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New data from Skandia shows that the number of sick leave due to mental health issues is decreasing for the first time in several years. At the same time, we see that mental health issues among those who are the longest on sick leave continue to rise. It is a distressing statistic. The Moderates have made several (translated)

The British Office for National Statistics (ONS) plans to use artificial intelligence to reduce costs and improve the quality of collected data, which is expected to save thousands of man-hours annually and address issues related to the accuracy of key economic statistics. (translated)

🚨 The world is sleeping on the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is the fastest-growing in history. The statistics are startling. More than 2,500 people have now died out of more than 5,000 confirmed cases, with about half of the deaths happening in https://t.co/AiUTcWzrjo #EbolaOutbreak #DRC #HealthCrisis #CD

Rabaa: The Hour the World’s Conscience Stood Still On the anniversary of one of the largest single-day killings of protesters in modern history, one question remains unanswered: who will be held accountable? By Adham Hasanin Egyptian journalist and political writer, based in the Netherlands On 14 August, the anniversary returns of a day unlike any other in modern Egyptian history. Not simply because it was the bloodiest Egypt has known wars and massacres before and since ,but because it was the day a state chose to open fire on its own people in broad daylight, in front of the world’s cameras, and then let thirteen years pass without a single officer ever being held accountable. This article will not be a cold recitation of statistics, though the statistics exist, are documented, and are horrifying. It is an attempt to understand something deeper: how a square in the heart of Cairo, filled with tents, children, and worshippers, became the site of the largest mass killing the Arab world has witnessed in the past decade and why the echo of that day still reverberates in every Egyptian prison cell today. I. A Morning That Began Like Any Other For readers unfamiliar with the background: in July 2013, the Egyptian military, led by then-General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, removed Mohamed Morsy Egypt’s first freely elected civilian president, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who had taken office in 2012 following the 2011 uprising against Hosni Mubarak. In response, tens of thousands of Morsy’s supporters staged an open-ended sit-in demanding his reinstatement. By 14 August 2013, more than twenty thousand people had spent weeks camped out at two Cairo squares, Rab’a al-Adawiya and al-Nahda, in a peaceful sit-in. They were not an army, nor a uniform bloc; they were entire families men, women, and children, some affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, many simply ordinary citizens who saw the restoration of elected legitimacy as a cause worth the risk. There were tents for sleeping, communal kitchens feeding the demonstrators, speaking platforms, and a small field clinic that no one imagined would, within hours, become one of the most terrifying places in modern Egyptian history. In the early hours of that morning, Central Security Forces and army units, under the command of then-General Sisi, began what was officially described as a "dispersal" operation targeting both sit-ins simultaneously. It was not a dispersal in any ordinary sense of the word. According to a year-long investigation by Human Rights Watch, it was a pre-planned operation that anticipated, from the outset, thousands of deaths. II. The Numbers the Regime Refuses to Speak The Egyptian government, to this day, cites a death toll of "over 600" for that single day a figure that, even at its official lowest, is horrifying enough to warrant an independent international investigation. But the field investigation conducted by Human Rights Watch, drawing on field hospital records, survivor testimony, and analysis of video footage from dozens of angles, arrived at a far more disturbing figure: at least 817 people killed at Rab’a Square alone, with the true toll likely exceeding 1,000, plus another 87 killed at the nearby al-Nahda Square. When the deaths from the weeks surrounding 14 August are added from the dispersal of the Republican Guard sit-in on 8 July, through the Mansoura Street killings, to the dispersal of an October 6 march the combined total reaches at least 1,150 deaths in just six weeks, according to Human Rights Watch’s meticulous documentation. This figure led the organisation to use a term not deployed lightly in international law: crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch described the Rab’a killings as "one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history." Not in Egyptian history alone in modern history as a whole. What happened at Rab’a is cited in international reporting alongside China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. This is the true scale of what the Egyptian state has spent thirteen years trying to minimise, justify, and reduce to a mere "security incident" in a news bulletin. III. "All According to Plan" When Mass Killing Becomes Administration, Not Chaos The title Human Rights Watch chose for its detailed report on the massacre deserves lingering on: "All According to Plan." This is not an emotive headline; it is a precise legal conclusion built on field evidence. According to the investigation, what happened at Rab’a was not a dispersal operation that spiralled out of control amid chaos or panic, as the regime later tried to portray it. It was a carefully planned operation that assumed, in advance, massive casualties. Then-Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim admitted, in a televised interview broadcast on 31 August 2013 just weeks after the massacre that his ministry had anticipated losses of "10 percent of the people" present at the sit-in, acknowledging that the number of demonstrators exceeded twenty thousand. By simple arithmetic, this is an official admission that the state anticipated, in advance, the deaths of roughly two thousand people and proceeded with the operation regardless. This is the true horror at the heart of the Rab’a story: it was not a security operation that spun out of control, but a conscious administrative decision, made in an air-conditioned room, with advance calculations, by men who knew precisely how many human beings would die under their fire and who proceeded anyway, or perhaps because of it. According to Human Rights Watch’s analysis, the objective was to send an unambiguous message: whoever challenges the new state will pay an irreversible price. IV. Snipers, Women, and Children The Faces the Reports Do Not Tell Behind every number in the Human Rights Watch reports lies a full human story, deliberately omitted from the state’s official narrative. The investigation documented how security forces opened fire from multiple angles, and how snipers positioned themselves atop buildings surrounding the square, targeting according to survivor testimony and analysed video footage any movement in the square, regardless of whether it was an armed combatant or a nurse trying to reach a wounded person. According to documented testimony, entire families had their tents burn over their heads as fire swept through the sit-in. Doctors and paramedics were killed while trying to pull the wounded from the line of fire. Most damningly of all, the documentation shows deliberate targeting of ambulances and field medical points meaning that wounded people who survived the first bullet then faced death by bleeding out, because anyone attempting to save them was themselves a target. This detail the targeting of medics is what elevates the event from "excessive violent repression" to what human rights organisations have described as a systematic crime. When security forces target those trying to save the wounded, they are not merely dispersing a sit-in; they are preventing witnesses from surviving to tell what happened. V. Thirteen Years of Total Impunity The most painful part of the Rab’a story is not only what happened that day, but what has not happened in the years since. From 14 August 2013 to today, not a single officer, of any rank, has been held accountable for the deaths of hundreds, or thousands, of Egyptians. Quite the opposite: the state has moved to entrench impunity through the force of law itself. Egypt issued legislation granting senior military officers immunity from questioning over any violations that may have occurred following Morsy’s removal a law specifically designed to close the door on any future judicial accountability, regardless of how political circumstances might change. Even the fact-finding committee established by then-interim President Adly Mansour to investigate the June and July events concluded, in its report issued more than a year after the events, that the sit-in’s leaders bore responsibility for the deaths, on the grounds that they had allowed weapons into the square even as the same report admitted, in a glaring contradiction, that security forces had failed to target only armed individuals, meaning they had fired indiscriminately on everyone: armed and unarmed, man and woman, adult and child. This is the pattern that has repeated for over a decade: as each anniversary approaches, official statements re-narrate the events and shift blame onto the victims, while the actual perpetrators — those who planned the operation, gave the orders, and pulled the trigger — remain free. Some now occupy the highest offices of the state. VI. Why This Anniversary, Why Now? A reader might ask: why revisit this story after all these years? Has the world not moved on to newer crises? The answer lies in the very nature of impunity. When a state is never held accountable for the largest massacre of protesters in its modern history, it does not simply "forget" the crime it sets a precedent, telling every future ruler and every future security apparatus: mass killing is possible, politically profitable, and free of cost. This poisonous lesson does not remain confined within Egyptian borders; its echo reaches every Arab capital contemplating how to handle its own opposition. More dangerously, this system of impunity did not stop at Rab’a’s edges; it is the foundation on which Egypt’s entire subsequent decade of repression was built: thousands of political prisoners, grossly unfair mass trials that produced death sentences for dozens of defendants in cases linked directly to the Rab’a events themselves, laws criminalising peaceful protest, a muzzled press, and a civil society hollowed of substance. All of it traces back to the morning of 14 August 2013, when the state learned that overwhelming force succeeds, and that the world will condemn for a few days, then move on. VII. Delayed Justice Is Not Forgotten Justice Despite more than a decade of official silence and impunity, the Rab’a case remains alive in international legal memory. Human rights organisations, from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International, continue to renew their annual calls for an independent international investigation, grounded in the legal principle that crimes against humanity are not subject to statutes of limitation: delayed justice is not forgotten justice. The victims who fell in that square were not numbers in a statistical report. They were fathers who left behind children too young, that day, to understand why their father would never return. They were mothers who, thirteen years later, are still searching for a clearly marked grave to which they can carry flowers, and young people who had decades of life ahead of them that they never got to live. Their memory does not fade with time; it grows with their children, who carry with them the same question their parents asked before they were killed: when will justice come? Conclusion: What Does This Anniversary Demand of Us? Every year, as the anniversary of 14 August returns, the same question resurfaces one the Egyptian state refuses to answer: who gave the order? Who planned the operation? Who decided that twenty thousand human beings deserved to be shot with live ammunition because they staged a peaceful sit-in? This anniversary is not a call for vengeance, nor an invocation of the past for its own sake. It is a reminder that justice, however delayed, remains a debt still owed. And that every instance of international silence over a massacre of this scale opens the door to the next one, elsewhere, under a different pretext, carrying the same lethal conviction: that the world will condemn for a week, then forget. We will not forget. And we will not stop asking the question that unsettles everyone who took part in that crime, regardless of the office they hold today: where is the accountability? Rab’a is no longer merely the name of a square in Cairo. In the conscience of everyone who believes in justice, it has become a test of the world’s conscience itself a test the world has not yet passed.

🇨🇳 #China's surveyed urban unemployment rate rose to 5.2% in July (3-month high), according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics on Monday. *The reading was higher than the consensus forecast of 5.1% tracked, and compared with the 5% rate recorded in the previous month. #China #Unemployment #Economy #CN

Wat ik vooral heel erg bijzonder vind, @HaanXander, dat mensen als jij nooit ingaan op het gegeven dat de primaire stellingen uit het Proximal Origin artikel ontkracht blijken te zijn en dat in ieder geval een van de auteurs tot maanden na het verschijnen ervan zelf niet overtuigd was van deze stellingen. Wat ik ook heel erg bijzonder vind, Xander Haan, is dat mensen als jij nooit ingaan op het feit dat het artikel over de markt van Huanan van Worobey et al. - waar ook de naam van @MarionKoopmans bijstaan - in het beste geval broddelwerk was en in het slechtste geval gewoon wetenschappelijke fraude. En het zijn bepaald niet de minste auteurs die dit schreven en het werd gewoon in een toonaangevend tijdschrift gepubliceerd. Statistics did not prove that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was the early epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic https://t.co/bSGh61HQbX Dan vind ik het ook nogal bijzonder, Xander Haan, dat het paper van Pekar et al. een drietal substantiële fouten in de simulatiesoftware bevatte. Dat leidde zelfs tot een officieel erratum bij dit artikel in Science, waarbij de Bayes factor met een factor tien daalde. En ik heb me door een hoogleraar Bayesiaanse wiskunde laten vertellen dat dat niet meer is dan statistische ruis. https://t.co/czp5qiwKZE Was dat alles, Xander Haan? Welnee. Daarna bleek ook nog eens dat de methodologie van die 'wetenschappelijke' studie onjuist was. Aan de twee scenario's werden verschillende eisen gesteld, een doodzonde binnen de Bayesiaanse wiskunde, maar wel een fout die de conclusie van Pekar et al. toevallig ten goede kwam. Toen ook dat gecorrigeerd was, bleek dat juist één introductie waarschijnlijker was. Maar dat was niet de conclusie die de auteurs wilden trekken. Want dat zou in strijd zijn met het overspringen van #SARSCoV2 van dier op mens op de markt van Huanan. https://t.co/1IfA8PzvXD En ook hier was het niet de minste die dit aan de kaak stelde. @mbw61567742 En wat ik ook heel bijzonder vind, Xander de Haan, is dat de studie van Crits-Cristoph et al. over de #wasbeerhond een aanfluiting bleek te zijn: in het monster Q61 - het monster waar het meeste DNA van de wasbeerhond zat - bleek namelijk zo weinig RNA van SARS-CoV-2 te zitten dat de rtPCR het niet oppikte, en dat hele kleine beetje alleen bij sequencen werd 'aangetoond'. Waarom de aanhalingstekens, Xander? Dat zal ik je uitleggen. Dat is omdat het statistisch niet eens mogelijk bleek te zijn om te bepalen of het er nu wel of niet inzat. Zo weinig was het. https://t.co/tqnNM0Ct2J Waarom heb ik je hier nooit over gehoord, Xander? Want ook @jbloom_lab is een expert op zijn gebied. En als ik dit zo alles op een rij zet en ik kijk er eens goed na, wie denkt hier dan de wijsheid in pacht te hebben, Xander? Ik denk dat jij dat bent. Want al dat zogenaamde 'wetenschappelijke bewijs' voor een zoönose wat door jullie aangevoerd en kritiekloos omarmd werd, verkruimelde onder de druk zodra mensen met verstand van zaken er naar keken. Noem je dat genuanceerd? Noem je dit wetenschap? Echt? Als dat zo is, heb je niet heel veel van wetenschap begrepen. En ben je een aanfluiting voor wat wetenschap zou moeten zijn. Want - zoals ik al zei - het was in het beste geval pseudowetenschappelijk gefröbel en in het slechtste geval wetenschapsfraude. Met wat er in de afgelopen weken zoal naar buiten is gekomen, maakt dat ik inmiddels sterk neig naar het laatste. En weet je wat nu zo grappig is, Xander? Dat is dat twee van de vier auteurs van het Proximal Origin artikel, Eddie Holmes en Andrew Rambaut zeer recent geconstateerd hebben dat de afstand tussen Zuid China en Laos enerzijds en Wuhan anderzijds veel te groot is om door vleermuizen te worden overbrugd. Daarom moet dat wel door een tussengastheer gebeurd zijn. Die er nog steeds niet is. Tja. Er waren mensen - die volgens jou denken de wijsheid in pacht te hebben - die dat in 2020 stelden. https://t.co/X6FTJwcEyH Ik vind dit werkelijk zo'n leuk zinnetje uit het artikel: "These ancestors traveled unexpectedly fast to reach sites of human emergence." Ja. Onverwacht snel. In Wuhan. Waar men onderzoek deed naar deze virussen en er ook aan knutselde. Ik zie graag je weerlegging van bovenstaande argumenten Xander. Want ik heb van de auteurs van het Proximal Origins artikel begrepen dat virologen alwetend zijn en alles beter weten dan wie ook. Net zoals dat geldt voor @MarionKoopmans. Dus dat moet voor jou ook geen probleem zijn als hoofddocent virologie. #Wetenschap #COVID19 #Statistiek

🚨 Lucas Digne est le défenseur français avec le plus de matchs dans les 5 grands championnats sur les 15 dernières années. 🤯🇫🇷 394 matchs... WOW. (@OptaJean) https://t.co/42e3MP9XLs #Football #Ligue1 #Statistics

🇪🇸📊 𝗧𝗛𝗜𝗔𝗚𝗢 𝗣𝗜𝗧𝗔𝗥𝗖𝗛 (𝟭𝟴) has PLAYED in 9 competitions this season. • LaLiga • Primera Federación • Champions League • Youth League • U21 PL Int. Cup • LaLiga2 Promotion • Segunda Federación • U20 World Cup • U19 EURO https://t.co/lt4CCQDKra #Football #Statistics #YouthTalent

Artists shouldn't be asking AI to evaluate or judge their art. Art has fundamentals, but lives in how humans perceive it: unease, recognition, feelings you can't name on the spot. A model is trained to run statistics and return what sounds right. It'll never say your work is bad. https://t.co/CyPpQgkDFS #Art #AI #Creativity #Nospecificcountrycodesarepresentinthetweet.

Signals of improvement already in April Statistics Canada estimates that the economy could have grown by as much as 0.4 percent this month. The improvement is primarily attributed to: – mining, – extraction of resources, – and the oil and gas sector. (translated)

RT @tparsi: Stunning! Very understandable that many view the Iran war as "Israel first" when you see these statistics: The US depleted fa… #IranWar #Israel #USPolitics #IR #US

The 30 Highest-Paying Jobs in America This ranking of America’s highest-paying occupations uses Bureau of Labor Statistics data to compare mean annual wages and total U.S. employment across the country’s top-paid roles. 💶 The results show how concentrated high pay is in https://t.co/1MTrSUe9ns #HighestPayingJobs #Careers #SalaryInsights #US