isn't going for enough.

The new guideline emphasizes that drug developers must perform comprehensive preclinical tests of a new compound, including how it binds to its target and whether it has so-called off-target effects; experts argue such studies fell short for the French study. EMA also provides more detailed guidance on dosing and how to monitor subjects' safety. Trial sponsors need to have strategies to minimize risks at every step and have to deal with adverse events timely and adequately.

Also new in the guideline are provisions for trials consisting of multiple substudies, which have become far more common the past decade. (The French trial, run by Biotrial in Rennes for a Portuguese drug company named Bial, used multiple groups of volunteers to test many different dosing regimens and interactions with food.) In some cases, drug developers need to analyze all the results of an earlier part before moving on to the next.

Neuropharmacologist Daniele Piomelli from the University of California, Irvine, welcomes several of the new rules. Bial and Biotrial made the incomprehensible decision to test daily doses of up to 100 milligrams, he says, when much smaller doses had been shown to completely inhibit the target enzyme; the new rules would have prevented that.

But the guideline doesn't sufficiently address another mistake, Piomelli says. After the first volunteer was hospitalized with strokelike symptoms, the remaining subjects received another dose the next morning. Under EMA's new rules, a serious adverse reaction in even one subject should be considered a reason to stop if it is at least possibly related to the drug candidate. But Piomelli says that with healthy volunteers, any serious adverse event should be presumed to be drug-related. In doubt, you stop, he says.

EMA certainly tried to improve the guideline, says Joerg Hasford of Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in Germany, the chair of the Association of German Research Ethics Committees. But the wording is supersoft, Hasford says. Drug developers want studies to go fast, and EMA appears to accommodate them, he says. Studies with multiple parts, for instance, are attractive to trial sponsors because they have to apply for approval and produce participant information only once. But Hasford says such setups should not normally be allowed for first-in-human trials.

The guideline also lacks sufficient ethical guidance on weighing the benefits against the risks before a trial starts, he adds. Some researchers criticized the Bial trial because the company had not shown that the test drug, called BIA 10-2474, was a promising drug candidate. It was not clear that this compound was useful for anything, Piomelli says.

In an email to ScienceInsider, an EMA spokesperson says that the guidelines need to cover many different scenarios and that the agency can't produce an omni-comprehensive document. Trial sponsors have to interpret and apply the provisions in a manner that is proportionate to the level of uncertainty linked to the novel drug and the characteristics of the subjects, he says. And the revision focuses on technical aspects, he emphasizes; ethics committees are responsible for weighing studies' ethical questions.

Read more from the original source:
After French drug trial tragedy, European Union issues new rules to protect study volunteers - Science Magazine

Joseph Muscat revealed there is a genuine feeling around the EUs leadership that Britain could still remain in the political project.

The Maltese prime minister, however, said there are others who are less optimistic when he was asked how wide-arranging the opinion is.

While speaking to CNN, he was asked whether his views on Britains chances of remaining in the EU are shared, Mr Muscat said: There are some who think in the same manner as I think, others are less optimistic.

CNN

But I do think I am not alone in having this point of view.

Mr Muscat did though refuse to name the politicians we are referring to during the interview.

He had previously claimed Brexit will never take place because everyone will lose if the will of the British electorate was genuinely delivered.

The Maltese PM urged British leaders to hold a second referendum in an attempt to overturn last years historic vote.

Mr Muscat told Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant: For the first time, Im starting to believe that Brexit will not happen.

I am seeing hopeful signs that indicate things will change. I see encouraging signs that the tide is turning.

Twitter

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Tourists from the UK have been stuck in four hour queues

Im not saying the Brits have made a mistake, but the mood is changing.

He did, however, claim there is no solution to Brexit, claiming everyone will a loser when Britain leaves the EU.

Mr Muscat added: The referendum was democratic, but has resulted in a situation everyone loses.

Read the rest here:
'I'm not alone!' European Union leader clinging to hopes Brexit WON'T happen - Express.co.uk