The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to a pair of scientists who developed the technology that led to the mRNA Covid vaccines.

Professors Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman will share the prize.

The technology was experimental before the pandemic, but has now been given to millions of people around the world to protect them against serious Covid-19.

The same mRNA technology is now being researched for other diseases, including cancer.

The Nobel Prize committee said: “The laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.”

Both were told they had won by telephone this morning and were said to be “overwhelmed”.

Vaccines train the immune system to recognise and fight threats such as viruses or bacteria.

Traditional vaccine technology has been based on dead or weakened versions of the original virus or bacterium – or by using fragments of the infectious agent.

In contrast, messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccines use a completely differently approach.

During the Covid pandemic, the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines were both based on mRNA technology.

Professor Kariko and Professor Weissman met in the early 1990s when they were working at the University of Pennsylvania, in the United States, when their interest in mRNA was seen as a scientific backwater.

Source: BBC

Americans have commemorated the 60th anniversary of the “March on Washington,” a pivotal event held in the US capital in the 1960s US civil rights movement, amid spreading social injustice in an increasingly polarized US society.

Tens of thousands of Americans, who gathered on Saturday in Washington, DC, to show their devotion to the ideas of late American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., called for an end to White supremacy and racial discrimination in the United States.

Rights activists from all over the US and from all walks of society gathered at the iconic Lincoln Memorial to promote racial equality in US society and beyond.

Speakers at the rally, who see Black America’s rights are on the line, addressed discriminatory issues in US society including Supreme Court decisions on Affirmative Action to states who are attempting to rewrite the history.

“No Justice, No Peace,” the demonstrators chanted, while speakers reminded that “Black lives matter”, condemning gun violence against Black individuals.

They stressed that racism is becoming more prevalent in American society and highlighted the need for more efforts to eliminate racial discrimination.

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his “I have a dream” speech which would become one of the most influential speeches in world modern history.”

That march brought more than 250,000 people to the US capital to push for an end to continuous discrimination against colored people in the US.

In his memorable speech, King urged the righteous people from all walks of US society to imagine a day when “all of God’s children, Black men and white men, [are] …  ‘Free at last! Free at last!”

The “March on Washington” King’s enlightening speech helped change the segregated system prevalent in US society in the 60s and bring an end to Jim Crow laws, pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and open the modern civil rights era which was slowly making progress before former US President Donald Trump launched his regressive rightist campaign, driving a wedge in US society.

Source: Presstv

Gun deaths related to children in the United States have reached a new high, a recent study revealed on Monday, signaling the surging gun violence across the country.

The report published by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) found that more children had died from gun-related injuries in 2021, in contrast to previous years.

By using the stats provided by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s mortality database, the study found that gun deaths of American children rose from 3,390 in 2019 to 4,368 in 2020 and to 4,752 in 2021, the latest year for which data was available.

According to the study published in the AAP’s journal, gun violence has been the number one cause of death for children in the United States since 2020.

Noticeably, among Black kids guns were mostly used for homicide while the majority of White children used them for suicide.

Source: Presstv

A man who posted violent threats against President Joe Biden and other officials online was shot dead during an FBI raid on Wednesday.

Agents were attempting to serve an arrest warrant on Craig Robertson at his home in Utah, just hours ahead of a planned visit to the state by Mr Biden.

A criminal complaint said Robertson posted threats on Facebook against Mr Biden and a prosecutor pursuing criminal charges against Donald Trump.

The FBI declined to give more details.

The raid happened at about 06:15 local time in Provo, about 40 miles (65 km) south of Salt Lake City.

A criminal complaint outlined messages that Robertson made on Facebook including pictures of guns and threats to kill Mr Biden and Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney leading an investigation into a hush-money payment by Mr Trump to an adult film star.

According to the complaint, other messages targeted US Attorney General Merrick Garland and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Robertson posted on Facebook: “I hear Biden is coming to Utah. Digging out my old ghillie suit and cleaning the dust off the M24 sniper rifle.”

It was just one of dozens of violent messages and photos of weapons posted on two of Robertson’s Facebook accounts.

The complaint said Robertson came to the attention of federal agents in March after he posted a threat against Mr Bragg on Truth Social, the social network owned by Mr Trump. The company alerted the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center.

FBI agents then visited the suspect, who told them that the post was a “dream” and ended the conversation by saying: “We’re done here! Don’t return without a warrant!”

Later posts by Robertson referenced his encounter with the agents, showed him in camouflage used by snipers, and repeatedly threatened public officials.

The messages continued as late as Tuesday, when he posted: “Perhaps Utah will become famous this week as the place a sniper took out Biden the Marxist.”

Mr Biden will make his first visit to Utah as president on Thursday, with a visit to a veterans’ hospital and a fundraising event in Park City.

Source: BBC

At least 17 people were killed and 22 injured Thursday when a bus carrying locals and migrants plummeted into a ravine in northwestern Mexico, authorities said.

Three minors were among those killed, the civil protection agency in Nayarit state reported.

The injured were taken to hospitals in the area, while one passenger escaped unharmed, it said.

The bus was travelling from Mexico City to northwestern Tijuana, which borders San Diego, from where numerous migrants attempt to seek refuge in the United States.

There was no immediate confirmation of the victims’ nationalities, though local media reported that citizens of India and Africa were believed to be among them.

Deadly road accidents are common in Mexico, usually due to high speeds, poor vehicle conditions or driver fatigue.

Such crashes are a leading cause of deaths among migrants making the dangerous journey overland to the United States.

In February, migrants from Venezuela, Colombia, and Central America were involved in a bus crash between the southern state of Oaxaca and central Puebla that left at least 17 dead.

In July, at least 29 people were killed when a passenger bus careened off a mountain road and fell into a ravine in Oaxaca.

Source: AFP

World hunger stopped rising in 2022 after growing for seven years but remains above pre-pandemic levels and far off track to be eradicated by 2030, UN agencies said Wednesday.

Between 691 million and 783 million people faced hunger last year, with a midrange of 735 million, the five agencies said in a report.

The proportion of people facing chronic hunger rose from 7.9 percent of the world population in 2019 — before the pandemic — to 9.2 percent in 2022.

The annual rise “has stalled”, however, with the total falling by about 3.8 million people between 2021 and 2022, according to the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report.

“There is no room for complacency though, as hunger is still on the rise throughout Africa, Western Asia and the Caribbean,” they warned.

The report is “a snapshot of the world still recovering from a global pandemic and now grappling with the consequences of the war in Ukraine, which has further rattled food and energy markets.”

Since 2019, those crises have plunged an additional 122 million people into hunger, according to the UN, with women and those living in rural areas hit particularly hard.

The post-pandemic economic recovery helped improve the situation, “but there is no doubt that the modest progress has been undermined by rising food and energy prices magnified by the war in Ukraine,” said the report.

The report was prepared by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, UNICEF, the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization.

The estimates indicate that hunger “is no longer on the rise at the global level” but it remains “far above pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels and far off track to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 2” of a world free of hunger, the report said.

The UN agencies warned that if the world fails to redouble and better target its efforts, the “goal of ending hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030 will remain out of reach.”

‘New normal’

“There are rays of hope, some regions are on track to achieve some 2030 nutrition targets,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement.

“But overall, we need an intense and immediate global effort to rescue the Sustainable Development Goals.”

Formulated in 2015 by the UN General Assembly, the Sustainable Development Goals include 17 interlinked objectives including ending hunger and poverty.

If the pace of progress does not pick up, nearly 600 million people could still suffer from hunger in 2030, mostly in Africa.

The UN agencies warned that the major drivers of food insecurity and malnutrition — conflicts, economic shocks, natural catastrophes — as well as glaring inequality seem to become the “new normal”.

“What we are missing is the investments and political will to implement solutions at scale,” said Alvaro Lario, head of the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

The worst drought in four decades in the Horn of Africa region threatens to create a famine affecting more than 23 million people in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, the World Food Programme warned in May.

Some 2.4 billion people — three out of 10 people on the planet — suffered from moderate or severe food insecurity in 2022.

The pandemic hit the incomes of many people and the Ukraine war sent prices rising, leaving “billions without access to an affordable healthy diet,” the UN agencies said.

More than 3.1 billion people did not have enough money for a healthy, balanced diet last year, according to UN figures.

“Hunger is rising while the resources we urgently need to protect the most vulnerable are running dangerously low,” the WFP’s executive director Cindy McCain warned on Wednesday.

“As humanitarians, we are facing the greatest challenge we’ve ever seen.”

Source: AFP

Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have welcomed Iran’s accession into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as the ninth full member of the influential security and trade alliance.

Iran gained full-fledged membership of the SCO on Tuesday, during the 23rd virtual summit of the SCO hosted by India, becoming the ninth member of the bloc, which also includes China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran will now participate in our organization in a full-fledged format. I would like to extend congratulations on this occasion to the president of Iran, Mr. Ebrahim Raeisi, and sincere greetings to him,” Putin said during his address to the one-day-long summit.

“In less than two years, our Iranian partners completed all the necessary procedures and now our shared task is to help our colleagues to productively join in the multifaceted activities taking place within the framework of the SCO,” the Russian leader added.

Being a Eurasian political, economic, international security and defense bloc, the SCO boasts to be the world’s largest regional organization in terms of geographic scope and population, grouping around 40 percent of the world population in approximately 60 percent of Eurasia.

Source: Presstv

The UN Security Council on Friday ended a decade-old peacekeeping mission in Mali, whose military junta has aligned with Russia and demanded the withdrawal of the international force battling jihadists.

Bowing to the principle that peacekeepers need the consent of the host government, the Security Council voted unanimously to start immediately winding down the mission despite fears by Western powers of new instability in the troubled nation.

The vote came two weeks after Malian Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop stunned the Security Council by calling the UN operation known as Minusma a “failure” and urging its immediate end.

Mali’s relations with the United Nations have deteriorated sharply since a 2020 coup brought to power a military regime which also severed defense cooperation with France, the former colonial power.

The junta instead has rallied behind Russia and brought in the Wagner Group, the ruthless mercenaries involved in a mutiny against President Vladimir Putin last week.

“We deeply regret the transitional government’s decision to abandon Minusma and the harm this will bring to the Malian people,” senior US diplomat Jeffrey DeLaurentis told the Security Council.

But he said that the United States voted for the resolution as it agreed with the logistical timeline for the withdrawal, which is set to be complete by the end of the year.

Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN, Anna Evstigneeva, said the authorities in Bamako were seeking to take “full responsibility” for security and that Russia “will continue to provide comprehensive support to Mali for normalizing the situation.”

Under the resolution led by France, the peacekeepers will cease their main activity from Saturday and focus on a departure by the end of the year.

The peacekeepers will still be empowered to protect against “imminent threats of violence to civilian” in areas surrounding them.

Deadly and costly

Minusma has been the most costly mission for the UN, at $1.2 billion a year, and 174 peacekeepers have died since its creation in 2013.

Despite tensions with the junta, the UN mission had widely been expected to be extended until the Malian foreign minister’s intervention. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres earlier in June had proposed renewing Minusma but streamlining its activities.

In a report, Guterres acknowledged shortcomings but called the mission “invaluable.” He noted that several countries in the region saw extremist groups as an “existential threat” whose violence could spill over and wanted to strengthen Minusma.

With 13,000 troops and police in Minusma, its termination will be a Herculean task with the United Nations needing to take away equipment, helicopters and armored vehicles.

“Securing the constructive cooperation of the Malian authorities will be essential to facilitate the process,” said a spokesperson for UN peacekeeping operations.

While the withdrawal was a given, the timeline was the focus of heated negotiations in recent days, according to diplomats.

Mali, with the backing of veto-wielding Russia, had pushed for Minusma to leave as quickly as possible, while some other nations feared that even six months was too rushed.

Richard Gowan, an expert at the International Crisis Group, said that UN officials feared that Wagner will simply take over Minusma facilities once the mission is completed.

Julie Gregory of the Stimson Center said the end of the mission could have a dire effect on civilians.

“It’s likely that violent extremists will take the opportunity to increase violence” with a potential for increased confrontation with national forces, especially in the north,” Gregory said.

Russia has insisted that its paramilitary forces will continue to operate in Mali and other African nations, notably the Central African Republic, despite the aborted mutiny of the Wagner Group’s chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Russia had long insisted that Wagner was a private group but acknowledged after the rebellion that it had been directly funding its overseas operations, which have been widely criticized by the West and human rights groups.

“Ultimately it is for the Malian transitional authorities to choose its partners,” said James Kariuki, Britain’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations. “But let’s be clear: the Wagner Group, whether operating autonomously or under direct control from Moscow, is not the answer — in Mali or anywhere else.”

Source: AFP

US President Joe Biden said Wednesday that “pariah” Vladimir Putin is “losing” the war in Ukraine, but it is too early to tell whether the Russian president has been weakened by the mercenary Wagner group’s aborted rebellion.

Asked by reporters at the White House whether Putin is now weaker, Biden said: “It’s hard to tell, but he’s clearly losing the war” in Ukraine and “he’s losing the war at home.”

Putin is now “a pariah around the world,” Biden added.

In his brief remarks, Biden mistakenly referred to Russia “losing the war in Iraq” — a gaffe he also made late Tuesday when he told a group of re-election campaign donors that he’d united the West in opposing Moscow’s “onslaught on Iraq.”

The White House remains cautious on interpreting the fallout from last week’s extraordinary events in Russia where the forces from the Wagner group — one of the most capable parts of the Russian military in Ukraine — mutinied and threatened to attack Moscow, before reversing course.

Biden, 80, is leading a Western drive to support Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion launched in February last year.

Source: AFP