What happened
A demonstration outside Aston Villa’s Europa League fixture against Maccabi Tel Aviv saw several confrontations and six arrests. The match went ahead without travelling supporters after local authorities raised safety concerns. Hundreds of protesters gathered near the stadium to call for Israeli clubs to be removed from European football competitions. West Midlands police said three people were arrested for racially aggravated offences and one for a breach of the peace. The other arrests were for refusing to remove a face mask and failing to comply with a dispersal order.

Who said what
“We have shown that we are a welcoming community, that we want to support footballers, but we don’t support hooligans and we don’t support genocide,” said Independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, Ayoub Khan.

Villa won the match 2-0, earning “three points and one huge sigh of relief for the people of Aston and its surrounding areas”, said Alan Smith in The Independent. This was a “comfortable win” for the hosts on a night where “football was an afterthought”.

What next?
Police are reviewing evidence from the operation as the debate over Israeli clubs’ participation in European football continues.

What happened
This year’s Miss Universe competition has been thrown into disarray after the contestants staged a mass walkout due to a comment by one of the judges.

In a pre-event ceremony, Miss Universe Thailand director Nawat Itsaragrisil criticised Miss Mexico, Fatima Bosch, for failing to post promotional content. He is widely reported to have called the 25-year-old a “dumbhead”, but Itsaragrisil later claimed at a press conference that he was saying “damaged”.

Who said what
“Insulting another contestant is a huge lack of respect,” said the reigning holder of the Miss Universe tiara, Victoria Kjaer Theilvig of Denmark (pictured above, centre), who led the walkout in solidarity with Bosch.

“As is usually the case with these sorts of things,” said Glamour magazine, “this is not the first time that Itsaragrisil has come under fire for his comments and treatment of women.” The Thai media personality body-shamed the then Miss Iceland, Arna Ýr Jónsdóttir, in 2016, added the magazine.

What next?
Despite the controversy, the Miss Universe competition is set to continue, with the winner due to be crowned on 21 November.

Scientists may have developed a snake bite anti-venom that can be used for 17 different species of snakes, according to a study published in the journal Nature. The anti-venom specifically targets species of snakes in the Elapidae family. There are approximately 360 species of elapids worldwide and they are “among the deadliest snakes because their venoms contain potent neurotoxins that act rapidly to induce paralysis and respiratory failure”, Anne Ljungars, a biological engineer at the Technical University of Denmark and a study co-author, told Popular Science. The new anti-venom is effective against 17 of 18 elapids found in the African continent, including cobras, mambas and rinkhals.

More than 300,000 snake bites are reported each year in sub-Saharan Africa, along with 7,000 deaths from those bites. While anti-venoms have long existed, getting the correct one was dependent on the “victim knowing which species of snake had delivered the bite – something that is not always easy to notice in the chaos of the moment”, said The Economist. In addition, the technology used to make anti-venoms has not changed much since the 1800s.

While the new anti-venom worked in alpacas, llamas and mice during testing, it has yet to be trialled on humans and still requires improvement before it can be made widely available. Still, it appears to be safer than the current anti-venoms being used. It “almost always prevented tissue death at the injection site”, a problematic side-effect of many other products that often leads to limb amputations, according to The Economist.