K-pop boy band Bangtan Boys, also known as BTS, will give speeches during a virtual commencement event along with global figures including former U.S. President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle, and pop star Lady Gaga. "Dear Class of 2020," organized by YouTube, will be streamed on June 6 to celeb...

The nominal Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee, who is in a vegetative state, remains Korea's richest man and one of only four Koreans on Bloomberg's list of top 500 billionaires in the world. The others are acting Samsung chief Lee Jae-yong, Seo Jung-jin, CEO of biopharmaceutical company Celltrion, and K...

The Bundesliga soccer season will resume on May 16 in empty stadiums, picking up right where it left off two months ago amid the coronavirus pandemic.Thursday's announcement comes one day after clubs were told the season could restart following a meeting between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and t...

U.S. President Donald Trump is reportedly demanding US$1.3 billion a year to maintain American troops in Korea. That is a whopping 53.3 percent higher than the W1.4 trillion Korea had to pay last year. A senior U.S. official told the Chosun Ilbo on Thursday, "The U.S. faces many difficulties, includ...

The government will stockpile 100 million face masks to prepare for a second wave of coronavirus but will also send them to about 70 countries in need."We've already allocated the budget necessary to stock up 100 million masks," Minister of Food and Drug Safety Lee Eui-kyung said Thursday. "Some 70 ...

The consolidated central government balance, which is derived by subtracting total fiscal spending from earnings, has resulted in a staggering W45 trillion deficit in the first quarter (US$1=W1,226). The fiscal deficit grows even further to W55 trillion if losses from the National Pension Service an...

More than two months after a black man was shot to death while jogging on a Sunday afternoon, Georgia investigators conceded that the facts show enough evidence to jail a white father and son on charges of felony murder and aggravated assault.  The investigation appeared stalled by local author...

An exquisite estate in Cherry Hills Village that finished as a finalist for the 2019 Home of the Year in Colorado Homes & Lifestyles Magazine was recently listed for sale at $7.75 million.

Surrounded by the White River National Forest, the 11,600-acre Seven Lakes Ranch located in the Meeker Valley is up for sale three years removed from extensive renovations.

Colorado Springs is the beachhead. But it's always been clear In-N-Out Burger planned to feed its fanatical following along the Front Range by building more than just the one restaurant coming to that city in 2020.

Rawalpindi: Pakistan Businessmen and Intellectuals Forum President Mian Zahid Hussain has said that sales tax should be withdrawn on cottonseed, oil cake, etc. while withholding tax refunds stuck since a decade should be released.He said the largest foreign exchange earning sector is in trouble,...

Rawalpindi : The Rawalpindi Police with assistance of other security institutions staged a flag march in the city to create awareness among public on prevailing alarming situation due to coronavirus pandemic and preventive measures adopted by the Punjab government.According to the police...

The Karachi Metropolitan Corporation is going to introduce a mobile application to ensure punctuality of its employees and facilitate their work.Karachi Mayor Wasim Akhtar announced this while addressing a meeting at the Frere Hall on Friday. He also announced that applications were sought for...

A man was killed and another wounded during a clash within the Gulshan-e-Iqbal police station’s limits on Friday.Police said the incident took place when the two men exchanged fire near Kamran Market in Gulshan-e-Iqbal Block 1. As a result, both were wounded and taken to Jinnah Postgraduate...

Microchip Smart Storage Adapters Now Interoperate Seamlessly with MegaRAC® SP-X Management Firmware from AMI for At-Scale Secure Storage Management

Next-Generation Miniaturized Rubidium Atomic Clock Improves Performance and adds Features without Increasing Size

Protect Against Rootkit and Bootkit Malware in Systems that Boot from External SPI Flash Memory

Microchip Releases Version 2.1 of TimeProvider 4100 Timing Grandmaster

Safeguards due diligence reports are prepared as part of safeguard due diligence and review to ensure compliance with ADB safeguard policy due diligence requirements. This document dated May 2020 is provided for the ADB project 51039-002 in Afghanistan.

ADB has a vacancy for the position of Senior IT Officer (Project Management) (3 Vacancies) in the Information Technology Department . The deadline for submitting applications is on 22 May 2020.

ADB has a vacancy for the position of Associate Facilities Planning and Management Officer (Project Management) in the Office of Administrative Services. The deadline for submitting applications is on 22 May 2020.

ADB has a vacancy for the position of Budget and Management Services Analyst in the Budget, Personnel, and Management Systems Department. The deadline for submitting applications is on 22 May 2020.

ADB invites papers for the Asian Development Conference 2020 to be held 16-17 July 2020 in Seoul, Korea.

Schools and universities are to resume classes in June, Education Minister Tarek Majzoub said Friday

Life returned to normal Saturday in the Rashidiyeh Palestinian refugee camp, south of Tyre, after a night of clashes that left one person dead and five others injured.

Getting Started Guide: Microchip PIC-IoT WA (Wireless for Amazon Web Services) Application

dsPIC33CK64MC105 General Purpose Plug-In Module (PIM) Information Sheet

dsPIC33CK64MC105 Motor Control Plug-In Module (PIM) Information Sheet for External Op Amp Configuration

dsPIC33CK64MC105 Motor Control Plug-In Module (PIM) Information Sheet for Internal Op Amp Configuration

A white former police officer and his son were arrested on Thursday in Georgia, United States of America, and charged with murder in the shooting death of an unarmed black man, an incident that touched off a furore in the community and among civil rights activists nationwide.

Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son Travis, 34, were taken into custody by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and charged with aggravated assault as well as murder in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in the town of Brunswick, the agency said in a statement.

The Feb 23 shooting death of Arbery, 25, as he ran unarmed through the small town was captured on video by an unnamed witness in a vehicle near the scene. The video’s wide broadcast in recent days ignited outrage among activists, politicians and celebrities who saw the incident as the latest case of white perpetrators killing a black man and going unpunished.

It was not immediately clear on Thursday if the two men had retained attorneys.

A district attorney appointed to handle the high-profile case after two other prosecutors recused themselves said on Wednesday he would ask a county grand jury to decide if the two men should face charges.

The men’s arrest by the GBI, one day after the agency opened an investigation into the case, appears to have sidelined any grand jury probe.

Three shots

The video footage shows Arbery jogging down a narrow two-lane road and around the McMichaels’ white pickup truck, which had stopped in the right lane with its driver’s door open.

As Arbery crosses back in front of the truck, a gunshot is fired. Arbery is then seen struggling with a man holding a long gun as a second man stands in the bed of the truck brandishing a revolver. Two more shots are heard before Arbery stumbles and falls face down onto the asphalt. The GBI said it was Travis McMichael who fired the fatal round.

According to a police report obtained by the New York Times, Gregory McMichael, a former Glynn County police officer and district attorney’s investigator, told detectives the incident began when he spotted Arbery from his front yard “hauling ass” down the street.

McMichael told police that, because he suspected Arbery in a string of recent neighborhood break-ins, he and his son gave chase in the truck, with Gregory McMichael carrying a .357 Magnum revolver and Travis armed with a shotgun.

Gregory McMichael said Arbery began to “violently attack” his son, fighting him for the shotgun, prompting Travis to open fire.

According to a letter obtained by the Times, the prosecutor in Brunswick argued there was not probable cause to arrest the McMichaels because they were legally carrying firearms, had a right to pursue a burglary suspect and use deadly force to protect themselves.

A wholesale market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan played a role in the outbreak of the novel coronavirus last year, as the source or possibly as an “amplifying setting”, the World Health Organisation said on Friday, calling for more research.

Chinese authorities shut down the market in January as part of efforts to stop the spread of the virus and ordered a temporary ban on trade and consumption of wildlife.

“The market played a role in the event, that’s clear. But what role we don’t know; whether it was the source or amplifying setting or just a coincidence that some cases were detected in and around that market,” said Dr Peter Ben Embarek, a WHO expert on food safety and zoonotic viruses that cross the species barrier from animals to humans.

It was not clear whether live animals or infected vendors or shoppers may have brought the virus into the market, he told a Geneva news briefing.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said there is “a significant amount of evidence” the virus came from the Wuhan laboratory, although he has also said there wasn’t certainty.

Read: The Wuhan lab at the core of a virus controversy

No public evidence has linked the outbreak to the lab in Wuhan and scientists have said the coronavirus appears to have developed in nature. A German intelligence report cast doubts on Pompeo’s allegations, Der Spiegel reported.

Ben Embarek did not address the accusations. He noted that it took researchers a year to identify camels as the source of the Mers (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) virus, a coronavirus that emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and spread in the Middle East, adding: “It’s not too late.”

“What is important, what would be of great help, is to get hold of the virus before it adapted to humans, before the version we have now. Because then we would better understand how it adapted to humans, how it evolved,” he said.

“In terms of investigations, China has most probably, most likely, all the expertise needed to do these investigations. They have lot of very qualified researchers to that,” he said.

A common sight across Asia, wet markets traditionally sell fresh produce and live animals, such as fish, in the open air.

Many markets worldwide that sell live animals must be better regulated and hygiene conditions improved, and some should be closed down, Ben Embarek said. “But the vast majority can be fixed, can be better organised.”

It is often a question of controlling waste management, the movement of people and goods, and of separating live animals from animal products and from fresh goods, he said.

Five Frontier Corps (FC) soldiers and one officer were martyred after their vehicle was targeted with an improvised explosive device (IED) near the Pakistan-Iran border, the military's media wing said on Friday.

In a tweet, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) said the security personnel were returning from patrolling in Buleda — 14 kilometres from the Pakistan-Iran border — to "check possible routes used by terrorists in the mountainous terrain of Makran".

As they were returning, their vehicle was targeted with a remote controlled IED, it added.

The martyred were identified as Major Nadeem, Naik Jamshed, Lance Naik Khizar Hayat, Lance Naik Taimor, Sepoy Nadeem and Sepoy Sajid.

In December 2019, one FC soldier was martyred and two others were injured in an exchange of fire with terrorists after they raided an FC checkpost in North Waziristan.

"Terrorists raided an FC post in North Waziristan district near the Pak-Afghan border," an ISPR statement had said.

"During the exchange of fire, two terrorists were killed," it had added.

ISLAMABAD: As many as 1.6 billion of the world’s 2bn informal economy workers are affected by Covid-19 lockdown and containment measures, a new briefing paper issued by the International Labour Organi­sation (ILO) said.

Most are working in the hardest-hit sectors or in small units more vulnerable to shocks including workers in accommodation and food services, manufacturing, wholesale and retail, and the more than 500 million farmers producing for the urban market, the report says. Women are particularly affected in high-risk sectors, it adds.

The Covid-19 lockdown and containment measures threaten to increase relative poverty levels among the world’s informal economy workers by as much as 56 percentage points in low-income countries.

In high-income countries, relative poverty levels among informal workers is estimated to increase by 52 percentage points, while in upper middle-income countries the increase is estimated to be 21 percentage points.

In addition, with these workers needing to work to feed their families, Covid-19 containment measures in many countries cannot be implemented successfully. This is endangering governments’ efforts to protect the population and fight the pandemic. It may become a source of social tension in countries with large informal economies, the report says.

More than 75 per cent of total informal employment takes place in businesses of fewer than ten workers, including 45pc of independent workers without employees.

With most informal workers having no other means of support, they face an almost unsolvable dilemma: to die from hunger or from the virus, the briefing says. This has been exacerbated by disruptions in food supplies, which has particularly affected those in the informal economy.

For the world’s 67 million domestic workers, 75pc of whom are informal workers, unemployment has become as threatening as the virus itself. Many have not been able to work, whether at the request of their employers or in compliance with lockdowns. Those who do continue to go to work face a high risk of contagion, caring for families in private households. For the 11 million migrant domestic workers the situation is even worse.

The countries with the largest informal economies, where full lockdowns have been adopted, are suffering the most from the consequences of the pandemic. Informal economy workers significantly impacted by lockdown vary from 89pc in Latin America and the Arab states to 83pc in Africa, 73pc in Asia and the Pacific, and 64pc in Europe and Central Asia.

Countries need to follow a multi-track strategy that combines several lines of actions relating to both the health and economic impacts of the pandemic, the ILO said.

Among its recommendations, the report highlights the need for policies that reduce the exposure of informal workers to the virus; ensure that those infected have access to health care; provide income and food support to individuals and their families; and prevent damage to the economic fabric of countries.

Published in Dawn, May 9th, 2020

A llama called Winter could prove useful in the hunt for a treatment for Covid-19, according to US and Belgian scientists who have identified a tiny particle that appears to block the new coronavirus.

The scientists, from Belgium’s VIB-UGent center for medical biotechnology and the University of Texas at Austin, published research on Tuesday in the journal Cell, with the llama in Belgium central to their studies.

The group began four years ago looking into antibodies that might counter the Sars virus, which spread in 2003, and the Mers virus that flared up in 2012.

“The work was a side project in 2016. We thought maybe this was interesting,” said Xavier Saelens, joint leader of the Belgian part of the collaboration. “Then the new virus came and it became potentially more crucial, more important.”

Winter, the llama, was given safe versions of the Sars and Mers viruses and samples of its blood were later taken.

Llamas and other members of camel family are distinct in creating standard antibodies and smaller antibodies, with which scientists can more easily work.

The Belgian part of the research team, also led by Bert Schepens, identified fragments of the smaller antibodies, known as nanobodies, to see which bound most strongly to the virus.

Saelens describes the new coronavirus as the cousin of the Sars virus. Both have a corona, or crown, shape with protein spikes, onto which an antibody can latch.

The team intend to begin tests on animals, with a view to allowing trials with humans to begin by the end of the year. Saelens said negotiations were under way with pharmaceutical companies.

The research is not the first into nanobodies derived from camels or llamas. French group Sanofi paid 3.9 billion euros ($4.23 billion) in 2018 to buy Ghent-based nanobody specialist company Ablynx.

The government of Pakistan has decided to bring back via special flights its students stuck in Wuhan, China, ground zero of the novel coronavirus.

Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Overseas Pakistanis Zulfiqar Bukhari tweeted the development on Friday night, referring to those stranded there as "the bravest soldiers".

Pakistan International Airline (PIA) has been tasked to bring the first batch of Pakistanis – mostly students – beginning May 18, when around 250 individuals are expected to return.

Pakistanis who had been studying in Wuhan and other cities in the Chinese province of Hubei – first region in the world to be put under a strict lockdown on Jan 20 after being declared a virus epicenter – had appealed at the time to be evacuated.

Multiple requests for evacuation were made not only by the stranded students but also by their families back home. However, the government said it would not repatriate them immediately and would follow guidelines and processes put in place by China in this regard.

To allay the fears of the students and their families, the Foreign Office in February sent two of its officials from the Beijing embassy to Wuhan while the strict lockdown was still in place. The FO said the staffers were to remain in Wuhan till the lockdown ended and would meet students in different universities to get an update on their well-being and safety.

In March, President Arif Alvi and Minister for Foreign Affairs Shah Mahmood Qureshi visited China and interacted with Pakistani citizens there via video link.

Upon returning from the trip, both the foreign minister and President Alvi briefed the media and said that the students were in a good condition and had only requested that Pakistani food be provided to them.

On March 28, China began lifting the lockdown in Wuhan. By April 8, the restrictions were completely lifted and some of the the students celebrated by cooking themselves a meal.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Saturday that Saudi Arabian authorities recently detained and are holding incommunicado Prince Faisal bin Abdullah, who had previously been netted in an anti-corruption drive and released in late 2017.

The US-based rights group, citing a source with ties to the royal family, said Prince Faisal bin Abdullah, a son of late monarch King Abdullah, was detained by security forces on March 27 while self-isolating due to the coronavirus pandemic at a family compound northeast of the capital Riyadh.

Reuters could not immediately independently verify the detention. The Saudi government media office did not immediately respond to a detailed Reuters request for comment.

Earlier in March, authorities had detained King Salman’s brother, Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, and former crown prince Mohammed bin Nayef, who was replaced in a 2017 palace coup and placed under house arrest, sources had told Reuters.

Sources with royal connections said at the time that the move was a preemptive effort to ensure compliance within the ruling Al Saud family ahead of an eventual succession to the throne by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman upon the king’s death or abdication.

It was not clear if the reported detention of Prince Faisal was related to those in early March, which also saw Ahmed’s son Nayef and Mohammed bin Nayef’s brother Nawaf detained.

Saudi authorities have not commented on those detentions, which follow crackdowns on dissent in which clerics, intellectuals and rights activists have been arrested, and an anti-corruption drive launched in 2017 that netted scores of royals, ministers and businessmen.

Critics have said the campaigns were part of moves by Crown Prince Mohammed, the king’s son and the kingdom’s de facto ruler, to consolidate his grip on power.

“Now we have to add Prince Faisal to the hundreds detained in Saudi Arabia without a clear legal basis,” said Michael Page, deputy Middle East director at HRW.

The kingdom has regularly denied allegations of unfair detention.

Authorities said last year the government was winding down the anti-corruption campaign after 15 months, but would continue to go after graft.

HRW said Prince Faisal’s whereabouts or status are not known.

“The source said that Prince Faisal has not publicly criticised authorities since his December 2017 arrest and that family members are concerned about his health as he has a heart condition,” it added.

In late December 2017, a senior Saudi official said Prince Faisal and another royal, Prince Meshaal bin Abdullah, were released from Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton hotel, where people nabbed in the anti-corruption drive were being held, after reaching an undisclosed financial settlement with the government.

NEW DELHI: The Narendra Modi government is set to substantially ease norms for foreign investment in the construction sector, hoping to drum up interest in the prime minister’s plans for 100 smart cities as well his affordable housing initiative. The government is seriously considering the removal of all restrictions on size and minimum capitalisation for the smart cities as well as affordable housing projects. “The discussions are on for exempting smart cities from all FDI conditionalities. We need to give them a push by making it attractive for investors,” said a government official. The new policy is also expected to provide easier exit windows.The proposal could be moved for the […]

NEW DELHI: Foreign direct investment (FDI) in the real estate sector could jump over two-fold in the next one year with easing of FDI rules in the construction sector, realtors’ body NAREDCO said today. Real estate developers and consultants were of the view that this move would give fillip to cash-starved realty sector, which is reeling under a slowdown since last 2-3 years. It will help developers in raising funds to complete projects. Yesterday, the Cabinet relaxed FDI rules in construction sector by reducing minimum built-up area as well as capital requirement and easing the exit norms. “Reduction in minimum built-up area to 20,000 sq meters from 50,000 sq meters […]

February 29th is right around the corner. It’s been hibernating for the past three years, snuggling in its secret den between February 28th and March 1st. But it’s just about to emerge again, stretching the calendar and irritating impatient March.... read more >>

You may have noticed that MATLAB Mobile now sports a different UI. For this post, I’d like to welcome Geeta Sonigra, our User Experience designer to talk about what’s changed. ... read more >>

Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, engineers and scientists are finding themselves suddenly working from home or other remote locations. We’d like to help you continue to use MATLAB and Simulink productively. We hope this brief collection of resources will help you access MATLAB, collaborate and connect with others, and... read more >>

East Africa's "triple threat" — the coronavirus, locusts, and floods — are not mutually exclusive. In fact, each is inextricably linked.

The government has advised people to make homemade masks using capulanas – a traditional Mozambican cloth generally worn by women – and other readily available materials.

Benin drops 17 places in the 2020 World Press Freedom Index, following the withdrawal from a key document of the African Charter of Human and People's Rights.