brajeshupadhyay

[brajeshupadhyay]

Joining the Dots is a fortnightly column by author and journalist Samrat in which he connects events to ideas, often through analysis, but occasionally through satire *** It’s the biggest gathering of Bollywood stars since the closing credits of Om Shanti Om. Film production houses representing Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Anoushka Sharma, Zoya Akhtar, Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgn, Karan Johar, Aditya Chopra, Anil Kapoor, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, Vishal Bhardwaj, Ashutosh Gowarikar and a whole lot of others including industry four associations representing those who work behind the scenes have sued Arnab Goswami’s Republic TV and Times Now headed by Rahul Shivshankar and Navika Kumar for their repeated insults to Bollywood, spread over months, that followed the death by apparent suicide of actor Sushant Singh Rajput. On the other side of the world, United States elections are just days away, and President Donald Trump, who managed to get COVID and recover from it, is now trailing badly in all major polls by significant margins. His chances of re-election appear dim at the moment, although it’s not over until he’s vacated the White House, which as a real estate man he would be loath to do. He is certainly finding endorsement from unusual quarters. The Taliban have expressed the hope that he will win. North Korea, whose leader Kim Jong Un he had called Rocket Man – Kim called him a “mentally deranged US dotard” in return, sending half of America scurrying to find the meaning of dotard – has lately extolled the “mysterious, wonderful” chemistry between the two and called Democratic candidate Joe Biden a “rabid dog” whose candidacy is “enough to make a cat laugh”. The common feature that linked, and still links, the dramatis personae involved in these very disparate matters is entertainment, and what people find entertaining. I know several people including, sadly, my own father, who regularly watched overheated “news debates” on TV for entertainment. Some of them found it funny. One quite senior print journalist friend had the curious habit of going home from work after midnight and watching a bit of Republic TV while having his nightcap to “relax” and have a few good laughs before bed. Others just liked getting their adrenalin up with minimal effort – a way of doing cardiac without going to the gym, although if one took it too seriously heart attack or stroke were distinct possibilities. Trump had a similar appeal. He was funny, a clownish character with strange hair and the most outrageous of lines. During his 2016 election campaign he made statements no one had ever heard or imagined a US presidential candidate would utter. He blew his own trumpet while saying things like “I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall”. His particular style became such a rage that a whole host of viral videos popped up in response to his “America First” slogan, with comedians in country after country making parodies of people talking like Trump, and asking if their country could be second. Board games were created that had cards with his most bizarre statements printed on them, which were mixed in with other bizarre statements that he didn’t actually make. The game is to guess which ones are real, authentic Trump quotes… and it’s a very difficult quiz. I know. I’ve played it, and lost. I mean, who’d have guessed that the guy actually compared gay marriage to… golf? The lure of Trump, who made his mark as a reality TV star, and of news channels in India that have become reality TV channels in all but name, are similar. The characteristics that propelled Trump and star anchors like Goswami are loudness, rudeness, an infinite capacity for making outrageous statements, and a blithe disregard for the possible impacts of their words on the lives of others. These qualities were obviously attractive to a lot of people. A general feeling of being suffocated by an excess of political correctness had spread around the world, and many people seemed to relish the spectacle of that which could not be said being screamed out loud. The amusement has now worn thin. It’s like watching the same circus routine day after day for years. At first, it might be new and fun but after a while it loses its novelty. At the same time, the harm being done has become stark. The job of the American president is not to entertain the world; he is not meant to be a clown. He is meant to provide responsible leadership to his country, which happens to be a superpower, in a way that is beneficial for Americans and the world. Similarly, and at a far smaller level of impact, it is not the job of TV news channels to keep viewers engrossed in the drama of what are essentially reality TV shows. Their primary job is to accurately inform viewers about what is going on in the country and the world, in a manner that generates more light than heat. Americans and Indians are now collectively paying a heavy price for all the “free” entertainment. America leads the world in the number of COVID-19 cases, with India at second. China, where the pandemic started, has a larger population than both these countries. It is also less developed, even now, than USA. However, it managed to get the situation under control long ago. Meanwhile, America’s standing in the world has diminished faster in the last four years than in any comparable span of time in living memory. Trump made it to the White House in the name of Making America Great Again, but did nothing of the sort. The country is ailing and more divided than at any time since the Civil War. His last roll of the dice now is religion; he’s busy playing the Catholic card. In India too, it was people wrapping themselves in the flag and claiming to represent a religion who pushed it into the hole it is now in. They, too, divided the country in pursuit of television ratings or electoral gain, all the while making loud noises about Making India Great Again. The country and its people have arguably not been in more dire straits at any time since Independence, although you might not realise this if you get your news from certain channels. Therefore, we must thank our stars, the ones in Bollywood, for finally coming to the nation’s rescue by taking a step that might correct this. Their case could put a stop to the culture of divisive reality TV dramas masquerading as news. Those dramas contributed to an overall culture of faux patriotism becoming the first refuge of many a scoundrel, while the actual things that improve the strength and health of the country – such as healthy institutions, which are the organs of the state, and a robust economy, which is its lifeblood – went into decline. Hopefully, the US elections and the case by Bollywood will herald a turnaround, to a world where reality TV programming does not spill over into the US presidency, or the day’s news. Those who enjoy such entertainment are welcome to it – just watch old episodes of The Apprentice, or the next season of Big Boss. COVID deaths and economic ruin are not worth whatever joys anyone might derive from watching people say obnoxious things loudly.

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/10/donald-trump-indian-news-channels-and.html

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[brajeshupadhyay]

Washington: US President Donald Trump has described his presidential challenger Joe Biden as "the single worst candidate in the history of America", referring to a few recent gaffes of the Democratic leader. Republican incumbent Trump, 74, and challenger Biden, 77, are locked in a close contest for the 3 November elections. "I'm running against the single worst candidate in the history of American presidential politics and you know what that does? That puts more pressure on me. Can you imagine if you lose to a guy like this?" Trump told his supporters in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Tuesday. Trump recalled how recently Biden, mid-speech, forgot the name of former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. "It's unbelievable. It's disgusting. It's disgraceful. If he wins the radical left will be running the country. He won't be running the country. The radical left will takeover. And how about (that), Pennsylvania? So he says there will be no fracking. No fracking! the president said, as his supporters jeered Biden. With the elections just 21 days away, Trump exuded confidence of winning the eastern swing state. "And we are going to win four more years in the White House," he said. "This election is a simple choice. If Biden wins, China wins. All these other countries win. We get ripped off by everybody. If we win, you win, Pennsylvania wins, and America wins. Very simple," he said. "For years the selfish and corrupt political class betrayed the people of Pennsylvania. You know that. And the people of our country. Career politicians like Joe Biden lied to you," the president said. He criticised Biden for his views on migrants and troop deployment in the Mid-east. "Biden's a servant of the radical globalists, the wealthy donors, the big money special interest who shipped away your jobs, shut down your factories and you know it. Because you really suffered right in this area. Threw open your borders and ravaged our cities while sacrificing American blood (soldiers) and treasure in these ridiculous, endless foreign wars. They're (soldiers) all coming back home. Don't worry. They're all coming back home. Soon. They're already on their way," Trump said.

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/10/joe-biden-is-worst-presidential.html

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[brajeshupadhyay]

Washington: Two late-stage COVID-19 medical trials have been paused in the span of 24 hours over potential safety concerns, the latest setbacks to scientists in the long fight against the pandemic. US pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly on Tuesday suspended its Phase 3 trial of its lab-produced antibody treatment in hospitalized patients over an unspecified incident. A day earlier, the American pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson temporarily halted its Phase 3 COVID-19 vaccine trial due to an unexplained illness in a study participant. J&J's research head Mathai Mammen told investors Tuesday it was a "temporary pause" that could be unrelated to their drug. It's not unusual for final stage clinical trials to hit a problem - indeed, they are designed to scale up the number of participants to thousands or tens of thousands to tease out side effects that may be very rare. Last month, British firm AstraZeneca became the first in the world to announce a pause of its vaccine trials after one patient in Britain was diagnosed with an inflammatory condition affecting the spine. The trial was later resumed around the world but remains suspended in the US for reasons that are unclear. Doctor and scientist Eric Topol, who directs the Scripps Research Institute, tweeted that he was surprised to hear about the safety concern with Lilly's antibody treatment, because earlier stages didn't reveal any serious side effects.     "Hopefully a brief pause and we'll get details quickly. Good to be cautious," he said. Trump treatment "Lilly is supportive of the decision by the independent DSMB (data safety monitoring board) to cautiously ensure the safety of the patients participating in this study," a spokesperson told AFP in a statement Tuesday. The study began in August across more than 50 sites in the United States, Denmark and Singapore with the aim of recruiting 10,000 people. Lab-produced antibody treatments have been making headlines recently after US President Donald Trump credited one therapy, developed by biotech firm Regeneron, with curing him of COVID-19. Both Lilly and Regeneron last week applied to the US Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorizations for their treatments. Monoclonal antibodies are a relatively new class of drugs that are best known for treating certain types of cancer and autoimmune disease. Human immune systems produce antibodies, which are infection-fighting proteins, and vaccines teach our bodies to be prepared to make the right ones for particular pathogens. The COVID-19 treatment studied in the paused trial was based on an effective antibody Lilly found in a recovered patient. The host immune cells that produce the antibodies can be cultured in a lab to produce the desired proteins en masse. Lilly didn't disclose any details about the safety concern or how many people are affected. But generally speaking, mild side effects of intravenously administered therapies can include fevers, chills and fatigue, while moderate to severe infusions can cause chest pain and shortness of breath. J&J seeks to reassure J&J, meanwhile, moved to buoy confidence in its vaccine. "It's not at all unusual for unexpected illnesses (to occur) in large studies over their duration," Mammen said in a conference call. "In some cases, serious adverse events... may have something or nothing to do with the drug or vaccine being investigated," he said. The final stage of J&J's trial had started recruiting participants in late September, with a goal of enrolling volunteers across more than 200 US and international locations. J&J is one of 11 organizations globally to begin a Phase 3 trial on a COVID-19 vaccine. Washington has given the multinational about $1.45 billion in funding under Operation Warp Speed. The vaccine is based on a single dose of a cold-causing adenovirus, modified so that it can no longer replicate, combined with a part of the new coronavirus called the spike protein that it uses to invade human cells. J&J used the same technology in its Ebola vaccine, which received marketing approval from the European Commission in July. At close of trading, J&J was down 2.3 percent while Lilly was down 2.9 percent.

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/10/after-johnson-johnson-us-pharma-company.html

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[brajeshupadhyay]

A video of US President Donald Trump dancing to the tune of The Village People’s “YMCA has gone viral on the social media platforms.

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/10/donald-trump-dancing-to-ymca-leaves.html

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[brajeshupadhyay]

United Nations: China, Russia and Cuba won seats on the UN’s premiere human rights body on Tuesday despite opposition from activist groups over their abysmal human rights records, but another target, Saudi Arabia, lost. Russia and Cuba were running unopposed, but China and Saudi Arabia were in a five-way race in the only contested race for seats on the Human Rights Council. In secret-ballot voting in the 193-member UN General Assembly on that race, Pakistan received 169 votes, Uzbekistan 164, Nepal 150, China 139 and Saudi Arabia just 90 votes. Despite announced reform plans by Saudi Arabia, Human Rights Watch and others strongly opposed its candidacy saying the Middle East nation continues to target human rights defenders, dissidents and women’s rights activists and has demonstrated little accountability for past abuses, including the killing of Washington Post columnist and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul two years ago. Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, the organisation founded by Khashoggi, said despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin on public relations “to cover his grotesque abuses, the international community just isn’t buying it.” “Unless Saudi Arabia undertakes dramatic reforms to release political prisoners, end its disastrous war in Yemen and allow its citizens meaningful political participation, it will remain a global pariah,” Whitson said. Under the Human Rights Council’s rules, seats are allocated to regions to ensure geographical representation. Except for the Asia-Pacific contest, the election of 15 members to the 47-member Human Rights Council was all but decided in advance because all the other regional groups had uncontested slates. Four countries won four Africa seats: Ivory Coast, Malawi, Gabon and Senegal. Russia and Ukraine won the two East European seats. In the Latin American and Caribbean group, Mexico, Cuba and Bolivia won the three open seats. And Britain and France won the two seats for the Western European and others group. “Saudi Arabia’s failure to win a seat on the Human Rights Council is a welcome reminder of the need for more competition in UN elections," Human Rights Watch's UN director, Louis Charbonneau, said after the results were announced, “Had there been additional candidates, China, Cuba and Russia might have lost too," he said. “But the addition of these undeserving countries won’t prevent the council from shining a light on abuses and speaking up for victims. In fact, by being on the council, these abusers will be directly in the spotlight.” Charbonneau earlier criticised UN member states, including Western nations, saying: “They don’t want competition. Essentially these are backroom deals that are worked out among the regional groups.” Last week, a coalition of human rights groups from Europe, the United States and Canada called on UN member states to oppose the election of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, saying their human rights records make them “unqualified.” “Electing these dictatorships as UN judges on human rights is like making a gang of arsonists into the fire brigade,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch. The Geneva-based rights organisation published a 30-page joint report with the Human Rights Foundation and the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights evaluating candidates for council seats. The report lists Bolivia, Ivory Coast, Nepal, Malawi, Mexico, Senegal and Ukraine — all winners — as having “questionable” credentials due to problematic human rights and UN voting records that need improvement. It gave “qualified” ratings only to the United Kingdom and France. Human Rights Watch pointed to an unprecedented call by 50 UN experts on 26 June for “decisive measures to protect fundamental freedoms in China,” warning about its mass rights violations in Hong Kong and Tibet and against ethnic Uighurs in the Chinese province of Xinjiang as well as attacks on rights defenders, journalists, lawyers and government critics. Their call was echoed by over 400 civil society groups from more than 60 countries. Of the four winners of seats in the Asia-Pacific group, China got the lowest vote. The rights group said Russia’s military operations with the Syrian government “have deliberately or indiscriminately killed civilians and destroyed hospitals and other protected civilian infrastructure in violation of international humanitarian law,” and noted Russia’s veto of UN Security Council resolutions on Syria, including blocking Damascus’ referral to the International Criminal Court. The Geneva-based Human Rights Council can spotlight abuses and has special monitors watching certain countries and issues. It also periodically reviews human rights in every UN member country. Created in 2006 to replace a commission discredited because of some members’ poor rights records, the new council soon came to face similar criticism, including that rights abusers sought seats to protect themselves and their allies. The United States announced its withdrawal from the council in June 2018 partly because it considered the body a forum for hypocrisy about human rights, though also because Washington says the council is anti-Israel. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday’s election of China, Russia and Cuba and last year’s election of Venezuela - “countries with abhorrent human rights records” - further validate the US withdrawal from the council. He said the US has taken its own actions to punish “human rights abusers in Xinjiang, Myanmar, Iran, and elsewhere.” Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan called on all democracies on the council “to immediately resign from this shameful and anti-Semitic body.” Human Rights Council spokesman Rolando Gomez said when the newly elected members start their three-year terms in January, 119 of the 193 UN member States will have served on the council, reflecting its diversity and giving the council “legitimacy when speaking out on human rights violations in all countries.” “If a State thinks they can conceal the human rights violations they may have committed, or escape criticism by sitting on the Human Rights Council, they are greatly mistaken," Gomez said.

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/10/china-russia-cuba-get-seats-on-un-human.html

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[brajeshupadhyay]

In a significant development, Johnson & Johnson on Monday (October 12) announced that it had temporarily halted the trial of its coronavirus COVID-19 vaccine after one of its participants fell ill.

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/10/johnson-johnson-halts-covid-19-trial.html

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[brajeshupadhyay]

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Economics, also called the Memorial Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economics, has been awarded to a pair of Stanford professors – Professor Paul R Milgrom and Professor Robert B Wilson – for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats. Wilson shared the prize for developing a theory that clubs together auction items with similar value. The theory explained why bidders will offer less than they think the object or service is worth because they are afraid of overpaying — which he dubbed 'the winner’s curse'. Prof Milgrom was awarded half the prize for his contributions in understanding how private action values vary from bidder to bidder in an auction. The duo "started out with fundamental theory and later used their results in practical applications, which have spread globally. Their discoveries are of great benefit to society," chairman of the Nobel committee, Peter Fredriksson, said in a release accompanying the announcement. Wilson and Milgrom invented new formats for auctioning off many interrelated objects simultaneously, on behalf of a seller motivated by the broader societal benefit of the item rather than making the most money out of its sale. The pair has studied and revealed the outcomes of different rules for bidding and final prices – known as the auction format. "The analysis is difficult, because bidders behave strategically, based on the available information. They take into consideration both what they know themselves and what they believe other bidders to know," the release adds, about the complexity involved in picking an auction format. Organizational theories around the auction process have prompted new formats for auctioning off related objects at the same time. These formats have even been used by governments to sell radio frequency, as per the release. BREAKING NEWS: The 2020 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson “for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats.”#NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/tBAblj1xf8 — The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 12, 2020

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/10/nobel-prize-in-economics-awarded-to.html

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[brajeshupadhyay]

This year’s Nobel Prize for Physics is awarded to research related to black holes. Half the award went to British Professor Sir Roger Penrose for his theoretical research, which confirmed that the black hole is a robust prediction of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Penrose shared the prestigious award with Prof Andrea Ghez and Prof Reinhard Genzel for their experimental work, discovering the presence of a supermassive compact object at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. Prof Penrose was awarded the prize for research he carried out some 55 years ago. His research used Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity to prove that a singularity and the formulation for a black hole is, mathematically, possible. The Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, as this set of results are called, also answers the question of when does gravitation produce singularities. These theorems made use of the Raychoudhuri equation – a key ingredient to explain the space-time singularities and gravitational focusing properties in cosmology. Also read: Nobel-winning black hole physics by Penrose, Hawking stands on work of Indian physicist Amal Raychaudhuri Though the above research is a collaborative effort between Sir Roger and Stephen Hawking, the latter shot into the limelight. Penrose, on the other hand, didn't attract media attention, and confined himself to academic pursuits. Penrose is a versatile intellectual, and a talented mathematician with wide interests. One can't help but wonder what took the Nobel Committee this long to honour him with the Prize. Significance of Penrose's discovery We know, from observing the stars in our galaxy and others, that stars form and die. Stars with a low mass, like our Sun, live for a long time and die as 'white dwarfs'. Bigger stars that are over eight times our Sun's mass, die in a spectacular explosion that we call a supernova. For stars that are much more massive – say, over 20 times the mass of the Sun – the central collapsing core is thought to be much, much larger. The core becomes immensely dense and compact, forming a black hole. This extraordinary event, when a black hole forms, and matter gets crushed to limits beyond the nuclear scale, is a complex one to describe theoretically. It asks for a combination of gravity and quantum physics and mathematics. The closest we can get without this theoretical work is a vague estimate of a black hole’s density, from studying other compact objects in the universe. Only recently was the first direct image of a black hole from a nearby galaxy (M87) captured by astronomers in the globe, in a remarkable feat. However, there's still a huge gap in the modern understanding of black holes. We’re yet to understand the singularity that was present in the beginning, before the big bang which supposedly gave rise to everything in the universe. We also don’t know what happens to an observer that falls into a black-hole singularity. Before the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems came along in the 70s, singularities were thought to only form in certain situations. For instance, in a supernova explosion where a black hole is formed from the collapse of a star's core, it might be possible for a spinning star to partly counteract its own gravity. It was thought that a singularity wouldn't form under these circumstances – till the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems disproved this belief. It showed that a singularity is formed in every instance there is an event horizon – the notional boundary around a black hole beyond which no light can escape. Much-needed recognition for theoretical work If there were two ideas that have tugged at the imagination of many-a-theoretical astrophysicist, they are black holes and Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. One of the most fascinating questions under astrophysics remains, "what is a black hole?". It is a curiosity that holds the interest of school children and astrophysicists alike. Of more real-world consequence, many nations have poured enormous funds into building experimental detectors to detect a black hole's presence. One of these experimental results, led by Ghaz and Genzel, was awarded half the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2020. Still, one wonders, isn't funding for international megaprojects like LIGO and VIRGO an acknowledgement of veritable theoretical work in need of recognition? Experiments to detect black holes have been put forward, funded and are now fully-functional research hubs. The 2017 Nobel in Physics was awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector, and the observation of gravitational waves. The signal that was detected using the LIGO observatory came from the merger of two black holes. It was, again, surprising to find that the prize was not awarded to those who made the actual predictions. In the meanwhile, the world lost one of the most brilliant minds in astrophysics, Professor Stephen Hawking, in 2018. Nobel prizes aren't awarded posthumously. And so, Hawking, for all his contributions, won't ever be awarded the Nobel Prize. Penrose's Nobel decades overdue? On a brief visit to the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in 2-9 January 1994, Sir Penrose delivered lectures at an international conference on (non-accelerator) particle physics. We were expecting him to receive a Nobel Prize in the next few years. I was a PhD student in the Institute at the time, and we were elated to hear him speak, and to interact with him. During the conference, Prof Penrose also wrote an article 'On the role of gravity in quantum state reduction' for the Proceedings of the International Conference on Non-Accelerator Particle Physics, edited by IIA's then-director, Prof R Cowsik. Prof Penrose was knighted the same year, for his "services to science". It would take another 26 years for him to win the Nobel Prize for his contributions to the theoretical understanding of black holes. It is heartening to see, despite the delay, that Sir Penrose was recognized by the Nobel Committee. Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, an Indian-origin astrophysicist, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983, for the work he did in the early 1930s. It took about 50 years for the Nobel Committee to recognize his work. Lest we forget that Albert Einstein never won the Nobel Prize for his timeless work on the General Theory of Relativity. Many great theoretical works and discovered are awarded late or missed altogether from consideration for the Nobel Prize. Perhaps this is because Alfred Nobel intended for the prize to be given to those inventions that most benefit mankind? The author is the director of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore, and works in the study of star clusters, stellar evolution and population in galaxies and Magellanic clouds. She tweets at @fiddlingstars

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/10/penroses-nobel-for-physics-comes-two.html

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[brajeshupadhyay]

Two remote towns in northern Japan struggling with rapidly graying and shrinking populations signed up Friday to possibly host a high-level radioactive waste storage site as a means of economic survival. Japanese utilities have about 16,000 tons of highly radioactive spent fuel rods stored in cooling pools or other interim sites, and there is no final repository for them in Japan — a situation called “a mansion without a toilet.” Japan is in a dire situation following the virtual failure of an ambitious nuclear fuel recycling plan, in which plutonium extracted from spent fuel was to be used in still-unbuilt fast breeder reactors. The problem of accumulating nuclear waste came to the fore after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. Finding a community willing to host a radioactive dump site is difficult, even with a raft of financial enticements. On Friday, Haruo Kataoka, the mayor of Suttsu town on the northwestern coast of Hokkaido, applied in Tokyo for preliminary government research on whether its land would be suitable for highly radioactive waste storage for thousands of years. Later Friday in Kamoenai just north of Kamoenai, village chief Masayuki Takahashi announced his decision to also apply for an initial feasibility study. Suttsu, with a population of 2,900, and Kamoenai, with about 800 people, have received annual government subsidies as hosts of the Tomari nuclear power plant. But they are struggling financially because of a declining fishing industry and their aging and shrinking populations. The preliminary research is the first of three steps in selecting a permanent disposal site, with the whole process estimated to take about two decades. Municipalities can receive up to 2 billion yen ($19 million) in government subsidies for two years by participating in the first stage. Moving on to the next stage would bring in more subsidies. “I have tried to tackle the problems of declining population, low birth rates and social welfare, but hardly made progress,” Takahashi told reporters. “I hope that accepting research (into the waste storage) can help the village’s development.” It is unknown whether either place will qualify as a disposal site. Opposition from people across Hokkaido could also hinder the process. A gasoline bomb was thrown into the Suttsu mayor’s home early Thursday, possibly by an opponent of the plan, causing slight damage. Hokkaido Gov. Naomichi Suzuki and local fisheries groups are opposed to hosting such a facility. One mayor in southwestern Japan expressed interest in 2007, but faced massive opposition and the plan was spiked. High-level radioactive waste must be stored in thick concrete structures at least 300 meters (yards) underground so it won’t affect humans and the environment. A 2017 land survey map released by the government indicated parts of Suttsu and Kamoenai could be suitable for a final repository. So far, Finland and Sweden are the only countries that have selected final disposal sites

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/10/mansion-without-toilet-towns-in-japan.html

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[brajeshupadhyay]

Azerbaijan and Armenia accused each other of serious violations and crimes against civilians, and Azerbaijan also said it had launched airstrikes as a day-old humanitarian ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh looked increasingly frayed on Sunday.

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/10/azerbaijan-armenia-war-nagorno-karabakh_12.html

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[brajeshupadhyay]

Amid the rising coronavirus COVID-19 cases across the world, farmers in this Asian nation has deployed a floral-shirted scarecrow with a plastic pot to ward off the deadly virus.

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/10/bizarre-farmers-in-this-country-deploy.html

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[brajeshupadhyay]

Researchers on the world's biggest mission to the North Pole will return to dock on Monday, bringing home devastating proof of a dying Arctic Ocean and warnings of ice-free summers in just decades. The German Alfred Wegener Institute's Polarstern ship is set to return to the port of Bremerhaven after 389 days spent drifting through the Arctic trapped in ice, allowing scientists to gather vital information on the effects of global warming in the region. The team of several hundred scientists from 20 countries have seen for themselves the dramatic effects of global warming on ice in the region, considered "the epicentre of climate change", according to mission leader Markus Rex. "We witnessed how the Arctic ocean is dying," Rex told AFP. "We saw this process right outside our windows, or when we walked on the brittle ice." Underlining how much of the sea ice has melted away, Rex said the mission was able to sail through large patches of open water, "sometimes stretching as far as the horizon". "At the North Pole itself, we found badly eroded, melted, thin and brittle ice." 'Ice-free Arctic' If the warming trend in the North Pole continues, then in a few decades we will have "an ice-free Arctic in the summer", Rex said. The researchers' observations have been backed up by US satellite images showing that in 2020, sea ice in the Arctic reached its second-lowest summer minimum on record, after 2012. The Polarstern mission, dubbed MOSAIC, spent over a year collecting data on the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice and ecosystems to help assess the impact of climate change on the region and the world. To carry out the research, four observational sites were set up on the sea ice in a radius of up to 40 kilometres around the ship. The researchers collected water samples from beneath the ice during the polar night to study plant plankton and bacteria and better understand how the marine ecosystem functions under extreme conditions. The 140-million-euro ($165 million) expedition is also bringing back 150 terabytes of data and more than 1,000 ice samples. "The expedition will, of course, produce results on many different levels," Rex said. The team measured more than 100 parameters almost continuously throughout the year and are hoping the information will provide a "breakthrough in understanding the Arctic and climate system", he said. Analysing the data will take up to two years, with the aim of developing models to help predict what heatwaves, heavy rains or storms could look like in 20, 50 or 100 years' time. 20 polar bears Since the ship departed from Tromso, Norway, on 20 September 2019, the crew have seen long months of complete darkness, temperatures as low as -39.5 Celsius (-39.1 Fahrenheit) — and around 20 polar bears. The mission was almost derailed by the coronavirus pandemic in the spring, with the crew stranded at the North Pole for two months. A multinational team of scientists was due to fly in as part of a scheduled relay to relieve those who had already spent several months on the ice, but the plan had to be redrawn when flights were cancelled across the world as governments scrambled to halt the spread of the coronavirus. During the course of the expedition, a rotating crew of 300 researchers spent time onboard the German ship as it travelled with the ice along a wind-driven route known as the transpolar drift. Radiance Calmer, a researcher at the University of Colorado who was on board the Polarstern from June to September, told AFP that stepping out onto the ice was a "magical" moment. "If you concentrate, you can feel it moving," she said. The voyage was a huge logistical challenge, not least when it came to feeding the crew — during the first three months, the ship's cargo included 14,000 eggs, 2,000 litres of milk and 200 kilogrammes of rutabaga. The ship's cook, Sven Schneider, did not underestimate the importance of his role in the mission. "It was my job to maintain the morale of 100 people living in total darkness," he said in an interview with German weekly newspaper Die Zeit. Also Read: Arctic expedition to investigate 'epicentre of climate change'

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/10/arctic-ocean-is-dying-says-scientist.html

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[brajeshupadhyay]

A day after the doctor of US President Donald Trump said that he was no longer a transmission risk for COVID-19, President Trump on Sunday (October 11) said that he was immune from the coronavirus and he has succeeded in beating this 'crazy horrible China virus'.

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/10/im-immune-i-beat-this-crazy-horrible.html

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[brajeshupadhyay]

In his now hidden Tweet, Donald Trump said that he can't get COVID anymore and neither can he spread it as doctors have given him clearance. 

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/10/twitter-flags-donald-trumps-tweet.html

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[brajeshupadhyay]

President Donald Trump’s long rants and seemingly erratic behaviour last week — which some doctors believe might have been fuelled by his use of dexamethasone, a steroid, to treat COVID-19 — renewed a long-simmering debate among national security experts about whether it is time to retire one of the early inventions of the Cold War: The unchecked authority of the president to launch nuclear weapons. Trump has publicly threatened the use of those weapons only once in his presidency, during his first collision with North Korea in 2017. But it was his decision not to invoke the 25th Amendment and turn control over to Vice-President Mike Pence last week that has prompted concern inside and outside the government. Among those who have long argued for the need to rethink presidents’ “sole authority” powers are the former defence secretary William J Perry, considered the dean of American nuclear strategists, who has cited the fragility of a nuclear-weapons control chain and the fear that it can be subject to errors of judgment or failure to ask the right questions under the pressure of a warning of an incoming attack. Trump’s critics have long questioned whether his unpredictable statements and contradictions pose a nuclear danger. But the concerns raised last week were somewhat different: Whether a president taking mood-altering drugs could determine whether a nuclear alert was a false alarm. That question is a new one. The military’s Strategic Command often conducts drills that simulate actual but inconclusive evidence that the United States may be under nuclear attack. Such simulations drive home the reality that even a president asking all the right questions could make a mistake. But they rarely simulate what would happen if the president’s judgment was impaired. “A nuclear crisis can happen at any time,” Tom Z Collina, the policy director at the Ploughshares Fund, a private group that seeks to defuse nuclear threats, noted last week in an opinion piece. “If such a crisis takes place when a president’s thinking is compromised for any reason,” he added, “the results could be catastrophic.” Traditionally, presidents have temporarily conveyed authority — including nuclear launch authority — to the vice-president when they anticipated being under anaesthesia. Ronald Reagan took that step in 1985, and George W Bush did so in 2002 and 2007. There was no indication that Trump was unconscious, but there was reason to be concerned that the cocktail of drugs he was given could impair his judgment to make the most critical decisions entrusted to a president. Last week in telephone interviews with Fox News and Fox Business Network, Trump said he was no longer taking experimental medications but was still on dexamethasone, which doctors say can produce euphoria, bursts of energy and even a sense of invulnerability. On Friday, he told Fox News he was off the drug, which he appears to have taken for less than a week. But during that week, his prolific Twitter activity and rambling interviews led many to question whether the drugs had accentuated his erratic tendencies. His doctors’ refusal to describe with any specificity his condition or treatment only played up the concern. “The history of obfuscating the medical condition of presidents is as old as the Republic,” said Vipin Narang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied the nuclear command-and-control chain. “The issue here is that the dex” — shorthand for dexamethasone — “can make you paranoid and delusional.” “We don’t know how much he was given,” Narang said. “And if he gives an order in the middle of the night, and no one is there to stop him, we are dependent on his military aide not to transmit the order or the duty officer at the national military command centre to stop it.” The military’s standard response is that it would carry out a “legal order” after authenticating that it truly came from the president. But that narrow answer does not address the problem that no other senior officials — the secretary of defence, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the commander of Strategic Command, which has responsibility for the nuclear arsenal — are required to sign off. Government officials refuse to say whether they were taking any special precautions when Trump was taking the drugs. In conversations over the past week, which they would not hold on the record, several pointed to the stories surrounding Richard Nixon’s last days in office in 1974. He was drinking heavily and talking to portraits on the walls, and his aides feared he was emotionally unstable. His secretary of defence, James Schlesinger, a hawkish cold warrior, said he instructed the military not to react to White House orders on nuclear arms unless they were cleared by him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. (Schlesinger died in 2014, and Kissinger, now 97, has said that he had no knowledge of such an arrangement.) If Schlesinger’s account is true, it was “certainly extralegal,” Narang said. There is no evidence that anyone around Trump, including Pence or Defence Secretary Mark Esper, whom Trump has reportedly frozen out of key decisions, had any enhanced authority while the president was on medication. The “sole authority” tradition is unusual among the world’s nine nuclear powers; even Russia requires two out of three designated officials to sign off on a nuclear launch. While the Constitution says that only Congress can declare war, the speed of bombers and missiles made clear during the Cold War that there would be no time to convene Congress or mount a defence. As a result, Congress began delegating to the president all powers to use nuclear weapons during Harry Truman’s administration. He is the only president who has ordered a nuclear strike. Officials from many nations felt the immense pressure surrounding such a decision during a simulation of a launch exercise conducted this year at the Munich Security Conference, the leading gathering of the West’s national security officials. Volunteers donned virtual reality headsets and were put through the head-spinning flow of data that comes in as a president faces a 15-minute window to decide whether to launch ground-based missiles before they are destroyed. There were tiny hints throughout that suggested there could be a false alarm, but the evidence was muddy. “The last finger I would want on the nuclear button,” said Hans M Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington, “is that of a president on drugs.” It is not a new problem: John F Kennedy took powerful pain medications, though there is no evidence that his judgment was impaired during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the United States and the Soviet Union came to a nuclear exchange. But no one understands exactly how the drugs given to Trump interact. And according to scientists, the most common mood enhancements associated with dexamethasone are mania and hypomania, a euphoric state. The hallmarks of hypomania include inflated self-esteem, increased talkativeness, decreased need for sleep, racing thoughts, distractibility and absence of restraint to engage in activities that could invite personal harm. Not surprisingly, the military imposes strict limitations on the officers who oversee the nation’s nuclear forces. Known as the Personnel Reliability Programme, it assures that the authority is vested in people “who demonstrate the highest levels of integrity and dependability” and whose behaviour is observed “on a frequent and consistent basis.” A 1991 study said thousands of nuclear personnel were decertified every year. Peter D Zimmerman, a physicist and former government arms scientist, said few things better illustrated the confused nature of the American effort to prevent a single individual from launching a nuclear strike than the “two-man rule” in nuclear silos, submarines, bombers and the nation’s coast-to-coast atomic complex. The rule requires the presence of two authorised people for any step involving access to the armaments or the launching of a nuclear strike. “No unaccompanied person ever approaches a nuclear weapon,” Zimmerman wrote in a 2017 opinion essay. “It’s a basic precaution against theft, misuse or sabotage.” But it does not apply to the commander-in-chief, whether in the Oval Office or at Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre. A president could misjudge the situation or become impulsive, Zimmerman noted in an interview. “And the consequences,” he said, “would be horrendous.” David E Sanger and William J Broad c.2020 The New York Times Company

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/10/donald-trumps-covid-19-treatment.html

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[brajeshupadhyay]

The Czech Republic has so far reported more than 43,000 cases in October. 

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/10/czech-government-to-tighten-coronavirus.html

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[brajeshupadhyay]

Trump, who has downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic to the nation and himself, showed no signs of the disease, but uncharacteristically his speech was about 18 minutes, as opposed to his previous 60-minute speeches at other events and rallies.

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/10/feeling-great-donald-trump-returns-to.html

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