Tag Archives: WorldNews

Soldiers fell to their deaths as India and China’s troops fought with rocks

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India shocked by Himalayan border clash in which unarmed troops fought in the dark

The hand-to-hand combat lasted hours, on steep, jagged terrain, with iron bars, rocks and fists. Neither side carried guns. Most of the soldiers killed in the worst fighting between India and China in 60 years lost their footing or were knocked from the narrow Himalayan ridge, plunging to their deaths.

India has reacted with shock and caution to the loss of at least 20 soldiers on its disputed border with China, with images of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, burned in Indian cities even as senior leaders including prime minister Narendra Modi had issued no public comment by Wednesday afternoon in Delhi.

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Dexamethasone may be part of the Covid-19 puzzle but it’s no magic bullet | Devi Sridhar

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If this cheap steroid reduces deaths in critically ill patients that’s great news, and one small step towards managing coronavirus

Right now, we could all use some good news, and it came yesterday in the form of dexamethasone. This cheap steroid could significantly reduce deaths in critically ill Covid-19 patients by one-third for those on ventilators and by one-fifth for those on oxygen alone. The drug appears to stop the damage from the severe immune reaction, called a “cytokine storm”, that researchers increasingly believe is responsible for causing some patients to have multiple organ failure and ultimately die. Had we been able to use dexamethasone from the start of the epidemic in the UK, scientists estimate up to 5,000 lives could have been saved.

Off the back of these results, the NHS has announced that treatment protocols for Covid-19 patients will now include this drug, which is widely and easily available. This will also have a major impact in low- and middle-income countries as, unlike an expensive new patent drug that would be beyond their financial reach, dexamethasone costs just £5 per patient in the UK, and even less in other countries.

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Coronavirus: Chinese firm says its vaccine candidate passes phase two clinical trials

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A potential Chinese Covid-19 vaccine, which has completed phase one and phase two human trials, is generally safe and can an generate immune response in test subjects, the vaccine’s developer, China National Biotec Group, said on Tuesday.The vaccine candidate, developed by a CNBG subsidiary, the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, began human trials in Henan province in April. Volunteers 18 to 59 years old were inoculated with low, medium and high doses and were given a second shot two…

Council votes to keep monuments honouring explorer linked to mass murders

The most barbaric act McMillan is associated with is the massacre at Warrigal Creek in which up to 180 Indigenous men, women and children were shot down in their camp in retribution for the killing of a white man.

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Wellington Shire Council in central Gippsland votes in favour of keeping historical markers honouring explorer Angus McMillan, linked to the mass murders of Gunai Kurnai people.

What made a pastor want to describe white privilege as ‘white blessings’? | Poppy Noor

Words matter, and Giglio’s wording was much more than a “poor word choice”. It was a powerful man trying to rebrand white privilege to make everyday racism more palatable.

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Louie Giglio said his choice of words was poor, but his attempt to rebrand white privilege should also grab our attention

On Monday evening, Atlanta megachurch pastor Louie Giglio apologized for calling slavery a blessing. In an online church service, he was apparently aiming to have an “honest conversation around how racism has plagued our city for generations”.

Then he said: “We understand the curse that was slavery, white people do, and [we] say ‘that was bad’. But we miss the blessing of slavery, that it actually built up the framework for the world that white people live in and lived in.”

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A diabetic immigrant in Ice custody sued for her release. Instead, she got Covid-19

Covid-19 cases in Arizona are rising rapidly after the state opened up last month. The Eloy Detention Center, where Mendoza is housed, is in the midst of its own dramatic surge. Over the past weekend, active Covid-19 cases among Eloy detainees jumped from 21 to 122. At least 60 employees at the facility have tested positive for the virus, according to Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, and one staff member has died from suspected complications from Covid-19.

Mendoza is one of 2,016 detainees nationwide in Ice custody who have tested positive for Covid-19.

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The Arizona detention center where Marisol Mendoza is housed is witnessing a dramatic surge in coronavirus cases

Marisol Mendoza has Covid-19. She’s short of breath, coughs and feels pain in her back and chest. She doesn’t have the energy to stand up or eat much. She’s scared she will die, alone, in an isolation cell of the immigration detention center where she’s been held for the past four years.

“Sometimes I think that Ice wants to release me when I’m dead, because they won’t do it any other way,” the 47-year-old Mexican national told the Guardian over the phone on Monday.

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India and China add to nuclear arsenals in 2020, report says

Not good but other also “modernizing” their holdings – dumb

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STOCKHOLM (BLOOMBERG) – India and China have added to their nuclear warhead stockpile in the past year while all other nuclear-armed nations such as the US, Russia and France, continued to modernise their arsenal, according to a recent report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

India increased its arsenal from an estimated 130-140 nuclear warheads in 2019 to 150 in 2020, whereas China increased its stockpile from an estimated 290 warheads to 320 during the same time, the SIPRI report said on Monday (June 15).

China and Pakistan, which has an estimated stockpile of 160 nuclear warheads, individually have more nuclear warheads than India, the report added.

China is modernising its nuclear arsenal and “developing a so-called nuclear triad for the first time, made up of new land and sea-based missiles and nuclear capable-aircraft”, the report said. On the other hand, India and Pakistan were both increasing the size and diversity of their nuclear weapons, it noted.

The SIPRI report on India and China increasing their nuclear stockpile comes at time when the two neighbours are engaged in a six-week-long border stand-off at multiple places along their 3,488 kilometre long unmarked border. Although, meetings between senior military personnel and at the diplomatic level have eased tensions, the confrontation continues.

Globally nine states together possessed an estimated 13,400 nuclear weapons at the start of 2020 which is slightly lower than the 2019 count of 13,865, SIPRI Yearbook 2020 said. The drop was largely due to the dismantling of retired stockpile by Russia and the US, which account for more than 90 per cent of the world’s stockpile.

Of the 13,400 active nuclear warheads, the SIPRI estimates about 3,720 of the nuclear weapons are deployed with operational forces and another 1,800 are stored in a state of readiness.

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