Alice delivers missiles and then takes a shower. Anna Marie crosses her exes and upgrades her goggles. Chris kickstarts all the games and laments over...

Magikarp manages to keep swimming up the current of news for another week. But Fire Emblem, River City, and Pyre show up as stops along...

Even before the COVID-19 shutdown, venture funding rounds and total deal volume of VC funding for esports were down noticeably from the year prior. The space received a lot of attention in 2017 and 2018 as leagues formed, teams raised money and surging popularity fostered a whole ecosystem of new companies. Last year featured some […]

President Donald Trump said on Thursday his administration is talking to Republican senators about work visa issues, amid the coronavirus outbreak that has wreaked havoc on the U.S. economy.

Miley Cyrus doesn't get a reply from all the celebrities she messages.

An early childhood education expert provides tips about how to explain the ongoing pandemic to children

Smithsonian's Earth Optimism Summit features CNN's Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir

Harry and Meghan have declared they will no longer engage with four British newspaper groups.

Boris Johnson is having an audience with the Queen by video link – his first conversation with the Monarch since he fell ill with coronavirus three weeks ago.

Donald Trump has said he knows how Kim Jong-un is doing amid speculation over the North Korean leader's health, but added: "I can't talk about it now".

A convicted stalker has admitted assaulting emergency workers after spitting blood in the faces of police officers while shouting about coronavirus.

Angela Merkel faced a test of her authority today as she prepared to thrash out plans with the country's 16 state premiers to further ease Germany's coronavirus lockdown.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will travel to Israel next week for a brief visit amid the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown, a trip that’s expected to focus on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to annex portions of the West Bank, the State Department said Friday. Pompeo will make the lightning trip to Jerusalem to see Netanyahu and his new coalition partner Benny Gantz on Wednesday as the Trump administration tries to return to business as normal by resuming governmental travel and reopening an economy devastated by the COVID-19 outbreak.

A hard Brexit is more likely due to the coronavirus crisis because Britain and the European Union have made so little progress in talks, Germany's foreign minister has said. Heiko Maas said that negotiations between Britain and the EU so far on the future trade relationship had yielded few gains with the UK disregarding the political declaration, which he said was "simply not on". Britain left the EU in January, and talks with the bloc are now focused on setting new trading terms from 2021, when London's status-quo transition period ends. However, the talks quickly hit an impasse when negotiations resumed last month, according to diplomats and officials. "It's worrying that Britain is moving further away from our jointly agreed political declaration on key issues in the negotiations," Mr Maas told the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper. "It's simply not on, because the negotiations are a complete package as it's laid out in the political declaration." Mr Maas said there was currently neither common ground on how to shape a comprehensive trade deal or on whether to extend the negotiation period beyond the end of the year. "The British government is still refusing to extend the deadline," Mr Maas said. "If it stays that way, we will have to deal with Brexit in addition to the coronavirus at the turn of the year." Simon Coveney, Ireland's foreign minister, said on Friday that the coronavirus pandemic had made an already difficult timeline for a British-European Union trade deal "virtually impossible" and that it would make sense to seek more time.

1. Trailer Talk: ‘Betaal’ Is Horrific & Intense  Gulte
2. Betaal trailer: Shah Rukh Khan’s new Netflix series unleashes army of zombies  Hindustan Times
3. Betaal trailer: The zombie redcoats are here  The Indian Express
4. Betaal Official Trailer | Viineet Kumar, Aahana Kumra, Suchitra Pillai | 24 May | Netflix India [HD] (Video)  Social News XYZ
5. 5 Scenes From ‘Betaal’ Trailer That Give A Peek Into The Dark Future If We Don’t Contain COVID-19  MensXP.com
6. View Full coverage on Google News

A Reuters report quoting Mint suggested that Yes Bank is in talks with Microsoft and two other tech firms for a possible stake sale.

In the late afternoon session, the scrip was being traded at 20.61 pounds, down by 5.50 per cent on the LSE. Vedanta opened on a positive note, but soon swung into the red.

The scrip, which was flat for most of the session, shot up in the final hour of trade on the Bombay Stock Exchange to settle with a net gain of 4.36 per cent at Rs 355.45.

Adele used an Instagram post to mark her 32nd birthday while sharing her latest look including thanking essential workers, calling them "our angels."

Campbell played Sidney Prescott in the first four movies.

It was a special episode to mark Mother's Day in the US.

Professional poker player Phil Galfond overcame a €900,000 deficit in a 25,000-hand head-to-head challenge against a pot-limit Omaha regular known as "VeniVidi1993" online.

One of the most photographed British women of the 1980s talks about feminism, her abusive father and how she battled her fears to come out as gay

In a small, unloved hotel, the receptionist greets me and Samantha Fox with pursed lips: “There will be no interview here,” she says. I feel as if I’ve wandered into the pages of Fox’s new autobiography, Forever, which is littered with bizarre anecdotes of best-laid plans going awry. From her ill-fated presenting partnership with a spaced-out Mick Fleetwood at the 1989 Brit awards, to a secret naked horseback photo shoot in Antigua – during which her steed galloped off with her to a busy tourist beach – not much has gone as expected in Fox’s life. Not least the day she worked with her childhood idol David Cassidy, who died earlier this month, which she says culminated in being sexually assaulted by him. Despite these, and many other setbacks, she says she is a “lucky girl”.

Fox was just 16 when her mother entered her for the Sunday People’s Face and Shape of 1983 competition – her wholesome, girl-next-door image made her the most popular Page 3 girl ever, and one of the most photographed women of the 1980s, alongside Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher. By 21, she had made her first pop record and retired from modelling, going on to break the US and sell 30m records worldwide.

The EU's chief negotiator has branded progress in post-Brexit talks disappointing and warned the "clock was ticking".

The UK will begin the first round of post-Brexit trade deal talks with the US this week.

Britain and the US are set to begin negotiations on an "ambitious" post-Brexit free trade agreement.

There are many challenges to developing a vaccine that will be successful against COVID-19.eamesBot / Shutterstock

Wayne Koff is one of the world’s experts on vaccine development, the president and CEO of the Human Vaccines Project. He possesses a deep understanding of the opportunities and challenges along the road to a safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19. He has won prestigious awards, published dozens of scientific papers, held major positions in academia, government, industry, and nonprofit organizations. But Koff, 67, has never produced a successful vaccine.

“I have been an abject failure,” he says. He smiles with a charming, self-deprecating sense of humor. “That’s what the message is.”

The real reason for Koff’s lack of success is that he spent most of his career searching for a vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. It remains, as he and many others put it, “the perfect storm” of a viral infection resistant to a vaccine development. Almost 40 years after doctors first recognized the disease in five men in Los Angeles—and 70 million people have been infected worldwide—there are no adequate animal models. Neutralizing antibodies, the backbone of many vaccines, do not stop it, and most importantly, HIV begins its assault on the body by attacking CD4 T cells, which serve as the command center of much of the immune system.

As for COVID-19, “We’re all hoping this one is going to be easier,” says Koff, a slight, bearded man with thick, curly salt-and-pepper hair. “There are research issues that still have to be addressed on a COVID vaccine. But they are a lot more straightforward than what we were dealing with in HIV.”

Let’s say we have a vaccine in 18 months. How do you make 1 billion doses or 4 billion doses or whatever it’s going to take to immunize everybody?

Koff and others started the Human Vaccines Project in 2016, modeled on the Human Genome Project. The project works with industry and academia to study the human immune system and develop vaccines, incorporating every modern-day tool, including artificial intelligence, computational biology, and big data sets. Today it is partnered with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

With COVID-19, Koff says, scientists “know the target is the spike protein binding site.” This is where the proteins sticking out from the virus attach to the cells in the human respiratory system. “If you can elicit antibodies against those proteins, they should be neutralizing.” He puts a strong emphasis on should. To prove antibodies will prevent infection, scientists must watch a population of people who’ve been infected for months or longer. It’s a good bet, based on similar viruses, that antibodies will appear and protect—although no one right now can predict how long and how well.

Depending on which count you use, more than 70 companies, universities, and other institutions are offering candidate vaccines. Koff says the real number of companies is lower. During the AIDS crisis, he says, “a lot of people claimed they had an experimental HIV vaccine in development. Some of those were a one-person lab who had created a paper company to attract investors.”

But even with a lower number, almost everyone involved in the search for a vaccine agrees that several different approaches from different research organizations need to proceed in parallel. The world does not have the time to bet on one horse. The race will be neither simple nor cheap.

“The probability of success, depending on whose metric is used in vaccines, is somewhere between 6 and 10 percent of candidate vaccines that make it from the animal model through licensure,” Koff says. “That process costs $1 billion or more. So you can do the math.”

Koff sees big potential problems at the outset. “In the best of all worlds, let’s say we have a vaccine in 18 months. Who knows where the epidemic is going to be then and what its impact is going to be? How do you make 1 billion doses or 4 billion doses or whatever it’s going to take to immunize everybody? Will we need one dose or two or three? These are issues people just haven’t faced before.”

COVID-19 also presents some unique dangers for vaccine safety. Based on how the virus behaves when it infects some people, there’s a chance a vaccine could dangerously overstimulate the immune system, a reaction called immune enhancement. “I’m hoping it’s more theoretical than real,” Koff says. “But that has to be addressed and it may slow down the entire process.” To ensure safety, he says, “It may mean we have to test the vaccine in a larger number of people. It’s one thing to do a 50-person trial in healthy adults as a safety signal. It’s another thing to run a trial of 4,000 or 5000 or more individuals.”

The world does not have the time to bet on one horse. The race will be neither simple nor cheap.

A virus also sometimes causes mysterious, potentially deadly blood clots. This means an experimental vaccine could hypothetically induce the same damage. “This is a bad bug,” Koff says. “We’re just starting to understand that pathogenesis.”

A big question is who should be the first volunteers for widespread vaccine testing. “Who are the high-risk groups?” asks Koff. “Is it nursing-home residents and staff, health-care workers and people on the front lines, or people someplace else like grocery stores? We must also make sure a vaccine is effective for the elderly and people in the developing world.”

Many vaccines work well in young and healthy people but not in older adults because immunity declines with age. Influenza vaccine is a prime example. Rotavirus vaccine, which protects against the deadliest killer—diarrheal disease in children—works better in the developed world. In the developing world, the virus often circulates year-round. Infants get antibodies from breast milk but not enough to prevent disease. Worse, those antibodies can make the vaccine less effective.

Another hypothetical obstacle is that a mutation in the COVID-19 virus could render a vaccine designed today less effective in the future. While the virus mutates frequently, so far there has been little change in the critical part of the spike that binds to human cells.

Of course, neither Koff nor all the others working for a COVID-19 vaccine focus solely on the potential obstacles. At one time, all vaccines against viruses either killed viruses, such as the Salk polio vaccine, or rendered them harmless, such as the Sabin polio vaccine. Now there is a multiplicity of ways to stimulate an immune response to prevent infection or reduce the consequences. These include genetically engineered protein subunits (peptides) or virus-like particles. Such approaches have led to successful vaccines against hepatitis B and human papilloma virus, which causes cervical cancer. Researchers now use “vectors”—harmless viruses attached to the protein subunits and virus particles to transmit them into the body. There are also many new adjuvants, chemicals that boost immune response to a vaccine.

Newer platforms include direct injection of messenger-RNA. M-RNA is the chemical used to translate the information in DNA into proteins in all cells. The Moderna Company, which received a $483 million grant from the U.S. government, and has begun early clinical trials, uses m-RNA to try to make the body produce proteins to protect against the COVID-19 virus. INOVIO Pharmaceuticals uses pieces of DNA called plasmids to achieve the same objective. It has also begun phase 1 studies.

“There are about eight platforms, and it would be good to see a couple vaccines in each of those advance,” Koff says. Predicting which of these most likely to succeed or fail he says would be “simply foolish.”

Many groups, including the Human Vaccines Initiative, are plotting routes to test any possible vaccine more quickly than tradition dictates with an “adaptive trial design.” Usually trials begin with a phase 1 study of some 50 healthy people to search for any immediate signs of toxicity, then moves onto about 200 people in a phase 2, still looking for hazards and a signal of immunity, and then to phase 3 in thousands of people. But the plan here is to start phases 2 and 3 even before its predecessors are finished, and keep recruiting additional volunteers so long as no danger signals arise.

Good animal models are appearing almost daily. Macaque monkeys, hamsters, and genetically engineered mice have all been infected in the laboratory and could determine whether potential vaccines exhibit various types of immunity. Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have suggested that healthy human volunteers should be allowed to agree to be test subjects, allowing themselves to be infected. Stanley Plotkin, a vaccine researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, was among the first to suggest the idea.

Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University, says that “deliberately causing disease in humans is normally abhorrent.” But COVID-19 is anything but a normal circumstance. In this case, Caplan says, “asking volunteers to take risks without pressure or coercion is not exploitation but benefitting from altruism.” At least 1,500 people have already volunteered to be such human guinea pigs, although none of the experimental vaccines is far enough along to try such challenging experiments.

Koff says the key to a successful vaccine is a cooperative effort. “It’s going to take a whole different way of thinking to move this onto the expedited train,” he says. “The old dog-eat-dog, ‘I’m going to beat you to the end of the game,’ isn’t going to help us with this.” Seth Berkley, who worked with Koff at the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, and now heads GAVI, an international vaccine organization, agrees that a COVID-19 vaccine needs a Manhattan Project approach. “An initiative of this scale won’t be easy,” Berkley says. “Extraordinary sharing of information and resources will be critical, including data on the virus, the various vaccine candidates, vaccine adjuvants, cell lines, and manufacturing advances.”

Koff has no regrets about spending so many years on an AIDS vaccine without results. He learned a great deal, he says, which he’s putting to work in the COVID-19 crisis. “The reason COVID-19 vaccines should be a lot easier is because most of the platforms, the novel approaches, and the clinical infrastructure for the testing of vaccines, came out of HIV.” He pauses. “We’re far better prepared.”

Robert Bazell is an adjunct professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale. For 38 years, he was chief science correspondent for NBC News.

CFL, CFLPA were scheduled to meet Friday to continue talks on potential contingency plans due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was first gathering after CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie's admission Thursday night the most likely scenario for the league is a cancelled 2020 season.

Lenny Henry, Catherine Tate and many more famous faces starred in the fundraiser

The 84-year-old star of 'M*A*S*H' is working harder now than ever before. Ellen McCarthy spoke to him about his life, his acting career and his new work to get the world communicating more clearly

'Talking Heads' was first broadcast in 1988 and 1998

'The Mindy Project' star and writer talks to Priya Arora about breaking boundaries with her new Netflix show 'Never Have I Ever', a coming-of-age comedy about a modern-day first-generation Indian American teenage girl, much like younger herself

The comic essayist on crying over Olive Kitteridge, his love for Richard Yates and the books that make him laugh

The book I am currently reading
Hidden Valley Road. It’s a nonfiction book about a family with 12 children, half of whom turn out to be schizophrenic. In the opening pages the mother sews a live bird’s eyes shut. And she’s one of the few who isn’t mentally ill!

The book that changed my life
Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. A friend read it out aloud to me when we were hitchhiking across America in 1976, and it made me think: “That’s right – books!” After high school I had forgotten about them. As soon as I got a stable address, I secured a library card, and started making up for lost time.

Cate Blanchett will be reuniting with director Eli Roth if she signs on for the project.

Barcelona forward Lionel Messi has taken to Instagram to dismiss a report claiming he will sign for Inter Milan in the summer... and that he paid bail money to get former teammate Ronaldinho out of prison.

Welcome to the Evening Standard's live blog covering the latest transfer news and rumours from the Premier League and beyond.

Barcelona misfit Philippe Coutinho would "love" a return to the Premier League, according to agent Kia Joorabchian.

RB Leipzig chief executive Oliver Mintzlaff insists he is calm over the future of Timo Werner amid speculation linking the forward with Liverpool and Chelsea.

Odion Ighalo believes Victor Osimhen has huge potential, with the Manchester United striker praising his compatriot as the "future of Nigerian football."

Chelsea have "dropped one" regarding Willian's contract, according to Paul Merson - but the former Arsenal forward also believes the Brazilian winger has been fortunate to avoid criticism for letting his deal run down.

Ivan Rakitic has warned Barcelona he wants to be "where he is valued" amid growing transfer speculation.

Arsenal are growing frustrated at the progress and complexity of talks with their squad over wage cuts.

Welcome to the Evening Standard's live blog covering the latest transfer news and rumours from the Premier League and beyond.

Former Arsenal and England striker Ian Wright has hit back at criticism of the Premier League over discussions about how to finish the current campaign, claiming football is being used as a 'punch-bag'.

Welcome to the Evening Standard's LIVE coverage as the coronavirus crisis continues to heavily impact sport across the globe.

Watford will become the third Premier League club to agree wage deferrals with their squad this week.

Charlie Nicholas says Arsenal's inability to convince big stars to extend their contracts is "terrifying" but doubts that Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang actually wants to leave Emirates Stadium.

The father of Atletico Madrid midfielder Thomas Partey has confirmed that his son is in talks with Arsenal over a summer transfer.

Welcome to the Evening Standard's live blog covering the latest transfer news and rumours from the Premier League and beyond.