Notice HARBOUR AUTHORITY — NOTICE TO VESSEL OPERATORS. Berths 7 to 11 on the south quay are withdrawn from service with immediate effect pending structural inspection of the quayside. Vessels currently occupying these berths must relocate to berths 14 to 18 on the north quay by 08:00 tomorrow. Harbour operations are otherwise unaffected. Operators requiring assistance with relocation should contact the duty harbour master on VHF Channel 12.

Police Appeal APPEAL FOR INFORMATION — ARMED ROBBERY. Officers are seeking witnesses to an armed robbery at the Centrale pharmacy, Via Rossini 44, at approximately 19:10 on Thursday 6 April. Two male suspects entered the premises; one remained near the entrance while the other approached the counter. Both wore dark clothing and face coverings. They left on foot heading east toward the railway station. One suspect carried a distinctive red and white sports bag. No shots were fired and no customers were injured. Anyone with information should contact the Questura on 0721 387000 or use the anonymous tip line at polizialocale.it.

Article When Sergeant Major Elena Varga was appointed Regimental Sergeant Major of the 4th Logistics Regiment in January 2023, she became the first woman to hold that role in the regiment’s 80-year history. The appointment followed a 19-year career in which she served across five countries and held instructor and leadership roles at the NCO training centre. Varga has since introduced a mentoring scheme pairing junior NCOs with senior non-commissioned officers from other units, a programme she describes as filling a gap that formal training alone cannot address. She was clear in her first address to the regiment that the appointment carried significance beyond herself personally: the doors that had taken eight decades to open, she said, should stay open.

Article A study published in a leading occupational health journal has found that shift workers who rotate between day and night duties experience significantly higher rates of metabolic disorder, cardiovascular disease and depression than workers on fixed schedules, including those on permanent night shifts. The study, which followed 6,400 workers across twelve years, found that the health burden was most pronounced among workers whose rotation cycle was faster than one week, leaving the body insufficient time to adapt its circadian rhythms before the schedule changed again. Workers on permanent night shifts showed elevated health risks compared with day workers, but those risks stabilised over time in a way that rotating shift workers’ risks did not.

Article A joint NATO and European Union working group on critical infrastructure protection has concluded that undersea cable networks carrying internet and telecommunications traffic represent one of the most significant and least protected strategic vulnerabilities in the current security environment. The group’s report notes that more than 95 percent of intercontinental data traffic travels by undersea cable rather than by satellite, and that the cables are concentrated in a small number of chokepoints that are technically straightforward to identify and physically accessible to state and non-state actors with modest maritime capability. Protective measures discussed include increased naval patrols, acoustic monitoring arrays and the development of rapid repair protocols, but the group acknowledged that no single measure provides comprehensive protection and that deterrence relies primarily on the difficulty of attribution and the political costs of confirmed interference.

Article The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 reduced the sea journey between Britain and India from approximately 11,000 nautical miles around the Cape of Good Hope to approximately 6,200 nautical miles, cutting voyage times by weeks and transforming the economics of colonial trade. The canal was built under a French concession and initially operated by a joint French and Egyptian company, with the British government acquiring a majority shareholding in 1875 when the Egyptian Khedive sold his stake to meet pressing financial obligations. British strategic interest in the canal intensified over the following decades as it became the principal artery through which oil, troops and material moved between Europe and Asia. The canal’s nationalisation by Egypt in 1956 precipitated the Suez Crisis, in which Britain, France and Israel launched a military intervention that was subsequently abandoned under significant pressure from the United States and the Soviet Union.

Article Research published in a peer-reviewed environmental science journal has found that urban heat island effects — the phenomenon by which built-up areas retain significantly more heat than surrounding rural areas due to reduced vegetation, increased impermeable surfaces and waste heat from energy use — are intensifying in European cities at a rate that exceeds projections made a decade ago. The study, which used satellite thermal imaging across 47 cities between 2010 and 2024, found that the average peak temperature differential between city centres and peri-urban areas had increased by 1.8 degrees Celsius over the study period. The researchers noted that the effects were not uniform: cities that had invested in green infrastructure — parks, green roofs, permeable paving and tree canopy — showed significantly smaller increases than those that had not.

Article Counterfeit medicines — pharmaceuticals that contain the wrong active ingredient, incorrect dosage, or no active ingredient at all — are estimated by the World Health Organization to account for between 10 and 30 percent of all medicines sold in lower-income countries, with rates in some regions significantly higher. The problem is not confined to developing markets: a series of regulatory investigations in Europe between 2019 and 2024 identified supply chain infiltration at the wholesale distribution level in eight member states, with counterfeit products reaching licensed pharmacies and in some cases hospitals. Detection relies primarily on serialisation — the use of unique barcodes that allow individual packs to be tracked through the supply chain — but implementation has been uneven and small independent pharmacies frequently lack the scanning infrastructure required to verify authenticity at the point of dispensing.

Article I have been a librarian for 31 years and in that time I have watched the predicted death of my profession arrive and then not arrive, repeatedly. First it was the photocopier that was going to make lending obsolete. Then the internet. Then e-books. The library where I work has never been busier. What has changed is what people come for. They come for internet access they cannot afford at home. They come for quiet. They come because they are lonely. They come for the children’s reading groups, the local history collections, the knitting circles on Wednesday afternoons. They come, I suspect, because the library is one of the few remaining genuinely public places in which you are not required to buy anything in order to stay.

Article The use of body-worn cameras by police officers has expanded rapidly across European and North American forces since 2015, driven primarily by pressure to increase accountability following high-profile incidents of alleged excessive force. Research on the effects of the technology has produced a more complex picture than either advocates or critics initially anticipated. Several large-scale studies have found statistically significant reductions in use-of-force incidents and in complaints against officers in departments that adopted cameras. Others have found no significant effect, or effects that disappeared after the initial novelty period. A consistent finding across studies is that the effect of cameras depends heavily on departmental policy: forces that require cameras to be switched on for all encounters show different outcomes from those that allow officer discretion about when to activate recording.

Media Report An Italian Army combat engineer unit completed the construction of a 120-metre panel bridge across the Tagliamento river yesterday, restoring a road connection that had been severed by flash flooding three days earlier and reopening access to four villages that had been isolated since the event. The operation, which was completed in 14 hours, was described by the regional civil protection chief as the fastest military bridge-building operation she had witnessed in 22 years in the role. The unit’s commanding officer said the speed was made possible by pre-positioned bridging stocks held at a forward logistics point established as part of a regional emergency readiness plan implemented two years ago, which had significantly reduced the time between mobilisation and the start of construction.

Media Report A ruling by the European Court of Justice has found that a major online retail platform violated EU competition law by using sales data generated by third-party sellers on its marketplace to inform the development and pricing of its own competing products. The court found that the practice gave the platform an unfair informational advantage over sellers who had no equivalent access to market-wide data and who could not reasonably have anticipated that their trading activity would be analysed in this way. The company has been ordered to pay a fine of 2.1 billion euros and to implement structural changes to the way data generated by marketplace sellers is handled. The company stated that it disagrees with the ruling and is considering an appeal, but would comply with the structural requirements while any appeal process is under way.

Media Report A coast guard vessel from the Greek Hellenic Coast Guard reached a stricken sailing yacht 40 nautical miles south of Crete yesterday afternoon after the vessel sent a distress signal at 06:20 local time. The yacht’s two-person crew had activated their EPIRB following an engine failure and loss of steering in deteriorating sea conditions. Both crew members were found to be in good health, though severely dehydrated. The yacht sustained significant damage to its rudder assembly and was taken under tow to Heraklion harbour. The coast guard stated that the operation had been completed within the target response window and commended the crew for activating their distress beacon without delay, noting that the early alert had allowed the patrol vessel already at sea to alter course rather than requiring a second vessel to be dispatched from port.

Correspondence Major T. Andersen, G4 Branch, Multinational Corps Headquarters. 22 October. Director of Procurement, NORDIC DEFENCE SUPPLIES AS. Re: Purchase Order NDC-2025-0491 — Field Catering Equipment. I am writing to formally register a complaint regarding the delivery received on 18 October against the above purchase order. The consignment was incomplete: items 7 to 14 on the packing list (field boiling units, quantity 24) were absent from the delivery, while items 1 to 6 arrived correctly. The outstanding items are required for a multinational exercise commencing on 3 November, and their absence at this stage creates a material risk to exercise catering capability. I request immediate dispatch of the outstanding items by air freight at no additional cost to the contracting authority, and a written explanation of the cause of the shortfall. A response is required within two working days.

Correspondence Dr. Sofia Monteiro. Institute for Security Policy, Lisbon. 8 November. Dear Dr. Monteiro, I am writing to apply for the Research Fellow position (Ref: ISP-RF-2025-03) advertised in the September issue of the European Security Review. I hold a doctorate in strategic studies from the University of Coimbra and have spent the past five years as a senior analyst at the Portuguese defence ministry, where my work has focused on hybrid threat assessment and the policy implications of information operations. I have published 14 peer-reviewed articles in the field and have presented at NATO, EU and OSCE policy forums. I am fluent in Portuguese, English and Spanish, and have a working knowledge of French. I enclose a full curriculum vitae and three letters of reference. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss my application in person. Yours sincerely, Captain (Ret.) Rui Figueiredo.