After vowing to retaliate against Lithuania’s move to allow Taiwan open a “representative office” in Vilnius, Beijing has announced it is downgrading diplomatic relations with the Baltic state.
In a statement on Sunday, the Chinese foreign ministry said that China’s diplomatic relations with Lithuania will be formally lowered to the level of charge d’affaires, while blasting Vilnius for setting a “bad international precedent” by giving the island the green light to open its mission in the Lithuanian capital.
The ministry went on to accuse Vilnius of undermining the One China principle and the principle of neutrality in bilateral relations, explaining its decision to demote relations by citing the need to “safeguard its sovereignty and the basic norms of international relations.”
“The Lithuanian government must bear all the consequences arising from this,” the ministry said, while calling on Vilnius to “correct its mistakes immediately.”
“No matter how the ‘Taiwan independence’ forces distort facts and reverse black and white, they cannot change the historical fact that the mainland and Taiwan belong to the same China,” the ministry asserted.
The move comes just two days after Beijing went on a verbal offensive against the Baltic country, warning that pushback for its cozying up to Taiwan would be imminent. “As to what necessary measures China will take, you may wait and see,” it said at the time.
Lithuania and China have been embroiled in a diplomatic row and have not maintained relations at ambassadorial level since September. After the Baltic state revealed that it would be opening a de facto Taiwanese embassy, China withdrew its ambassador from the country in August. Vilnius followed suit the following month.
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A gunman injured two civilians, one of them fatally, and two police officers before being shot dead by security forces near Jerusalem’s Western Wall on Sunday morning, Israeli police said.
The civilian victims were taken to Shaare Zedek Medical Center. One, who was in his 30s, succumbed to his injuries at the hospital. The other, a 46-year-old, is said to have suffered moderate injuries. Two police officers were hurt by shrapnel.
Two civilians were critically and seriously wounded this morning, Sunday, and two policemen were lightly wounded in a shooting attack in the area of the Chain Gate near the Western Wall and the entrance to the Temple Mount. pic.twitter.com/MRN6MLckj3
In a video clip shared on social media and purportedly filmed at the scene, multiple gunshots could be heard amid agitated shouting. Security officers could then be seen standing around what appears to be a dead body. Witnesses speculated it was that of a “terrorist.”
Scenes and sounds of shooting in the Old City of Jerusalem captured on Live Cam. Initial reports are attack is near the Temple Mount area 2 Israelis wounded one apparently seriously the terrorist has been neutralised pic.twitter.com/UKWSOqCu8D
— ElBluemountain MossadDolphin 🇮🇱🐬🇮🇱🐬🇮🇱 (@EBluemountain1) November 21, 2021
The gunman, whose identity was not immediately disclosed, was killed during the incident. Police said he had used a homemade submachine gun.
An object lurking in the outer region of our solar system may well be the elusive Planet 9, a leading British astronomer has suggested after digging through the telescope archives of 250,000 point sources.
Possible evidence of a mysterious planet up to 10 times bigger than Earth, with a distant orbit around the Sun, has been unveiled by professor of astrophysics at Imperial College of London, Michael Rowan-Robinson. Aiming to prove – or rule out – the existence of another big planet beyond Neptune, the UK scientist decided to conduct a new analysis of data collected by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) in 1983.
The astronomer has looked through some 250,000 point sources detected by the telescope, which took a far-infrared survey of 96% of the sky. Having analyzed the data, keeping in mind the hypothetical planet’s size and distance, “at the very limit of the survey,” he singled out a moving object that the satellite picked out on three occasions.
The candidate for Planet 9 would be up to five times the mass of Earth, according to the IRAS data. Its orbital distance would be some 225 times farther than that of our planet, equaling about 33.7 billion kilometers (20.9 billion miles) from the Sun.
If the enigmatic object is indeed rotating around the Sun at such a distance, it would be extremely cold and not much sunlight would be reflected by it, making it even more elusive and harder to find. While the latest study is not a clear detection, it could be valuable as guidance for where exactly to search for the new planet, the astronomer concluded.
“Given the great interest of the Planet 9 hypothesis, it would be worthwhile to check whether an object with the proposed parameters and in the region of sky proposed, is inconsistent with the planetary ephemerides,” he wrote in the preprint paper, accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
A debate on the possible existence of an undiscovered planet in our solar system has been ongoing for decades. With no concrete evidence found, there has been speculation about its presence, mainly based on the gravitational clustering of objects in the system’s outer reaches. Several years ago, a suggestion was put forward that a group of icy objects that lie beyond the orbit of Neptune in the Kuiper Belt are possibly under the gravitational influence of a larger mysterious body, possibly Planet 9. The claim was based not on observation, but on modeling.
Currently, the eighth and farthest known planet from the Sun is Neptune. In the last century, Pluto, discovered in 1930, was regarded as the ninth planet, but a controversial vote at the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 2006 formally excluded it from the solar system’s ‘planets’, and reclassified it as a dwarf planet.
One of our favorite very specific image genres of funny pictures is cat moms that look completely unprepared for the realities of parenthood. Scroll down to see the best examples!
As infections are rising again, scientists all around the world are rushing to fight the danger, offering a choice of new treatments and unusual variants of vaccines.
Levels of contagion are setting new records, hospitals are overwhelmed, governments are starting to introduce lockdowns, and not only for unvaccinated people – the picture of the fight against Covid-19 looks quite disappointing. However, there’s still a place for good news: Research teams report positive results while trialling new medicines and vaccine types.
Nasal vaccines
Vaccination will remain one of the most effective tools against Covid-19. As Professor David Dockrell, from the Center for Inflammation Research of the University of Edinburgh, told RT, “vaccines will continue to be a central part of how we control the virus.”
“If we can dampen down the number of infections, and the severity of infections, and also the extent to which the virus can replicate in people when they become infected, then we are slowing down the ability of the virus to change and to mutate,” he explains.
So I think the vaccines still will be a very important part of the preventive strategy. It’s vital that they are available to all the world’s population, irrespective of where people live, and the wealth of the country in which they live.
However, vaccination doesn’t always mean you have to get an injection. For instance, several intranasal Covid-19 vaccines are currently being developed. As the virus gets into the body through the nose, a nasal spray or drops are aimed to produce mucosal immune response and prevent it from getting into the lungs.
In India, a vaccine of this type is already completing Phase 2 of clinical trials. In Russia, a nasal vaccine is undergoing a clinical trial on volunteers. In Thailand, a home-developed product is expected to be trialed on humans next spring. In the US, Universities of Houston and Stanford recently reported good results of their experiments carried out on mice.
Intranasal vaccines can have several potential benefits compared to inoculation.
“They would be easier to use, because they can be self-administered. They wouldn’t need a nurse or clinical settings,” Swedish professor emeritus of epidemiology Marcello Ferrada de Noli explained to RT. As a result, he says, there’s hope that fewer people will be reluctant to be immunized. Not so many of us find it pleasant to get a jab – and after all, there are those who are just afraid of needles. Also, it would be much easier to vaccinate children with nasal substances.
However, what concerns Prof. de Noli the most is the duration of the effect of a vaccine of this type. Still, scientists can’t say for sure whether a nasal substance may completely replace a shot. According to Alexander Gintsburg, the head of Moscow’s Gamaleya Center biomedical research institute, which created the Sputnik V vaccine, the nasal version they are working on would serve for an additional protection against the virus, but would not replace the injections.
Chew the virus away?
A nasal vaccine is not the only one being developed. In summer, it was revealed that Russian Defense Ministry scientists were creating a ‘chewing gum’ vaccine, also targeting the mucosal immune response. Meanwhile, a UK firm announced this month that it would conduct a human trial of a skin patch that uses T-cells to confront the virus. Developers hope it would offer longer-lasting immunity than the existing vaccines. Work on a similar project is being done in the University of Queensland, Australia.
While it all looks so promising, Prof. de Noli warns that it would still take a lot of time until these products become available to the public. “I think that discoveries in this field are a very good thing. But if we say ‘We discovered a new type of vaccine’, people will say ‘Aha, so I’m going to wait’. But we need to vaccinate people now,” he points out.
Improving Covid treatment
Vaccines are not a silver bullet, unfortunately, given the not-so-high level of global immunization and the constantly emerging new strains of the virus. “People might get infected despite having had a vaccine, but I still think the vaccine strategy is going to be central to how we manage this kind of virus going forward,” Prof. Dockrell says. “But we will have other strategies that will be very important. We will have other elements. When we put them all together, it gives us the best opportunity that people can live with coronaviruses, and hopefully, the mortality can be limited to much lower extense than what we’ve sadly seen in the last eighteen months.”
Monoclonal antibodies will be central to the ongoing vaccine strategy, Prof. Dockrell explains. These are the antibodies similar to those the body uses to fight the virus. They are produced in labs and given via infusion or injection to boost the patient’s response against certain diseases. Monoclonal antibody treatment is used for people under a high risk of developing severe infection (including older patients 65+ years old or those with chronic medical conditions). It’s already being used in the US, following last year’s FDA approval. Earlier in November, the European Medicines agency recommended authorizing two monoclonal antibody medicines.
In October, UK’s AstraZeneca reported positive results of a Phase 3 study of its antibody combination, which, according to developers, is highly effective in both prevention and treatment of coronavirus.
Researchers are also working on a possibility to save Covid-infected patients from the so-called ‘cytokine storm’ – a situation when the immune system reacts so intensely that kills not only the virus, but the whole organism itself. A drug to ‘calm the storm’ was registered in Russia this year, and it’s already being used on patients.
Another way to fight Covid-19 is to use antiviral drugs. When the pandemic started, medics had to use something already existing (like anti-influenza Favipiravir) or something being authorized for emergency use (like remdesivir). Now, more than a year on, the work to create a special drug to specifically cure Covid-19 is giving its results. This month, Russia registered its first injectable anti-Covid medicine. A bit earlier, the UK became the first country to approve an antiviral pill produced by the US-based companies Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics. Another American firm, Pfizer, got positive results from trials of its drug of the same kind. Both firms hope that with a drug in the form of a pill it would be easier to treat people at home.
Appreciating all the efforts on the field of developing anti-Covid treatment, Prof. de Noli points out that still, the key issue now is to reduce the spreading of the virus. “The new medicines are developed for people who already got the disease,” he says.
But we need to prevent people from getting the infection, not let them get infected because we have some new medicine that can cure them.
The same idea is echoed by scientists all over the world quoted in plenty of articles dedicated to the medical gains: it’s great to have the treatment, but none of the drugs may substitute vaccination, as first and foremost, humanity has to adopt preventive measures and stop the pandemic.
Criminals convicted of multiple cases of rape could face chemical castration in Pakistan as the country’s parliament supported new legislation aimed at tackling the rise in sexual offenses there.
The amendments to existing legislation, which allow for speedy conviction and harsher punishments for rapists, have been voted in by the MPs on Wednesday.
They introduce the death penalty or a life sentence for gang rape as well as chemical castration for repeat sex offenders, with the consent of the convict.
Chemical castration was described in the bill as a process through which “a person is rendered incapable of performing sexual intercourse for any period of his life, as may be determined by the court through administration of drugs.”
It’s planned to establish special courts across the country to make sure that verdicts in sexual assault cases are delivered “expeditiously, preferably within four months.” If chemical castration is assigned as a punishment, it “shall be conducted through a notified medical board,” according to the new legislation.
Mushtaq Ahmed, a senator for the religious Jamaat-i-Islami party, had earlier denounced the bill as un-Islamic. Ahmed argued that there was no mention of chemical castration in Sharia law and that rapists are to be hanged in public.
By resorting to drugs to reduce the libido of repeat sex offenders, Pakistan joins South Korea, Poland, the Czech Republic and some US states, where chemical castration has been introduced.
The measure was put on the table a year ago by Pakistani President Arif Alvi in response to a vast public outcry over a spike across the country in cases of rape involving both women and children.
Back then, Amnesty International decried chemical castration as a “cruel, inhumane” treatment, advising Islamabad to instead focus on reforming its “flawed” justice system and to ensure justice for the victim.
Local NGO War Against Rape told Reuters last year that less than 3% of sexual assault or rape prosecutions in Pakistan result in a conviction.
Japan’s fifth wave of Covid-19 has virtually disappeared so dramatically that some scientists are puzzled as to why it happened. One team suggests the highly infectious Delta strain mutated into extinction on the island nation.
In mid-August, Japan experienced a peak in Covid-19 infections, recording over 23,000 new cases per day. Now the metric is just around 170, with deaths attributed to the disease mostly remaining in single digits this month.
The decline has been attributed by many to high vaccination rates, public acceptance of masks, and other factors, but some researchers say the drop was uniquely significant, compared to other nations with similar conditions.
Ituro Inoue, a geneticist at the National Institute of Genetics, believes that Japan had the good fortune of witnessing the Delta strain mostly rooting out other variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus before then eradicating itself. He explained his team’s theory to the Japan Times newspaper this week.
For some time now, Inoue and his fellow scientists were researching mutations of SARS-CoV-2 and how they are affected by the protein nsp14, which is crucial for the reproduction of the virus.
RNA viruses, like the one causing Covid-19, tend to have a very high mutation rate, which helps them quickly adapt to changes in the environment. However, this opens the door for a so-called “error catastrophe,” when bad mutations pile up and finally cause the full extinction of a strain. The protein nsp14 appears to offer a form of error proofreading that helps the virus genome to stay below the threshold of the “error catastrophe.”
In the case of Japan’s fifth wave of Covid-19, the Delta variant’s nsp14 failed at this job, Inoue believes, based on the genetic study of specimens collected from June to October. Contrary to his team’s expectations, there was a lack of genetic diversity, while many samples had many genetic changes in the site called A394V, which is linked to the error-fixing protein.
“We were literally shocked to see the findings,” the researcher told the Japan Times. “The Delta variant in Japan was highly transmissible and [was] keeping other variants out. But as the mutations piled up, we believe it eventually became a faulty virus and it was unable to make copies of itself.”
The theory could be relevant to the previous SARS strain, which was identified in 2003, explaining why it didn’t cause a pandemic. But that would be hard to confirm, since the outbreak ended relatively quickly and didn’t result in the massive collection of genetic data necessary to test the hypothesis.
It’s not clear why Japan had this lucky turn of events, but nothing comparable happened in other East Asian countries like South Korea, where populations are genetically close to that of Japan. Virus mutations similar to those flagged by the scientists have been discovered in at least 24 countries, Inoue said. He and his team plan to publish a paper detailing their findings by the end of November.
Even if the natural extinction theory is confirmed, it is at best a temporary reprieve for the Japanese people. New, more successful strains are likely to eventually find their way into the country, though quarantine measures and immigration control could delay the emergence of new variants in Japan, Inoue believes.
Meanwhile, Tokyo is bracing for a new wave of Covid-19 this winter and is preparing to live with the virus. The government reportedly plans to ease travel restrictions by increasing the number of people it allows to enter the country per day from 3,500 to 5,000.
A cleaner for Israel’s defense minister has been accused of espionage after allegedly offering to place malware on his boss’ household computer for an Iran-linked hacking group.
In a statement on Thursday, the Shin Bet security service said that Omri Goren, a housekeeper for Defense Minister Benny Gantz, and a former bank robber according to Israeli media, corresponded with an unnamed person over social media shortly before his arrest.
Goren reached out earlier this month to “a figure affiliated with Iran and offered to help him in different ways, in light of his access to the minister’s home,” the statement read, according to the Times of Israel.
It is understood that Goren offered to spy and place malware on Gantz’s computer on behalf of a hacking group, reportedly called ‘Black Shadow’ and associated with Iran, Tel Aviv’s perennial enemy. It is also said that he provided photos of Gantz’s residence to prove he had access.
A Central District prosecutor filed espionage charges against Goren on Thursday. If convicted, the accused could face a sentence of between 10 and 15 years, according to the Times of Israel.
The 37-year-old Lod resident has previously served four prison sentences, the most recent of which was for four years. Goren was found guilty of five crimes between 2002 to 2013, two of the convictions were for bank robbery.
The Shin Bet said they would review their processes for staff background checks “with the goal of limiting the possibility of cases like this repeating themselves in the future.”
Speaking on Kan public radio, Gal Wolf, the attorney representing Goren, suggested his client had intended to extract money from the Iranians without carrying out any spying.
People around the world will need to get a jab against Covid-19 once a year, at least when it comes to the Pfizer vaccine, BioNTech’s CEO Ugur Sahin said in an interview on Sunday, as he praised the quality of its booster shot.
In an interview with Germany’s Bild newspaper on Sunday, Sahin said he considers the vaccine, co-developed by his company, to be “very effective.”
When asked whether people should be worried about the “breakthrough infections” – in which those vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine still developed Covid-19 symptoms – he dismissed such concerns, saying that the jab offers a “90 percent protection” against cases that require intensive care in those aged over 60.
A “very high” level of protection against severe illness lasts for up to nine months, the BioNTech CEO maintained. He said this level starts decreasing “from the fourth month,” however. To maintain the protection, Sahin strongly pushed for booster shots, arguing that they would not just restore levels of antibodies but would potentially help “to break … chains of infection.”
He also encouraged doctors to be “as pragmatic as possible” when it comes to greenlighting vaccination and “not to send people home unvaccinated even though they could be vaccinated without any problems.”
In the future, people might need to get booster shots once a year, the BioNTech CEO believes. He said that he expects protection from a booster shot to “last longer” than the initial immunity one acquires after getting two doses of the vaccine.
“Subsequent … vaccinations may only be needed every year – just like [with] influenza,” he said. Currently, the German Federal Center for Health Education – an agency subordinated to the Health Ministry – recommends a booster shot six months after one gets the second dose of a vaccine. It also says that “booster vaccination makes sense after a minimum interval of about four months.”
Sahin’s interview comes days after it was revealed that Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are making a combined profit of $65,000 every minute – all thanks to their Covid-19 jabs. That is according to estimates made by the People’s Vaccine Alliance (PVA) – a coalition demanding wider access to vaccines.
The PVA estimated that the three companies are to earn a total of $34 billion in combined pre-tax profits this year alone, which roughly translates into more than $1,000 a second and $93.5 million a day.
PVA has slammed the three companies over their refusal to allow vaccine technology transfer despite receiving a combined $8 billion in public funding. Such a move could increase global supply and save millions of lives as well as drive down prices, the coalition said.
“Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have used their monopolies to prioritize the most profitable contracts with the richest governments, leaving low-income countries out in the cold,” said Maaza Seyoum of the African Alliance and People’s Vaccine Alliance Africa.
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