Vienna

The hard lockdown in Austria's capital of Vienna has been extended until at least May 1, Vienna Mayor Michael Ludwig announced on Monday. While Covid-19 infections have decreased in the past weeks, the city's hospitals are at capacity with a new record of 611 patients in the ICU as of Monday.

The measures include a 24-hour curfew, closure of all non-essential shops and mandatory FFP2 masks in all rooms where more than one person is present.

Founded in 2016 by Felix Ohswald (CEO) and Gregor Müller (COO) in Vienna, the start-up Go Student connects students and tutors on a virtual platform so that they can hold their tutoring sessions on computers, cell phones or tablet PCs. Especially in times of pandemics and homeschooling, the provider is getting a lot of interest - which in turn has now attracted new investors.

Go Student now announces that it has closed another investment round under the leadership of new investor Coatue together with existing partners Left Lane Capital and DN Capital. With a total investment of 70 million euros, Go Student says it is the best-funded start-up in the education sector in Europe. In the previous year, the Viennese company had already received a total investment of 13.3 million euros.

According to the Agency for Health and Food Safety (Ages), the more infectious mutant recently accounted for 76 percent of positive tests nationwide. In Vienna, the proportion is already 90 percent. Vienna is also likely to have recently surpassed Tyrol in terms of new infections with the South African variant B.1.351.

In several Austrian provinces, including Tyrol, Carinthia, Vorarlberg and Vienna, several politicians, municipal employees and relatives were injected with leftover Covid-19 vaccine doses meant for residents and staff at elderly care homes.

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz sharply criticised the behaviour.

During a house search in the 21st district, the officers from the Vienna customs office found a total of 13 tons of tobacco and several machines for the production of cigarettes. According to a statement of the Ministry of Finance, the production was only under construction and had only been in operation for a short time. One person was arrested during the search.

The customs office estimates that around 52,000 cartons of cigarettes were produced, taken away and sold during the approximated ten weeks that the illegal factory has been active. According to the investigators this is "a highly profitable business, since the turnover to date amounts to at least 1.5 million euros on the black market".

British budget airline Ryanair will close its Vienna, Austria, base by the end of 2020, the Austrian national public service broadcaster ORF reports. Vienna-based employees are being told they can either relocate to a different location or lose their job.

The Austrian government has announced that it will start mass testing its population on December 2, starting with the capital Vienna, followed by six other states. In Vienna, a total of 1.2 million tests will be provided at three major locations with the support of the Federal Armed Forces. Appointments can be made online and Health City Councillor Peter Hacker (SPÖ) predicts a total of 150.000 daily tests.

The mystery of the 2005 excavated grave in Krems-Wachtberg in Austria, which is about 31000 years old and in which two skeletons of new-born children were found, was unraveled by Archeologists of the Natural History Museum Vienna and the University Vienna. Gene analytics showed that the two boys, who were buried under a mammoth scapula, were identical twin brothers.

The one boy died during or shortly after birth, the second one about six or seven weeks later. Those children are the oldest recorded identical human twins. A nearby found skeleton of a male toddler of 13 or 14 weeks appears to be related to both brothers - he was their cousin.

As a consequence of the attack in Vienna, the German police union ("Gewerkschaft der Polizei") is demanding that people who pose a risk to society are monitored by federal authorities in the future.

Complete monitoring of potential terrorists is no longer possible due to the lack of personnel at the state level.

Berlin currently counts 88 Islamists, whose surveillance would require 2,640 officials. The land has 190 at its disposal.

The man accused of carrying out the attack is a 20-year-old "Islamist terrorist" who was released early from jail in December 2019. Police have carried out a series of raids and made 14 arrests in the hours since a gunman murdered four people in the heart of Vienna.

Update: The police have stated that during a terrorist attack in Vienna at least three people have been killed and several people have been injured.

There is at least one perpetrator who has been shot by police forces, there is the possibilty of additional perpetrators.

The confirmed shooter had been armed with an assault rifle.

According to a report by STANDARD the German government has stated that "since September 5, there have been significantly more than 50 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants [in Vienna], so we feel compelled to take action".

The Austrian newspaper states that a final decision to declare Vienna a risk area will likely be made Wednesday afternoon.

The finals include the following cities: Espoo (Finland), Helsingborg (Sweden), Leuven (Belgium), Valencia (Spain), Vienna (Austria), and Cluj-Napoca (Romania).

The winner of the competition, to be announced on September 24, receives €1 million, which is to be used in consolidating activities which innovate the infrastructure. The five runners-up will receive  €100,000 each.

According to a spokesperson of the government "there are no major clusters at educational institutions" after three cases of Covid-19 have been reported in three different schools in Vienna and 13 cases at multiple kindergartens.

The classmates of the infected students now need to go into quarantine for ten days since their last contact with the infected person.

The Greens party in Vienna has voiced that of the main demands for a future red-green coalition in the city is the reduction of working hours for all of the city's 65,000 employees to a 35-hour week without any loss of pay.

This includes garbage collection workers, employees in the care sector, kindergartens or administrative staff.

According to a calculation by the Greens, the measure would cost the city around 350 million euros. The reduction in working hours would also create an additional 7,000 jobs in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis, says Judith Pühringer, a Greens candidate for the upcoming elections.

The Vienna city council for transport Birgit Hebein from the Greens party and the district leader Markus Figl from the ÖVP party are reportedly working on plans to establish a ban for cars in the inner city. The current plans reportedly only exclude residents, residents, suppliers, police and emergency services and public transport. The ring road will not be included in the bans.

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization has detected slightly increased levels of isotopes produced by nuclear fission near the Baltic Sea. The CTBTO is a network of hundreds of monitoring stations checking for nuclear weapon tests worldwide but is also able to identify other nuclear activities. One CTBTO station detected higher-than-usual levels of the radionuclides caesium-134, caesium-137 and ruthenium-103 earlier this week that are "certainly nuclear fission products, most likely from a civil source," but "it’s outside the CTBTO’s mandate to identify the exact origin," so a spokesperson of the Vienna-based CTBTO.

Nuclear fission products are atomic fragments that are left after an atom is split into two or more smaller nuclei and are radioactive.

The Austrian government announced today that it is granting Austrian Airlines €450 million bailout that will protect Vienna as a transit hub and safeguard carrier's jobs.

Ministers told during a press conference the structure of the bailout will be €300 million in loans by a banking consortium, 90% of which to be guaranteed by the government, and €150 million in direct grants.