Yangon – “It is a campaign of civil disobedience and peaceful protest involving citizens of all cultures, races and religions. Today people did not go to work and boycotted public services and offices. People took to the streets with the three fingers raised to symbolize the condemnation of the military coup and to demand a return to democracy”, said Joseph Kung Za Hmung from Burma to Fides, editor of the Burmese Catholic newspaper “Gloria News Journal” in a comment on the day of protest in Yangon, where on February 8th the now continuing noise of pots and cans could be heard and red curtains, shirts and tablecloths hung at the windows, as a sign of non-violent dissent.
People took to the streets and not only in the former capital where, according to local observers, an estimated 700,000 people were taking part in the demonstrations in various major cities in the country at noon. It is the third consecutive day that there are street protests in Yangon, Mandalay, Naypyidaw and in other cities in the country where activists, doctors, teachers, young and old, women and men, ordinary people, even monks and Christian leaders are present. Joseph Kung Za Hmung states that “the Archbishop of Mandalay, Mgr. Marco Tin Win and some of his priests joined the demonstrators and greeted them with the symbol of the three fingers raised. In addition to Buddhist monks, there are also Christian nuns and lay people. It is a great encouragement, the country is united. Many religious leaders prayed together. It is a non-violent interfaith movement”.
The demonstrators put up posters asking for justice, the end of the military coup and of course the release of those arrested, especially the leader of the League for Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi, and President Win Myant, who was overthrown by the military council on February 1st.
However, the military junta, announced on TV that a “crackdown” will be implemented to “enforce order and security”.
The list of political prisoners, drawn up today by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, contains 137 detainees, of whom only 13 have so far been released. At the top of the list are Suu Kyi and the president, who are accused of “illegally importing transmission devices” and “violating anti-Covid regulations” during the election campaign. The indictment allows the judicial authorities to keep them in prison, but it seems paradoxical that the military junta allegedly wants to guarantee a “legal” trial when in fact it has the power to arbitrate the fate of the detainees.
Meanwhile, Aung San Suu Kyi’s attorney denied rumors that she was arrested for “high treason,” which would involve very severe sentences. The leaders of the National League for Democracy and President Win Myant are under house arrest and it is not clear whether the two will be allowed to stay at home or put in jail ahead of the hearing, due to take place in a court in the capital on February 15.
Their release was also requested by the UN Security Council.
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Drinks Giant Kirin Cuts Ties with Myanmar Military After Coup
Click to expand Image
Plastic crates containing Kirin brand beer at the Kirin Brewery Co. factory in Yokohama, Japan, June 2019.
© 2019 REUTERS/Issei Kato
Nearly one week after Myanmar’s military seized control of the government in a coup, it is facing a long-overdue consequence.
On February 5, Japanese beverage giant Kirin Holdings Company, Ltd announced it would “terminate” its partnership with Myanmar Economic Holdings Public Company Limited (MEHL), the country’s military-owned conglomerate. Kirin described the military’s “recent actions” as against the company’s “standards and Human Rights policy.” Kirin said it would be “taking steps as a matter of urgency to put this termination into effect.”
For years, Kirin has been widely criticized for owning two joint ventures with MEHL. Even after the military carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya Muslim-minority population in 2017, killing thousands and forcing 750,000 to flee to neighboring Bangladesh, Kirin continued with business as usual. Organizations including Human Rights Watch repeatedly called on Kirin to cut ties or else it would continue to drag its reputation through the mud as its partnership with MEHL helped fund the military’s grave rights violations.
Kirin should not have waited until the arrests of de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint, and other elected officials to determine that doing business with an abusive military is an extremely high risk to both human rights and its global standing. Nonetheless, considering that Kirin’s joint ventures Myanmar Brewery and Mandalay Brewery dominate the beer market in Myanmar, its move should set the ball rolling toward a global effort, called on by the United Nations-backed Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar in 2019, to financially isolate the Myanmar military and weaken its ability to commit further atrocities.
Japanese businesses and government-owned entities participating in projects with military ties in Myanmar should immediately re-evaluate their involvement and suspend commercial relationships until the military is removed from economic and political spheres and brought under civilian control. The Japanese government should also assess its policies more broadly and prevent companies from partnering with abusive actors in Myanmar and elsewhere. Otherwise, the commitments it has laid out in its five-year National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights will be meaningless.
Myanmar Faces Increasing Uncertainty as Opposition to the Military Coup Grows

A protestor in Myanmar holding up the three-finger salute of opposition to military dictatorship from the film “Hunger Games” which was popularised by the democracy protests in Hong Kong and Thailand. Courtesy: CC BY-SA 4.0
By Larry Jagan
BANGKOK, Feb 8 2021 (IPS)
Myanmar is in a deep political crisis. Over the past week — reminiscent of the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1988 — Myanmar’s citizens are openly and publicly challenging the country’s powerful military, whose coup earlier this month now threatens to stifle the country’s fledgling democracy.
Since the weekend, thousands of people have come out onto the streets in most of the country’s major cities in defiance of the military authorities: noisily opposing the coup and demanding that Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), which overwhelmingly won the November election, be allowed to form a civilian government.
These demonstrations of support for democracy are growing daily with thousands and thousands across Myanmar voicing their rejection of the military coup.
It is like 33 years ago when millions of students, civil servants, workers and Buddhist monks took to the streets demanding democracy. Those protests provoked the military to seize power in a coup in September that year.
Again, the future of the country’s transition to democracy has reached a critical crossroads. After weeks of tension between the military and the elected civilian government of Suu Kyi, the Commander-in-Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing seized power in a military coup on Feb. 1 and assumed all government powers – of the executive, judiciary and the legislature – for 12 months after which fresh elections would be held and power transferred to the winner.
Protests started with noise & via social media
People spontaneously started to demonstrate their opposition to the coup by creating a cacophony of noise – beating drums, banging, blowing trumpets and singing in unison every night at 8pm. Since then the ‘banging brigade’ has got louder and louder, as the country’s main urban centres come to a standstill and all that can be heard is the rhythmic sound of the beating of pots and pans all showing their opposition to the military and support for Suu Kyi.
“Most people in Myanmar support the ideals of democracy and want the army to withdraw from politics permanently,” Shwe Yee Myint Saw, who has joined the street protests almost every day from when they started on the weekend, told IPS.
The vast majority of those who have taken to the streets are under the age of 30. “You see the youth of this country understand what we lost in 30 years of military misrule, and we can’t afford a repeat of that.”
Peaceful protest in #Myanmar . #HearTheVoiceOfMyanmar #SaveDemocracy pic.twitter.com/WN0e98ehdU
— khant thaw (@akthaw) February 7, 2021
As in 1988, the charismatic pro-democracy icon Suu Kyi – and leader of the NLD — is at the centre of the movement. She was detained last Monday, Feb. 1, when the military launched their coup and arrested her in an early morning raid. She remains under house arrest and has been charged for possession of illegally imported radios that were used without permission – six walkie-talkie radios were found in the search of her home after she was arrested. If convicted it would bar her from contesting any future elections, including those the military have promised to hold later next year.
Most of the country’s civilian leaders were also detained in these dawn raids. This included all key politicians, regional chief ministers, government ministers, the top leadership of the governing NLD, most national and local members of parliament, and hundreds of pro-democracy and human rights activists. Many of them have been released since and effectively sent home to house arrest.
In the past week the opposition to the coup has built momentum and a concerted campaign of civil disobedience grew through the use of social media.
“We have digital power, so we’ve been using this to oppose the military junta ever since the start of the coup,” human rights activist Thinzar Shunlei Yi, who is one of the main organisers of the ‘Civil Disobedience Movement’ which has taken Myanmar by storm since the coup, told IPS. “And we must continue to use it: to seek an immediate end to this culture of coups.”
Banks reopened in Yangon, Myanmar on February 2 after closing the day before. Credit: IPS / Yangon stringer
Health workers went on strike
The social media protests quickly snowballed into a civil disobedience campaign initiated by the country’s health workers. The day after the coup, the country’s health workers galvanised public resistance to the military by refusing to work under a military government.
“It isn’t that we don’t care about our patients – we certainly do — but we can’t work under a military government again,” Dr Mya Oo, a doctor at Mandalay General Hospital who went on strike the first day, told IPS. “We all feel we must do everything we can to stop this bullying and preserve our democracy.”
Support for the opposition movement has grown enormously ever since, affecting hospitals, schools and other government offices. Although the doctors and nurses in the two main cities of Mandalay and Yangon took the lead — refusing to work and gathering outside their hospital to protest against the military coup — it quickly grew to government ministries, schools and universities throughout Myanmar.
Pictures can be seen of staff congregating together in uniform, wearing the red ribbon of protest, and defiantly holding up the three-finger salute of opposition to military dictatorship from the film “Hunger Games” – popularised in the democracy protests in Hong Kong and Thailand. There has also been a flood of resignations from government posts.
Civilians on the street
It culminated over the weekend, when the campaigners took to the streets to demonstrate their anger at the coup and its leaders. Their main grievance is the army’s seizure of power has effectively annulled the results of last November’s election which Suu Kyi and the NLD convincingly won.
“We voted for Aung San Suu Kyi and now the military are trying to steal this election from us and put us under their harsh controlling power like before,” Sandar, a young university graduate, told IPS. “We won’t stand for it: we have tasted democratic freedom and we know it’s the only way for our country to develop,” she said.
In most urban centres across the country, there are massive demonstrations of support for Suu Kyi demanding the military respect the election results. More and more civil servants are joining the movement. And now there are calls for a general strike.
“The ‘civil disobedience movement’ is a non-violent campaign – started by young doctors across the country which has inspired everyone and has grown into a mass protest involving all sectors of society,” Thinzar Shunlei Yi told IPS.
Suu Kyi is believed to have signalled her support for the movement in messages from her house arrest in the capital Naypyidaw, according to senior party officials. Late last week the NLD central executive committee released a statement supporting the current Civil Disobedience Movement.
“In order to take back the country’s sovereignty – invested in the people — and restore democracy, all the people of Myanmar people should support this political resistance movement — in a peaceful and non-violence way,” the statement read.
So far the authorities have been powerless to stem the movement. But as the momentum grows there are increasing fears of a major confrontation between the peaceful protestors and the security forces.
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The post Myanmar Faces Increasing Uncertainty as Opposition to the Military Coup Grows appeared first on Inter Press Service.
Three-finger salute: Hunger Games symbol adopted by Myanmar protesters

The gesture was first used after a coup in Thailand in 2014 and has since come to stand for solidarity and resistance across the region
A three-fingered salute that originated in the Hunger Games film series has been adopted by activists from Thailand to Myanmar, becoming a symbol of resistance and solidarity for democracy movements across south-east Asia.
The gesture, along with popular online memes repurposed as protest signs, are part of a suite of symbols adopted from global popular culture by a new generation of young activists reared on the internet and savvy about making their struggles resonate with audiences abroad.
Covid deaths of Yanomami children fuel fears for Brazil’s indigenous groups
Ten Yanomami children died from Covid-19 in January, fueling fears over the disproportionate impact the coronavirus is having on vulnerable indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon.
“It is very concerning that so many kids died in less than one month,” said Júnior Hekurari Yanomami, the head of Condisi-YY, an indigenous health council.

Health ministry sends team to investigate ‘concerning’ virus cases in Yanomami territory near Venezuelan border
Ten Yanomami children died from Covid-19 in January, fueling fears over the disproportionate impact the coronavirus is having on vulnerable indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon.
“It is very concerning that so many kids died in less than one month,” said Júnior Hekurari Yanomami, the head of Condisi-YY, an indigenous health council.
‘This has to end peacefully’: California’s Punjabi farmers rally behind India protests

In northern California, home to a large Punjabi population, residents join backlash against laws ‘shoved down people’s throats’
Sukhcharan Singh grows walnuts in Yuba City, California, about 40 miles north of Sacramento. Like many Sikh farmers in this small Central Valley city, Singh’s thoughts are occupied by the ongoing protests in India.
“I lose sleep over this. When I was there, it was a poor country, yes, but it was a good country,” said Singh, 68, flipping through notes he has taken on the latest news out of India. “Last night I finally slept at 11.30.”
Older and disabled Texans are demanding their home caregivers be vaccinated for COVID-19. But many workers don’t want it.
Vaccinate or look for a new job.
Houston health care worker Rachel Fuentes says she will wait to get the vaccine “as long as I can push it off.”
Credit: Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune
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Houston home health caregiver Rachel Fuentes is struggling between her need to stay employed and her fear of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Fuentes, 43, worries that her employer will make vaccinations mandatory, or that she won’t find clients who will let her care for them if she’s unvaccinated.
One of her co-workers, a 33-year-old, is already facing that reality: The assisted living facility where her client lives has said that if she’s not vaccinated by May 1, she won’t be allowed in.
Both women say they are more afraid of the injection than of catching COVID-19, which both say they have staved off by following safety protocols for a year.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. Health care is all I’ve known,” said the 33-year-old, who asked to remain anonymous because she fears backlash from people who know her and because she hasn’t told the older man she cares for that she will probably have to stop caring for him.
Like other home health agencies across the state, the women’s employers at Encore Caregivers in Houston are trying to navigate a growing dilemma: Their clients want home-based caregivers to be vaccinated against COVID-19, but they fear that they soon won’t have enough workers who are vaccinated to meet the demand.
“It’s starting to rear its head,” said Marilou Schopper, owner of Encore, which has more than 100 caregivers on staff. She said 10% of her staff has been vaccinated, and others have plans to be.
Home health and personal care aides help seniors and Texans with disabilities or debilitating illnesses to remain in their homes rather than move into a facility — which most prefer to avoid, according to government studies.
The caregivers are in the state’s 1A priority group for front-line health workers but are struggling to get access to vaccines because most aren’t affiliated with a state-approved vaccine provider like a hospital or nursing home.
In addition to lack of access, national surveys indicate that at least one-third are hesitant to take the vaccine, though those numbers appear to be decreasing, agency owners say. Researchers say that the main issues are distrust in the level of research on the vaccine and fear of side effects, among others.
Health experts and public officials widely agree that the vaccine is safe. Pfizer and Moderna reported their vaccines are 95% and 94% effective, respectively, at protecting people from serious illness, and while no vaccine is without side effects, clinical trials for both Pfizer and Moderna show serious reactions are rare.
Health care worker Rachel Fuentes is not eager to get the COVID-19 vaccine and hopes her current or future clients do not depend on it.
Credit: Annie Mulligan for The Texas Tribune
A similar hesitancy issue is being reported among staff at nursing homes, where education efforts are underway to increase trust in the vaccine, according to reports.
As of May 2019, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported some 300,820 personal care and home health attendants are working in Texas, not including those who are self-employed.
The majority of them, like Fuentes and her co-worker, are women of color, who have been disproportionately affected both by the virus and by its economic fallout.
Patient demand, however, may push more caregivers like Fuentes to overcome their vaccine fears if they have a hard time finding clients.
More than 300,000 Texans are getting care at home or in community-based settings through nearly 6,000 home health companies or through private pay or similar avenues, according to a November 2020 report by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.
If home health agencies start losing clients because they don’t have enough vaccinated health workers, they’ll have to lay off workers, said Darby Anderson, vice chair of the Partnership for Medicaid Home-Based Care, a national advocacy group.
“How will you keep my family safe?”
The only thing fending off a crisis, operators say, is that most clients know there aren’t enough shots to go around, so many aren’t demanding that their caregivers be vaccinated. For now.
“The market is very quickly pushing me towards having COVID-vaccinated staff that I’m going to need to get out to [clients],” said Travis Boldt, director of operations for At Your Side Home Care in Houston, which has about 100 employees. “People are already asking me if I can guarantee that the staff is vaccinated.”
That is certainly true at Atria Senior Living in Houston, which offers assisted living, independent living, memory care and short-term stays for seniors. Its parent company, which operates facilities across the U.S. and runs vaccination clinics for residents in partnership with CVS, set a May 1 deadline for employees and private duty aides to be vaccinated.
“The No. 1 thing residents and family members want to know is, ‘How will you keep my family safe?’” said Kathleen Dixon, vice president at Atria Senior Living. “We believe our residents deserve to live in a vaccinated environment and our employees deserve to work in a vaccinated environment. It’s the responsible thing to do for as many people as possible to be vaccinated, and this includes private and home health aides who serve our residents.”
Lora Roberts’ 84-year-old mother, who has advanced Parkinson’s disease, has been getting hospice care in her Plano home for more than two years and is unable to leave the house to get the vaccine. Roberts is shopping for a new agency that can guarantee her the staff will be vaccinated.
“They come in and out of the home, they go from home to home and they also go from home to nursing home, where we’ve had a horrible pandemic,” Roberts said. “They have not vaccinated their staff. They know I’m mad about it, and I’m looking at taking her out of there.”
If the problem goes unchecked, agencies could lose money and be forced to either scale back their operations or close altogether, which would reduce options for home-based care and potentially push more older Texans into costly residential facilities, Anderson said.
The 33-year-old with the client in the assisted living facility knows that refusing the shot likely means scuttling a career she’s been building since she was a teenager.
“I think it’s cruel to make people choose between keeping their job and getting a vaccine I don’t want to get,” she said.
Hesitancy and demand
In a recent national survey of more than 100 home health providers by the Home Health Care News group, only 10% said there was “universal acceptance” of the vaccine by staff.
The problem is so troubling to the industry that Anderson’s group recently launched a national education campaign called “Be Wise, Immunize” to bring public awareness to home care workers, including testimonials and a website.
Home health workers are mostly women of color, at least half of them live in low-income households, and most have high school diplomas or general equivalency degrees. Research has shown that vaccine hesitancy is higher among people in those demographics.
At Griswold Home Care in San Antonio, administrators surveyed the agency’s 130 field staffers in December to find out how many of them planned to be vaccinated. Fewer than 50 said yes, said spokesperson Ryan McGuire, who said the agency is working to educate and encourage staffers to get the vaccine.
Their efforts, combined with a national trend toward increasing acceptance of the vaccine, seem to be working, he said. At the end of January, he said, more than 100 said they wanted to be vaccinated.
“More people they know are getting it, and they’re getting a little bit more information,” he said. “I think more people are coming around to it.”
At Encore Caregivers, Schopper is collecting testimonials from her staffers who have gotten the vaccine in order to help sell acceptance to her staff. In other outreach, she is actively helping them get vaccination appointments through Houston and Harris County-based programs.
Some of her employees, like Rashidat Falore, didn’t have to be told twice.
“I wanted to do it, at all costs, because I don’t want to catch COVID,” said Falore, 60, a Nigerian immigrant who takes care of an 87-year-old client. “You don’t want to get infected and infect your client. That’s no good. She is vulnerable.”
The next challenge
Most home health workers do not have the same access to the vaccine as their counterparts in hospitals, which are authorized to get vaccine allocations and can vaccinate their own staff on site.
Instead, home health workers frequently must get their shots from public vaccination hubs or through scarce public health programs, an arduous process as demand for vaccines in Texas still far outpaces supply, said Rachel Hammon, executive director for the Texas Association of Home Care and Hospice.
“It’s been unnecessarily challenging, and agencies have been fighting tooth and nail, in every way, trying to piece together places for their employees to go get vaccinated,” Hammon said.
Boldt, the operations director for At Your Side Home Care, said his agency is trying to find a way to help workers get vaccinated, including potentially offering bonuses for time spent getting the shot.
“Getting them the vaccine is really going to be the ultimate solution,” he said.
A simple solution, Hammon said, would be if qualified home health agencies were allowed to administer the shot to their employees and clients — like they already are allowed to do with flu and pneumonia vaccines.
A recent change in federal law appeared to open the door to authorizing home health agencies to administer the COVID-19 vaccine in Texas, where they currently aren’t allowed to do so, Hammon said. But agencies were notified last week by state health officials that they don’t believe it preempts state law.
“It is unconscionable not to look for any possible way to allow for the mobilization of over 30,000 nurses to put shots in the arms of our most vulnerable Texans and the front-line workers who care for them every day,” Hammon said.
A bill in the Texas Legislature would allow this, but it could take months to pass. The bill’s author, state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, said Gov. Greg Abbott should use his emergency powers and allow it temporarily through an executive order.
“Since the state’s political leaders and medical experts are all in agreement that we must vaccinate all willing Texans against COVID-19 as swiftly and efficiently as possible, it should follow that we must do everything possible to make that happen — especially cutting away at red tape preventing health care providers from doing their jobs,” Howard said. “An executive order from the governor is necessary to provide this temporary relief while the Legislature works to provide a permanent solution.”
Meanwhile, home care workers like Fuentes and their employers are waiting to see what will happen in the next few months.
She has some time because her client, a frail 91-year-old, hasn’t asked her to get vaccinated. But she knows that her choice to avoid the shot will, at some point, become a matter of deciding whether to stick to her guns or keep her job.
“I’ll just work with the ones that are willing to work with me,” she said. “I think eventually I will have to get it, but as long as I can push it off, I am.”
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Bitcoin surges above $43,000 to a record after Elon Musk’s Tesla buys $1.5 billion
There seems to be no end to financial manipulation for the profit of a few and the bust ahead… Bunko is bunko!

Tesla revealed a big stake in the digital coin and said it would start accepting payments in bitcoin in exchange for its products.
Moroccan Scientist Lbachir BenMohamed Leads Work on New COVID-19 Vaccine
Moroccan scientist Lbachir BenMohamed is making headlines in the US for working on a universal COVID-19 vaccine — a vaccine that would work on all variants of the coronavirus, even those that have not appeared yet.
At the Institute for Immunology affiliated to the University of California, Irvine, BenMohamed is leading a nine-member research team tasked with developing a universal COVID-19 vaccine.
Moroccan scientist Lbachir BenMohamed is making headlines in the US for working on a universal COVID-19 vaccine — a vaccine that would work on all variants of the coronavirus, even those that have not appeared yet.
At the Institute for Immunology affiliated to the University of California, Irvine, BenMohamed is leading a nine-member research team tasked with developing a universal COVID-19 vaccine.
The vaccine is currently at the stage of preclinical trials, but it is expected to reach clinical tests before the end of 2021.
Lbachir BenMohamed explained during his several appearances on US television channels that the universal COVID-19 vaccine has a similar composition to the vaccines developed by American pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Pfizer.
However, the universal vaccine includes additional ingredients that would allow it to be effective against any possible mutation of the coronavirus in the future.
Another original concept that BenMohamed and his team are working on is the injection method of the vaccine. While all currently-available COVID-19 vaccines are injected through a syringe, the in-development universal vaccine would be administered through a patch, similarly to the widely-available nicotine patches.
Lbachir BenMohamed explained that the main reason behind developing a new method of injection is to overcome the limitations imposed by liquid vaccines.
The Moroccan scientist argued that current vaccines have strict limitations, such as the extremely-low temperatures required during their storage and transportation. The use of patches, meanwhile, would make transporting vaccines significantly easier.
“We could just put the patches in an envelope and send the vaccine anywhere in the world,” BenMohamed told Fox Los Angeles.
The innovative solution aroused the curiosity of American journalists who expressed their eagerness to learn more about the vaccine, as it goes through more development phases.
Modest beginnings
Born in 1968 in a small town near Guelmim, in Morocco’s southern provinces, a young Lbachir BenMohamed would have never thought that he would be making headlines for leading an international research team.
In an interview with Moroccan news outlet Le360, the Moroccan scientist shared how he managed to forge his path towards becoming a highly-acclaimed scientist in the US.
BenMohamed first attended the modest Sidi Ahmed Derkaoui primary school in his hometown, Tagant. As a teenager, he had to travel 40 kilometers to the city of Guelmim to pursue his middle and high school studies.
After earning a high school diploma, BenMohamed enrolled at the Faculty of Sciences affiliated to the Ibn Zohr University in Agadir. In 1984, he was part of the first class to ever study biology and geology at the university.
Five years later, in 1989, BenMohamed obtained a Licence (Bachelor equivalent) in biochemistry. He went on to deepen his knowledge in the field at the University of Paris VII, currently known as the Paris Diderot University, where he obtained a Diploma of Advanced Studies in immunology.
In the 1990s, the Moroccan scientist joined the world-renowned Pasteur Institute in Paris as an intern. He carried most of his research work at the institute until he obtained a Ph.D. in 1997.
Migration to the US
The doctor decided to fly to the US to improve his English language and then return to Paris to continue his post-doctoral research. However, attracted by the quality of research institutions in the US, he decided to stay there.
Lbachir BenMohamed joined the University of California, Irvine, in 2002 as an assistant researcher. He earned several promotions throughout the years and has been, since 2014, a fully-fledged professor at the university.
The universal COVID-19 vaccine is currently the Moroccan immunologist’s top priority. The project has recently received a $4 million grant from the US government to accelerate the vaccine’s development.
The post Moroccan Scientist Lbachir BenMohamed Leads Work on New COVID-19 Vaccine appeared first on Morocco World News.
Tesla Buys $1.5 Billion Worth of Bitcoin, May Accept the Cryptocurrency as Payment in the Future
With Trump out of the way – he wants to con everyone… not gonna happen.

Today in an SEC filing, Tesla disclosed that it has acquired $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin, the popular cryptocurrency. Moreover, the company noted that it may also accept bitcoin in the future as a form of payment for its cars, though it did allow that there is some regulatory uncertainty around that effort. From a report: As the news broke, the price of bitcoin instantly rose by around 7% to more than $40,000 per coin. Tesla had previously telegraphed that it had an interest in the cryptocurrency, however to purchase such a large block of the coin is notable. In its filing, Tesla writes that earlier this year it “updated [its] investment policy to provide [it] with more flexibility to further diversify and maximize returns on [its] cash that is not required to maintain adequate operating liquidity,” adding that it has the option of putting cash into “certain alternative reserve assetsâ that include âoedigital assets, gold bullion, gold exchange-traded funds and other assets as specified in the future.” Under that banner, the firm has “invested an aggregate $1.50 billion in bitcoin,” going on to say that the well-known electric car company “may acquire and hold digital assets from time to time or long-term.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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