Hyderabad, Nov 14,2020: Saturday marks the 12th Anniversary of Indian Flag landing on Moon.
Though people celebrate Diwali today, people after Sunset can locate three planets —Mars (in East) , Jupiter and Saturn (in South West Direction) as non-twinkling Star like objects.
Plaetary Society of India Director N Sri Raghunandan Kumar in a release e-mailed to UNI said 14th November is the day when in year 2008 The Moon Impact Probe (MIP) a lunar probe developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) with Indian Flag etched onto it was released by ISRO’s Chandrayaan-1 mission on to the surface of moon.
The Moon Impact Probe separated from the moon-orbiting Chandrayaan-1 on 14 November 2008 at 20:06 and crash landed, as planned, into the lunar south pole after a controlled descent.
He said Moon Impact Probe struck the Shackleton Crater of Southern pole of Moon at 20:31 on that day thus making India fifth nation to land its flag on Moon.
ADDIS ABABA/AL FASHQA, Sudan,Nov 13,2020: The United Nations voiced concern on Friday that the conflict between Ethiopian government forces and insurgent northern leaders could spiral out of control and said war crimes may already have been committed.
On the Sudanese border, refugees who had fled the combat zone in Tigray region told of buildings wrecked by government air raids, shootings in the street and killings by machete.
The 10-day-old war has already killed hundreds, pushed thousands of civilians into Sudan, and raised fears it may draw in Eritrea or pressure Ethiopia’s commitment to an African force opposing al Qaeda-linked militants in Somalia.
It may also blemish the reputation of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for a 2018 peace pact with Eritrea and had won plaudits for opening Ethiopia’s economy and easing a repressive political system.
“There is a risk this situation will spiral totally out of control,” U.N. rights chief Michelle Bachelet said.
A massacre of civilians reported by Amnesty International would amount to war crimes if confirmed it was commiited by one of the belligerent forces, she said.
Abiy accuses the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which rules the mountainous region of more than five million people, of treason and terrorism.
Federal troops say the TPLF rose against them last week but that they have since survived a siege and recaptured the west of the region. With communications cut and media barred, there has been no independent confirmation of the state of the fighting.
The TPLF says Abiy’s government has persecuted Tigrayans and purged them from positions since he took office in April 2018, replacing a TPLF-led coalition in which he had served as a minister and head of a cyber security unit.
It terms the offensive an “invasion”.
Federal troops have been carrying out air strikes and there has been fighting on the ground since Wednesday of last week.
Nov 13,2020:Morocco says its troops have launched an operation in a no man’s land on the southern border of Western Sahara to end “provocations” by the pro-independence Polisario Front.
Rabat on Friday said its troops would “put a stop to the blockade” of trucks travelling between Moroccan-controlled areas of the disputed territory and neighbouring Mauritania, and “restore free circulation of civilian and commercial traffic”.
The Polisario Front on Monday warned that it would regard a three-decade-old ceasefire with Morocco as over if Rabat moved troops or civilians into the buffer zone on the Mauritanian border.
It warned that “the entry of any Moroccan military, security or civil entity” into the Guerguerat buffer zone “will be considered as a flagrant aggression to which the Sahrawi side will respond vigorously in self-defence and to defend its national sovereignty”.
“This will also mean the end of the ceasefire and the beginning of a new war across the region,” the Polisario Front said.
Guerguerat is located on the southern coast of the disputed Western Sahara, along the road leading to Mauritania, some 380km (235 miles) north of Nouakchott, a buffer zone patrolled by a United Nations’ peacekeeping force.
Last week, around 200 Moroccan truck drivers appealed to Moroccan and Mauritanian authorities for help, saying they were stranded on the Mauritanian side of the border near Guerguerat.
In a statement carried by the Mauritanian news agency Alwiam, the produce truck drivers said they were returning from Mauritania and sub-Saharan Africa but “militias affiliated with separatists” had stopped them from crossing.
In recent weeks, Moroccan media outlets said Sahrawi separatists had set up roadblocks and stopped passage across the border. Al Jazeera could not independently verify the reports.
The UN also cited isolated incidents at Guerguerat in a recent report.
What is the conflict about?
Western Sahara, a vast swath of desert on Africa’s Atlantic coast, is a disputed former Spanish colony.
Rabat controls 80 percent of the territory, including its phosphate deposits and its fishing waters.
Morocco, which maintains that Western Sahara is an integral part of the kingdom, has offered autonomy but insists it will retain sovereignty.
The Algeria-backed Polisario Front, which fought a war for independence from 1975 to 1991, demands a referendum on self-determination.
The two sides signed a ceasefire in September 1991 under the aegis of the UN after 16 years of war, but the planned referendum has been repeatedly postponed due to a dispute between Rabat and the Polisario over the composition of the electorate and the status of the territory.
Negotiations on Western Sahara involving Morocco, the Polisario, Algeria and Mauritania have remained suspended for several months.
AMSTERDAM ,Nov 13,2020: Tata Steel will split its Dutch and British steel operations with immediate effect, as it is looking to sell the Dutch arm, a source close to the company told Reuters on Friday.
Swedish steelmaker SSAB earlier on Friday confirmed it is in discussions with Tata Steel Group over the potential acquisition of the IJmuiden steel mill in the Netherlands and related downstream assets.
Washington [US], November 13 ,2020: Hours after US President Donald Trump repeated a report claiming that a voting machine system had deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide, he was directly contradicted by a group of federal, state and local election officials, who issued a statement on Thursday saying that the election was the most secure in American history and there was no evidence of any voting system getting compromised.
In a statement by a coordinating council overseeing the voting systems used around the country, the rebuke never mentioned Trump by name, but it amounted to remarkable corrective to a wave of disinformation that Trump has been pushing across his Twitter feed, reported New York Times.
The statement was distributed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is responsible for helping states secure the voting process.
Across the country, election officials have said the vote came off smoothly, with no reports of systemic fraud in any state, no sign of foreign interference in the voting infrastructure, and no hardware or software failures beyond the episodic glitches that can happen in any election.
Earlier, the US President had quoted a report, which claimed that Dominion Voting Systems deleted his votes nationwide, and that several votes were switched from Trump to US President-elect Joe Biden.
Washington , November 13,2020: US President-elect Joe Biden has narrowly won Arizona, capturing the state’s 11 electoral votes and strengthening his Electoral College margin, while President Donald Trump has not yet conceded defeat in the presidential elections, reported New York Times.
The Arizona victory brings Biden to 290 electoral votes, 20 more than required to clinch the White House.
The President-elect’s margin is currently about 11,000 votes, or 0.3 per cent. Biden is the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state since former President Bill Clinton in 1996. Four years ago, Trump had won the state by 3.5 percentage points.
According to New York Times, Biden’s win underscored a profound political shift in Arizona, a longtime Republican bastion that has lurched left in recent years, fueled by rapidly evolving demographics and a growing contingent of young Hispanic voters championing liberal policies.
Meanwhile, Republicans have been mounting legal attempts for a recount in key battleground states.
The Trump campaign has filed a lawsuit in Arizona, alleging that poll workers in the state’s largest county, Maricopa, improperly pressured voters to enter their vote in a way that would incorrectly reject votes.
Biden on Saturday became the President-elect of the United States after victory in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, which took him past the electoral college threshold of 270 votes.
He defeated President Donald Trump in a closely contested election to become the 46th president of the United States.
New Delhi, Nov 13,2020: A High Level Committee (HLC), under the chairmanship of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, has approved additional Central assistance of Rs 4,381.88 crore to six states under the National Disaster Response Fund (NDRF) to six states, which were affected by cyclone, floods, landslides during this year, the Home Ministry officials said here on Friday.
While the West Bengal gets Rs 2,707.77, the state of Odisha has been given Rs.128.23 crore for cyclone Amphan, Maharashtra gets Rs 268.59 crore to deal with the impact of cyclone Nisarga.
Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Sikkim have also been given central assistance to deal with the destruction caused by the floods and landslides during the South-West monsoon and Rs 611.61 crore for Madhya Pradesh, Rs 577.84 crore have been approved for Karnataka and Rs 87.84 crore for Sikkim.
Aftermath of the cyclone Amphan, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi had visited the affected states of West Bengal and Odisha on May 22 this year and as announced by the Prime Minister, the financial assistance of Rs 1,000 crore to West Bengal and Rs 500 crore to Odisha were released immediately on May 23.
In addition to this, the Prime Minister Modi had also announced Rs two lakh ex-gratia for the next of kin of the dead and Rs 50,000 for the injured, which was over and above the ex-gratia provided through the State Disaster Response Fund (SDRF) and the NDRF.
In all the six states, the Central Government had deputed Inter-Ministerial Central Teams (IMCTs) immediately after the calamities, without waiting for the receipt of Memorandum from the affected State Governments, a senior official in the Ministry said.
So far, in the financial year 2020-21, till date, the Central Government has released Rs 15,524.43 crore to 28 States from the SDRF, the official added.
Nov 12,2020:After being elected leader of the Mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) on Thursday, Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Tejashwi Yadav asked the Election Commission on Thursday to release videos and other documentary evidence on counting of postal ballots in 20 seats where the alliance candidates lost by a margin of less than 200 votes.
“We lost about 20 seats where irregularities were resorted to in counting postal ballots and our candidates’ queries were not heard by the Election Commission…we’ve won 130 seats and the mandate was in our favour, but the Election Commission’s results were declared in favour of NDA,” Mr. Yadav told mediapersons in Patna.
CPI(ML) leader Dipankar Bhattacharya blamed the Congress party for the “dismal performance” of the Mahagathbandhan.
Congress leader Tariq Anwar admitted that had the party performed like the RJD and the Left, there would have been a Mahagathbandhan government. “Our performance was not as good… they performed better than us.”
WASHINGTON Nov 12,2020: Georgia will re-count all paper ballots cast in the Nov. 3 presidential election by hand, the state’s top election official said on Wednesday, a mammoth task that must be completed by Nov. 20.
Democrat Joe Biden secured more than the 270 Electoral College votes needed to gain the presidency on Saturday by winning Pennsylvania after four tense days of counting, delayed by a surge in mail-in ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic. Adding Georgia would only add to Biden’s margin of victory.
Republican President Donald Trump has refused to concede defeat and has said – without citing evidence – that the voting was marred by fraud.
The vote count in Georgia showed Biden ahead of Trump by just 14,101 votes out of some 5 million across the state. With the margin so small, a recount is needed, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said at a news conference.
“You actually have to do a full hand-by-hand recount of all because the margin is so close,” Raffensperger said. “We want to start this before the week is up.”
“People will be working lots of overtime over the next coming weeks,” he said.
Officials will work in pairs, sorting stacks of ballots into piles and counting them under the watch of observers from both political parties, Raffensperger said. The piles will include ballots cast in person and by mail, he said.
“That’s how it’s going to be all the way through, and you’re going to tally it all up. It’s a big process,” he said.
The scale of the endeavour is such that if counting takes place round-the-clock, officials will have to count more than 23,000 ballots an hour in the nine days before the deadline for the results to be certified.
A study by the non-partisan group Fair Vote found that out of 31 statewide recounts between 2000 and 2019, the outcome changed in only three of them. More often, the winner won by a tiny bit more. On average, they shifted the outcome by 0.024%, Fair Vote found – a much smaller margin than Trump would need. Biden currently leads Trump in Georgia by 49.5% to 49.2%.
Georgia’s two U.S. senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both Republicans, on Monday called on Raffensperger, who is also a Republican, to resign over his management of the election. They presented no evidence of fraud, however.
California [US], November 12,2020: While asthma has become a matter of concern for Americans as every day, ten Americans die from the attack, researchers at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI), in a breakthrough study, have discovered that blocking two immune molecules at the same time is key to preventing asthma attacks in a mouse model.
“We have found a way to block the acute asthmatic inflammatory response–and we saw a strong, long-lasting reduction in asthma exacerbations,” says Michael Croft, Ph.D., professor at LJI and senior author of the new study, published November 5, 2020, in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
When a person with allergies encounters an asthma trigger, harmful T cells boost their numbers in the lungs and release molecules that cause inflammation. The new study shows how to throw a wrench in this process.
For the study, the Croft Lab focused on blocking OX40L and CD30L, which are signalling proteins similar to tumour necrosis factor (TNF), a protein that is the target of several FDA approved drugs. These molecules are upregulated by allergens and can activate the harmful T cells that drive inflammation in asthma.
In the new study, Croft and his colleagues worked with a mouse model sensitive to house dust mites–a very common allergy and asthma trigger. The scientists showed that blocking OX40L and CD30L at the same time could stop the expansion and accumulation of harmful T cells in the lungs during an allergen attack, and this then led to reduced inflammation.
“The combination of taking out the two sets of signals allowed for a strong reduction in the number of those pathogenic T cells, whereas only neutralising either one had a relatively mild effect,” says Croft. “That was quite a significant finding.”
Importantly, blocking both OX40L and CD30L also reduced the number of pathogenic T cells that lingered in the lungs following the asthma attack. These “memory” T cells would normally drive inflammation when a person encounters an allergen again. Without OX40L and CD30L on the job, very few of these harmful T cells stuck around in the lungs, and mice had a weaker response to house dust mites for weeks after the initial treatment.
“This suggests we were diminishing the immune memory of the allergen,” Croft says.
This study comes several years after an ineffective clinical trial targeting OX40L. Previous research by the Croft lab and other researchers had suggested that blocking signalling from OX40L could reduce airway inflammation, yet a neutralizing antibody against OX40L did not have a beneficial effect in asthmatic patients with house dust mite or cat allergies.
“Why did it fail?” asks Croft. “The new study supports the idea that simply blocking OX40L was not enough.”
The research sheds light on the complexity of the immune system and suggests that long-lasting therapy of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases may require a multi-pronged targeting approach, especially when trying to limit the number of pathogenic T cells that are the central drivers of these diseases.
A combination therapeutic to block both molecules would be complicated to test (researchers would need to prove the safety of blocking each separately) but Croft thinks either dual antibodies or a “bi-specific” reagent could work to block OX40L and CD30L signalling together in a single treatment.
Croft is now thinking of the next steps for his lab. Blocking OX40L and CD30L reduced memory T cells but didn’t eliminate all of them. Croft thinks additional target molecules could be out there.
“We’re trying to understand what those molecules might be,” says Croft.