Category: World

PTI

New Delhi: India on Thursday appreciated Bangladesh’s consistent stand that all developments in Jammu and Kashmir are India’s internal matters.

The praise for Bangladesh came in the context of Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan raising the Kashmir issue during a telephonic conversation with his Bangladeshi counterpart Sheikh Hasina on Wednesday.

Asked about Khan taking up the issue during his call with Hasina, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said, “Our relations with Bangladesh are time tested and historic. This year is the celebration of Mujib borsho (centennial birth anniversary of Sheikh Mujibur Rah man) and both the countries are taking a lot of steps to strengthen this partnership in this year.”

India has also stood with Bangladesh as their ties have been forged by history and common sacrifices, Srivastava said at a Jedi briefing.

“As regards to Jammu and Kashmir, we appreciate their (Bangladesh’s) consistent stand that J&K and all developments in J&K are matters internal to India. This is a stand that they have always taken,” he said.

On the issue of an Indian national being injured recently in the firing by the Nepal Armed Police Force (NAPF) in the ‘no man’s land’ on the Indo-Nepal border in Bihar’s Kishanganj, Srivastava said the matter was taken up with Nepal under established mechanisms.

“We have extensive and continuing cooperation on border security and related matters with Nepal. In fact there is positive coordination between relevant departments on both sides,” Srivastava said.

“We have established standard operating procedures and mechanisms and under these established SOPs and mechanisms, we have taken up this issue with Nepal,” he said.

Asked about US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s remarks that the US and India need to work together in the wake of the challenges posed by China, Srivastava said, “Since India and China are both prominent countries, this issue (border tensions) has attracted interest all over the world.”

“What I can say is that as part of our diplomacy we are engaged with those interested, to convey our viewpoint,” he said.

Baden-Württemberg will now ban full-face coverings for all school children. State Premier Winfried Kretschmann said burqas and niqabs did not belong in a free society. A similar rule for teachers was already in place.

The government of the western German state of Baden-Württemberg agreed on Tuesday to ban full-face coverings, often known as burqa or niqab, in schools.

The new rule comes as the topic of Muslim face coverings has been hotly debated in Germany and follows a ruling by a court in Hamburg that reversed that city’s own ban.

Baden-Württemberg’s city council’s decision to ban full-face coverings, typically worn by ultra-conservative Muslim girls, matches the ban for teachers that is already in effect.

State Premier and prominent Green politician Winfried Kretschmann conceded that cases of full-face veiling in schools were rare, but said that nonetheless, a legal ruling was necessary for the rare cases.

Kretschmann said that full-face veiling did not belong in a free society. But he added that such a ban at the university level, where students are adults, was a more complex question. For now, the rule in Baden-Wurttemberg will only apply to primary and secondary education.

Controversial debate splits the Green party

Proponents of full-face bans in Germany say they are necessary to protect young girls, that forcing or encouraging them to wear them infringes on their rights. Prominent members of conservative parties, including Julia Klöckner in Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), have called for a nationwide full-face veil ban.

The Greens have been split on the issue, but in the case of school kids in Baden-Württemberg, they sided with the CDU. Baden-Württemberg Green party leaders Sandra Detzer and Oliver Hildenbrand have previously referred to the burqa and the niqab “symbols of oppression.”

But opponents say that such rulings can lead to the marginalization of Muslim communities in Germany. A school student in Hamburg recently fought and won a legal battle allowing her to wear the attire, though the court noted that a ban might be possible if the state’s school laws were altered, which local politicians are now working on.

Filiz Polat, migration policy spokesperson for the Greens’  federal parliamentary group, has said that the freedom to wear religious symbols or not was one of the features of a democratic society.

Currently, full-face veils have been banned in neighboring countries such as The Netherlands, France, Denmark and Austria.

A 2019 YouGov poll released found that 54% of respondents in Germany would support a ban on burqas.

– Agencies

WHO is working to ensure fair vaccine distribution, but in the meantime it is key to suppress the virus’s spread, said Mike Ryan, head of WHO’s emergencies programme, as daily new cases around the globe are at near-record levels.

Researchers are making “good progress” in developing vaccines against COVID-19, with a handful in late-stage trials, but their first use cannot be expected until early 2021, a World Health Organization (WHO) expert said on Wednesday.

People line up behind a health care worker at a mobile Coronavirus testing site at the Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles (AP)

WHO is working to ensure fair vaccine distribution, but in the meantime it is key to suppress the virus’s spread, said Mike Ryan, head of WHO’s emergencies programme, as daily new cases around the globe are at near-record levels.

“We’re making good progress,” Ryan said, noting that several vaccines were now in phase 3 trials and none had failed, so far, in terms of safety or ability to generate an immune response.

“Realistically it is going to be the first part of next year before we start seeing people getting vaccinated,” he told a public event on social media.

WHO was working to expand access to potential vaccines and to help scale-up production capacity, Ryan said.

“And we need to be fair about this, because this is a global good. Vaccines for this pandemic are not for the wealthy, they are not for the poor, they are for everybody,” he said.

The U.S. government will pay $1.95 billion to buy 100 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine being developed by Pfizer Inc and German biotech BioNTech if it proves safe and effective, the companies said.

Ryan also cautioned schools to be careful about re-opening until community transmission of COVID-19 is under control. Debate in the United States over restarting education has intensified, even as the pandemic flares up in dozens of states.

“We have to do everything possible to bring our children back to school, and the most effective thing we can do is to stop the disease in our community,” he said. “Because if you control the disease in the community, you can open the schools.”

With inputs from The Indian Express

Team based in China develop test that identifies cancers up to four years before signs appear

A blood test can pick up cancers up to four years before symptoms appear, researchers say, in the latest study to raise hopes of early detection.

A team led by researchers in China say the non-invasive blood test – called PanSeer – detects cancer in 95% of individuals who have no symptoms but later receive a diagnosis.

“We demonstrated that five types of cancer can be detected through a DNA methylation-based blood test up to four years before conventional diagnosis,” the team wrote in the journal Nature Communications.

They said the test was unlikely to be predicting cancer but rather picking up on cancerous growths that had not yet caused symptoms or been spotted by other methods.

Such tests, known as liquid biopsies, have become the focus of much research as they offer a non-invasive way to screen patients.

The new study is not the first to report positive results for a blood test for early detection of cancer. However, the team said the research was exciting because it showed cancers could be detected before patients showed any indication of symptoms – something few studies have shown before.

The researchers reported how the new test was based on screening particular regions of DNA found in blood plasma for telltale tags, called methyl groups, that often crop up in tumour DNA. The team said they used techniques that allowed them to pick up even very small levels of such DNA.

They then used machine learning algorithms – a type of artificial intelligence – to develop a system that could determine whether any DNA found circulating in the blood was indeed shed by tumours, based on the presence of these methyl groups.

To develop the test, the team used blood plasma samples collected from individuals in China between 2007 and 2014 as part of a wider research endeavour.

Overall, 414 samples were used from participants who remained cancer-free at least five years after the blood was taken, and 191 samples were used from participants who were diagnosed with stomach, colorectal, liver, lung or oesophageal cancer within four years of the blood being collected. The team also used samples from biobanks from 223 patients already diagnosed with one of the five cancers.

After training the system on about half of the samples, the team tested their approach on the remainder.

The results revealed PanSeer flagged cancer in 88% of participants who had already been diagnosed and in 95% of participants who were not diagnosed with cancer but later went on to develop the disease. The test correctly identified those without cancer 96% of the time.

The study has limitations, including that it is based on a relatively small number of samples, storage was not optimal, and the team has raised some concerns about possible contamination. Also, the test cannot identify which type of cancer an individual has.

But Dr Eric Klein, of Cleveland Clinic’s Taussig Cancer Institute, who was part of a team that previously revealed a liquid biopsy that can identify 10 different types of cancer at an early stage and predict which organ is affected, welcomed the new research.

“This is an exciting study which provides further confirmation that methylation-based assays can detect cell-free circulating tumour DNA and may form the basis for new screening tests that detect cancer at early stages,” he said. “There is a need for such tests to screen for cancers for which there are currently are no effective screening paradigms.”

Samantha Harrison, a senior early diagnosis manager at Cancer Research UK, said: “The PanSeer test has achieved encouraging initial results. Promisingly, the test may be able to detect cancer in blood samples taken years before diagnosis. But these are early results that now need to be validated in larger studies.”

With inputs from The Guardian

A Saudi Arabian man who was missing for three days has been found in the middle of a desert in Riyadh province while he was in the “sujood” or prostration praying position, prompting hundreds of social media users to pray for him online.

Videos of a rescue team finding the man and his car – which was stocked with sticks which may indicate that he was gathering wood for his family – went viral on social media platforms.

العثور على #مفقود_وادي_الدواسر⁩ متوفياً وهو ساجد لله تعالى..pic.twitter.com/FClNDNk6xz

— هاشتاق العرب (@TheArabHash) July 20, 2020

Dhuwaihi Hamoud al-Ajaleen had gone missing from his home on Thursday in Riyadh’s Wadi al-Dawasir, according to local media reports.

The 40-year-old was found three days later in the middle of the desert after police launched an intensive search for him.

Rescue teams drove through the desert before finding al-Ajaleen a few meters away from his car, local media said.

– Agencies

Russia-China-Iran Axis: The $400 billion pact has generated both anxiety and interest in Iran, with critics of Hassan Rouhani’s government terming it a “secretive” agreement. However, Rouhani and his Cabinet colleagues have strongly come out in its defence.

Iran and Russia are likely to renew their “20-year agreement”, which expires in March 2021, Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said during his official visit to Moscow on Tuesday.

Speaking to Iranian media in Moscow, Zarif said another “long-term deal” with Russia is “on the agenda”, terming the relations between the two all-weather allies as “strategic.”

Zarif, accompanied by Deputy Foreign Minister Seyyed Abbas Araqchi, left for Moscow early on Tuesday for talks with the Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

It is the second visit by the Iranian foreign minister to Moscow in a month and coincides with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi’s first official visit to Tehran. Zarif had visited Baghdad on Sunday.

While it was not immediately clear which “20-year agreement” Zarif was referring to, according to reports it pertains to a series of petrochemical and weapons deals signed by the two sides in 2001.

The long-term deals were signed in Kremlin in March 2001 between then Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, when Putin agreed to sell Russian conventional arms to Iran after a gap of six years.

In what was the first meeting in four decades between the top political functionaries of the two countries, Moscow had also expressed its willingness to help Iran complete work on the country’s only nuclear power plant in the Persian Gulf region.

Since 2001, the relations between the two countries have strengthened while Iran’s relations with the US have gradually deteriorated.

Extension of Arms Embargo

Pertinently, Russia is one of the countries that have opposed the US’ demand for extending the UN arms embargo on Iran, which is slated to expire in October this year. The US government officials have upped the ante in recent weeks, calling for an extension of the arms embargo on Iran, and threatening to invoke sanctions snapback.

Commenting on why he chose to visit Moscow just a month after his last visit, Zarif said: “continued dialogue with Russia and other friendly countries such as China is essential given the major international developments.”

On Monday, Iran’s envoy to Moscow Kazem Jalali had told a Russian daily that Iran was interested in buying new weapons from Russia “to enhance its defence capacities”. The talks about extending a long-term agreement with Russia comes after Iran’s proposed 25-year “comprehensive cooperation agreement” with China that has hogged headlines in recent weeks.

The $400 billion pact has generated both anxiety and interest in Iran, with critics of Hassan Rouhani’s government terming it a “secretive” agreement. However, Rouhani and his Cabinet colleagues have strongly come out in its defence.

The agreement is presently in the “negotiation phase” and is expected to be submitted in Iran’s parliament for approval in coming weeks. While the government has stopped short of divulging details of the agreement, government spokesperson Ali Rabiei last week said “recognizing cultural commonalities, encouraging multilateralism, supporting equal rights of the nations, and insisting on domestic development” were parts of the “plan.”

With inputs from EurAsian Times

Washington: President Donald Trump has warned the US pandemic may “get worse before it gets better”, as he revived his virus briefings with a more scripted tone.

Mr Trump also asked all Americans to wear face coverings, saying “they’ll have an effect” and show “patriotism”.

The president, who was not wearing a mask at the briefing, has previously disparaged them as unsanitary.

His aides have reportedly pressed him to adopt a more measured approach as virus caseloads spike across the US.

The daily White House news conferences ended soon after Mr Trump suggested in April during freewheeling remarks from the podium that the virus might be treated by injecting disinfectant into people.

In his first White House coronavirus briefing for months on Tuesday, a less off-the-cuff president echoed what public health officials on his pandemic task force have been saying as he warned: “It will probably unfortunately get worse before it gets better.

“Something I don’t like saying about things, but that’s the way it is.”

He added: “We’re asking everybody that when you are not able to socially distance, wear a mask, get a mask.

“Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact, they’ll have an effect and we need everything we can get.

Mr Trump – who more than once referred to Covid-19 as the “China virus” – took a mask from his pocket in the briefing room, but did not put it on.

The president is facing an uphill climb to re-election in November against Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, according to opinion polls.

Mr Biden on Tuesday accused Mr Trump of having failed Americans in his handling of the pandemic. “He’s quit on you, he’s quit on this country,” the former US vice-president said.

With inputs from BBC World News

84-year-old ruler was reportedly suffering inflammation of the gall bladder

REUTERS

Saudi Arabia’s 84-year-old ruler, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, has been admitted to hospital in the capital Riyadh, suffering from inflammation of the gall bladder, state news agency SPA said on Monday.

The king, who has ruled the world’s largest oil exporter and close U.S. ally since 2015, was undergoing medical checks, the agency added, without giving details.

King Salman, the custodian of Islam’s holiest sites, spent more than 2-1/2 years as the Saudi crown prince and deputy premier from June 2012 before becoming king. He also served as Governor of the Riyadh region for more than 50 years.

The defacto ruler and next in line to the throne is the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, widely known by his initials MBS, who has launched reforms to transform the kingdom’s economy and end its “addiction” to oil.

Social changes

The 34-year-old prince, who is popular among young Saudis, has won praise at home for easing social restrictions in the conservative Muslim kingdom, giving more rights to women and pledging to diversify the economy.

To the king’s supporters, this boldness at home and abroad was a welcome change after decades of caution, stagnation and dithering.

But state control of the media and a crackdown on dissent in the kingdom make it difficult to gauge the extent of domestic enthusiasm.

The coronavirus vaccine candidate being developed by Astrazeneca and Oxford University induces a strong immune response and is safe to use in humans, according to preliminary trial results.

The early stage trial has found that the vaccine causes few side effects and induces strong immune responses in both parts of the immune system – provoking a T cell response within 14 days of vaccination and an antibody response after 28 days.

More follows…

With inputs from independent.uk

Russia’s health minister revealed that the vaccine to prevent Covid-19, which the country is currently developing, will be available for public consumption by next month after it completes the last stage of clinical trials, Livemint reported.

Briefing media Mikhail Murashko stated as cited in a Sputnik News report: “The government’s decree implies this. It will be imperative that additional clinical research of an approved vaccine be conducted simultaneously.”

According to a Bloomberg report, Kirill Dmitriev, chief executive of the government-backed Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), said that the Phase-III trials will begin on August 3 in Russia, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.

Russia will mass-produce the vaccine, with around 30 million doses domestically in 2020, and 170 million for export. Five countries have already shown interest in helping Russia with the mass production, Dmitriev said.

Recently, Russia’s Sechenov University had announced that it had completed clinical trials of a Covid-19 vaccine, developed by Russia’s Defense Ministry’s Gamalei Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology.

The ministry said in a statement cited in the Sputnik report: “The Russian Defence Ministry tests the vaccine on volunteers in full compliance with the acting legislation and scientific methodological regulations, in order to prevent further risks, without any attempt to reduce the duration of the research.”

Russia is the fourth worst-affected country in the world by Covid-19. It has reported over 7.5 lakh Covid-19 cases.

With inputs from The Hindu