July 25,2022:Ukraine said it has used US-supplied HIMARS rocket systems to destroy 50 Russian ammunition depots since receiving the weapons last month, while Russia has claimed its forces destroyed a HIMARS ammunition depot in Ukraine’s Khmelnytskyi region.
Moscow has previously said it has destroyed several of the high mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS) supplied to Ukraine by the West, in claims denied by Kyiv.
On Monday, Ukraine’s defence minister Oleksiy Reznikov underlined the growing impact that the HIMARS appear to be having as Ukraine tries to repel Russia’s invasion.
“This cuts their [Russian] logistical chains and takes away their ability to conduct active fighting and cover our armed forces with heavy shelling,” Reznikov said in comments on national television.
Reznikov’s remarks could not be independently verified. Russia did not immediately comment on the claims.
Reznikov said Ukrainian artillery crews had conducted “precise” attacks on several bridges. He gave no details but was apparently referring to three river crossings in the Russian-occupied Kherson region, which local occupation authorities say were attacked by HIMARS over the past week.
July 23,2022:The World Health Organization on Saturday declared monkeypox a public health emergency of international concern, a designation reserved for the most serious global disease outbreaks.
That puts monkeypox on the same list as six other outbreaks with the same WHO label since 2007: Covid-19, Zika, H1N1 flu, polio and Ebola, which has been designated an emergency twice.
The WHO decision came after an emergency committee convened on Thursday to assess the spread of monkeypox and determine the severity of its threat.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made the decision to issue the declaration despite a lack of consensus among experts serving on the U.N. health agency’s emergency committee. It was the first time the chief of the U.N. health agency has taken such an action.
“We have an outbreak that has spread around the world rapidly through new modes of transmission about which we understand too little and which meets the criteria in the international health regulations,” Tedros said.
“I know this has not been an easy or straightforward process and that there are divergent views among the members” of the committee, he added.
The world has seen more than 16,500 monkeypox cases so far this year in 68 countries where the disease is not endemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. alone has recorded more than 2,500 cases since May, though that’s almost certainly an undercount.
For a disease outbreak to qualify as an international public health emergency, it must be an “extraordinary event” that poses a health risk to more than one country and may require an immediate, coordinated international response, according to the WHO.
The same emergency committee decided last month that monkeypox didn’t yet meet those standards, though Tedros said a few committee members “expressed differing views.” At the time, more than 4,000 monkeypox cases had been reported globally across 47 countries and territories.
Vaccines could help curb transmission
Monkeypox spreads through close physical contact, including kissing or sexual contact, as well as through respiratory droplets and contaminated items like clothing or bedding.
Anyone who has been in close contact with a monkeypox patient can get infected, but since the start of the outbreak, cases have been largely concentrated among men who have sex with men.
“Although I am declaring a public health emergency of international concern for the moment, this is an outbreak that is concentrated among men who have sex with men, especially those with multiple sexual partners,” Tedros said. “That means that this is an outbreak that can be stopped with the right strategies in the right groups.”
Most people with monkeypox develop a rash, according to WHO. For some, the rash may be hard to spot — just one or two lesions — while others can develop widespread lesions. In this outbreak so far, the rashes have often been found around the genital and anal region, on the face, or on the palms of hands and soles of feet. Some people may also get lesions inside the mouth, throat, vagina and anus.
Symptoms like fever, swollen lymph nodes, headaches, muscle aches, back pain and fatigue sometimes follow a rash.
In Europe and the U.S., health authorities are relying on increased vaccination and testing to reduce transmission and prevent monkeypox from becoming endemic.
As of last week, the U.S. had distributed 156,000 doses of the Jynneos vaccine to states and ramped up testing capacity to 70,000 tests per week. Many cities and states are offering vaccine doses to people with known or presumed exposure to the virus, including men who have sex with men and transgender, gender nonconforming or nonbinary residents with multiple sexual partners.
The European Commission’s Health Emergency Preparedness and Response department said Monday that it had delivered 25,000 vaccine doses to six member states. The U.K.’s National Health Service is also offering doses to close contacts of monkeypox patients with a high risk of exposure, on a case by case basis.
Research suggests that the Jynneos vaccine might prevent monkeypox if given within four days of exposure, meaning it could keep cases from climbing if more people get access to shots.
New Delhi,July 18,2022:Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar will brief leaders of various political parties on the Sri Lankan crisis during an all-party meeting on Tuesday, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pralhad Joshi said on Sunday.
During a meeting of all parties convened ahead of the Monsoon Session of Parliament, Tamil Nadu-based DMK and AIADMK demanded that India should intervene in the crisis surrounding the neighbouring country, Sri Lanka, which is facing a debilitating economic crisis. Both DMK and AIADMK raised the Sri Lankan issue, especially the condition of the country’s Tamil population.
Talking to reporters after the meeting, AIADMK leader M Thambidurai said India should intervene to resolve the crisis in Sri Lanka.
DMK leader T R Baalu also demanded India’s intervention in addressing the situation confronting the island nation.
Briefing reporters after the meeting, Union minister Joshi said the government would hold an all-party meeting on the Sri Lanka situation on Tuesday which will be chaired by union ministers Sitharaman and Jaishankar.
ROME,July 15,2022: Italy might need early elections to overcome a political impasse, government officials said on Friday, after Prime Minister Mario Draghi tendered his resignation in the wake of a mutiny by a coalition partner.
President Sergio Mattarella rejected Draghi’s resignation on Thursday and asked him to address parliament next week to get a clearer picture of the political situation.
If unity cannot return swiftly to government ranks, the only alternative would be for an election to be called in the autumn, Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio said, warning that an early vote would be welcomed by Russia, but would damage Italy’s economy.
“If Draghi falls, we vote,” he told RTL radio, adding that without a fully functioning government in the coming months, Italy would risk losing billions of euros in European Union post-pandemic recovery funds and not be able to enact measures to combat the high energy costs”.
Draghi’s 18-month-old government was thrown into turmoil by the populist 5-Star Movement, which boycotted a parliamentary confidence motion on Thursday on Draghi’s plans to tackle the growing cost of living, arguing they did not go far enough.
Critics say the party, which was torn apart by a schism last month, was acting merely out of self interest, anxious to raise its profile with voters following a slump in the opinion polls.
The risks of political chaos has unnerved financial markets with the premium Italy pays over German debt rising to a one-month high on Friday.
EUROPEAN CREDIBILITY
A national election is due in the first half of 2023 and bringing the vote forward would give parties little time to draw up manifestos and prepare their lists of candidates.
However, a source in the prime minister’s office, who declined to be named, expressed pessimism over the prospects of reviving the coalition and said the most likely outcome was a vote in early October.
In that case Draghi could stay on in a caretaker capacity, but would not be able to draw up budget for 2023 or enact reforms demanded by Europe in return for the recovery funds.
July 14,2022:Sri Lankans are waiting for the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a day after he fled to the Maldives to escape a popular uprising against an economic crisis blamed on his government’s mismanagement.
Rajapaksa has landed in Singapore on a Saudi airplane, although his final destination remains unclear. He has not requested asylum, Singapore officials said.
Protesters have gathered in front of Sri Lanka’s embassy in New Delhi, in solidarity with demonstrators in Sri Lanka.
Singapore’s foreign ministry has said President Rajapaksa had been allowed to enter the city-state on a private visit.
It said he has not asked for asylum and neither has he been granted asylum.
Parliament will not meet tomorrow
Parliament will not meet on Friday, the chamber’s speaker has said.
The speaker had previously said that parliament would meet to stay on schedule to accept nominations for a new president on Monday of next week, with an election to be held on Wednesday.
However, President Rajapaksa has yet to submit his official letter of resignation after reportedly relocating from the Maldives to Singapore.
July 12,2022:US President Joe Biden has unveiled the first full-colour image of the cosmos taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, offering what NASA said was “the deepest, sharpest infrared view of the universe” ever taken.
During a ceremony at the White House on Monday evening, Biden said it was “an historic day” as the world’s largest and most powerful space science telescope offered a “new window into the history of our universe”.
“Today we’re going to get a glimpse at the first light to shine through that window,” Biden said shortly before the release of the image, which showed bright white, yellow and orange lights that NASA said represented “galaxies once invisible to us”.
“Light from other worlds, orbiting stars far beyond our own,” Biden said. “The oldest-documented light in the history of the universe from over 13 billion – let me say that again – 13 billion years ago.”
The image will be followed on Tuesday by the release of four more galactic beauty shots from the telescope’s initial outward gazes.
“We’re going to give humanity a new view of the cosmos,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters last month in a briefing. “And it’s a view that we’ve never seen before.”
The $9bn Webb observatory, named after the man who ran NASA during the Apollo space programme that put humans on the moon in the 1960s, was designed to peer through the cosmos to the dawn of the known universe, ushering in a revolutionary era of astronomical discovery.
It soared off from French Guiana on South America’s northeastern coast on December 25, 2021, before reaching its final destination 1.6 million kilometres (one million miles) from Earth less than a month later. NASA is collaborating on Webb with the European and Canadian space agencies.
The highly anticipated release of its first imagery follows a six-month process of remotely unfurling Webb’s various components, aligning its mirrors and calibrating instruments.
With Webb now finely tuned and fully focused, scientists will embark on a competitively selected list of missions exploring the evolution of galaxies, the life cycles of stars, the atmospheres of distant exoplanets and the moons of our outer solar system.
Built to view its subjects chiefly in the infrared spectrum, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which operates mainly at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
Hubble has stared as far back as 13.4 billion years. It found the light wave signature of an extremely bright galaxy in 2016. Astronomers measure how far back they look in light years, with one light year being 9.5 trillion kilometres (5.9 trillion miles).
“Webb can see backwards in time to just after the Big Bang by looking for galaxies that are so far away that the light has taken many billions of years to get from those galaxies to our telescopes,” said Jonathan Gardner, Webb’s deputy project scientist during a recent briefing.
The much larger light-collecting surface of Webb’s primary mirror – an array of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal – enables it to observe objects at greater distances, thus further back in time, than Hubble or any other telescope.
All five of Webb’s introductory targets were previously known to scientists.
Among them are two enormous clouds of gas and dust blasted into space by stellar explosions to form incubators for new stars – the Carina Nebula and the Southern Ring Nebula, each thousands of light years away from Earth.
The collection also includes two very different sets of galaxy clusters. One of those, Stephan’s Quintet, was first identified in 1877 and encompasses several galaxies described by NASA as “locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters”.
The other is a much more recent discovery dubbed SMACS 0723, featuring objects in the foreground so massive that they act as “gravitational lenses”, a visual distortion of space that greatly magnifies the light coming from behind them to expose even fainter objects farther away and further back in time.
How far back and what showed up on camera remains to be seen.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s science mission chief, recently told reporters that with the new telescope, the cosmos is “giving up secrets that had been there for many, many decades, centuries, millennia”.
“It’s not an image. It’s a new world view that you’re going to see,” he said.