Tracking app data used in Australian gangland murder case
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Australian police have used data collected by a Covid-19 tracking app to help hunt down a suspect in the high-profile murder case of biker gang boss Nick Martin. The head of the Rebels Motorcycle Club was gunned down in December by a sniper at a race track in the city of Perth. Police, who accessed data from the Western Australia contract tracing app SafeWA, are now at the center of a national debate about privacy. Local opposition leader Mia Davies has said that the police action was a “significant breach of trust” and has introduced to the state parliament legislation that would make such information inaccessible to police.
Anti-vaxxers are using Yelp and Google to trash the reputations of U.S. bars and restaurants that require customers to show proof of vaccination. “We’ve built six years of good reviews that’s been chiseled away over a matter of months,” said Marshall Smith, one of the first business owners in the country to make patrons show vaccination certificates at the door of his bar in Denver, Colorado. MIT Technology Review reported that many of the bad reviews come from people in other parts of the country — or the world — and are often reactions to photographs shared online featuring bars and restaurants with signs stating that vaccination is compulsory for entry.
In Afghanistan, just 0.5% of the population has been fully vaccinated. This can be attributed to limited stocks and strong vaccine hesitancy, exacerbated by deadly attacks on health workers. Last March, gunmen murdered three female health workers on the second day of a polio vaccination drive in Nangarhar province. After finally reopening this week, the center was shut down by another attack, in which five workers were shot dead and four more wounded. A third pandemic wave has swamped hospitals, leading to widespread oxygen shortages, as doctors fear that the Covid-19 variant that has ravaged India is now spreading across the country.