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Donors including the Canadian government and the European Commission on Saturday (April 9) pledged a combined 9.1 billion euros in donations, loans and grants to support refugees fleeing the war following Russia’s invasion.

The fundraising event in Warsaw, Poland, yielded 1.8 billion euros to support internally displaced people inside Ukraine and 7.3 billion euros for refugees who have fled the country to neighbouring states.

Governments, companies and individuals together pledged 4.1 billion euros in donations, which will be distributed largely via the Ukrainian authorities or the United Nations.

The remaining 5 billion euros were loans and grants from European Union (EU) financial institutions – including a 4 billion euro program to help provide housing, education and healthcare for refugees arriving in EU countries.

“I can only announce today for the European Commission that we want to pledge one billion euros, 600 million of those will go to Ukraine, to the Ukrainian authorities and partially to the United Nation … and 400 million euros will go to the frontline states that are doing such an outstanding job and helping the refugees that are coming,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who visited Kyiv on Friday and co-hosted the event with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“As the humanitarian crisis deepens and needs to continue to grow, our collective response must keep pace,” Trudeau said via video link.

More than 4 million people have now fled Ukraine to seek shelter in EU countries, while 6.5 million people have fled their homes but remain inside Ukraine, the European Commission said.

Published : April 10, 2022

By : Reuters

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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday (April 9) in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, “in a show of solidarity with the Ukrainian people,” a Downing Street spokesperson said.

Johnson’s visit had begun with a one-on-one meeting with Zelenskiy, Andriy Sybiha, deputy head of the Ukraine president’s office, said on Facebook.

Johnson’s visit to the Ukrainian capital was not announced in advance and comes as Russia is amassing troops in the east of the country.

“The UK will send more defensive weapons to Ukraine and will work with G7 partners to target every pillar of the Russian economy to ensure Putin fails,” Johnson tweeted earlier on Saturday.

The British leader used the visit to set out a new financial and military aid package for Ukraine.

Earlier, his Downing Street office said Britain would provide the country with 120 armoured vehicles and new anti-ship missile systems.

Johnson is the latest foreign leader to visit Kyiv after Russian forces pulled back from the outskirts of the capital last week. The move caps weeks of lobbying by the British prime minister to meet Zelenskiy to underline their close ties.

In a joint news conference with Zelenskiy Johnson, pledged tighter sanctions on Russia

At a meeting shrouded in secrecy until Johnson appeared in the Ukrainian capital, the two leaders cemented the close ties they have nurtured since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. 24.

“We have to exert even more pressure on the Russian Federation, to exert pressure through supporting Ukraine. In defending itself, we have to exert pressure in the form of sanctions, and I’m grateful to the United Kingdom that continuing and intensifying the sanctions and also providing significant support to Ukraine by reinforcing our defence capacities. The other democratic Western countries should follow the example of the United Kingdom,” Zelenskiy said.

Johnson replied: “Together with our partners, we are going to ratchet up the economic pressure and we will continue to intensify, week by week, the sanctions on Russia.”

He added that the measures would include moving away from the use of Russian hydrocarbons.

The Ukrainian leader said that his country was grateful for the decisive support from Britain, and said it was “time to impose a complete embargo on Russian energy resources.”

The support aims to ensure that “Ukraine can never be bullied again, never will be blackmailed again, never will be threatened in the same way again,” Johnson said.

During the visit, Johnson walked with Zelenskiy in the city’s streets.

“You have a remarkable president, Mr Zelenskiy, who has done an outstanding job and we simply wish to keep supporting the people of Ukraine for as long as it takes,” said Johnson to a man who thanked him as he walked around Kyiv.

Published : April 10, 2022

By : Reuters

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Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan lost a confidence vote in parliament on Sunday (April 10). The lower house speaker said, following desertions from coalition partners who blame him for a deteriorating economy and failure to deliver on his campaign promises.

The announcement of the vote’s result came just before 0100 (2000 GMT) after multiple adjournments in the lower house caused by members of Khan’s party, who said there was a foreign conspiracy to oust the cricket star-turned-politician.

Opposition parties were able to secure 174 votes in the 342-member House in support of the no-confidence motion, presiding Speaker Ayaz Sadiq said, making it a majority vote. Just a few legislators of Khan’s ruling party were present for the vote.

Two sources said the voting came after the country’s powerful army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa met Khan, as criticism mounted over the delay in the parliamentary process.

Opposition leader Shehbaz Sharif is the front-runner to lead the nuclear-armed nation of 220 million, where the military has ruled for half its history.

Shehbaz, 70, the younger brother of three-time prime minister Nawaz Sharif, has a reputation as an effective administrator.

Khan, 69, surged to power in 2018 with the military’s support, but recently lost his parliamentary majority when allies quit his coalition government. There were also signs he had lost the support of the military, analysts said.

Opposition parties say he has failed to revive an economy battered by COVID-19 or fulfil promises to make Pakistan a corruption-free, prosperous nation respected on the world stage.

His ouster extends Pakistan’s unwanted record for political instability: No prime minister has completed their full term since independence in 1947, although Khan is the first to be removed through a no-confidence vote.

A handful of women suppers of Khan protested outside parliament while supporters of opposition parties celebrated victory.

People on the streets of Karachi and Lahore had divided opinions.

Parliament will meet on Monday (April 11) to elect a new prime minister.

Opposition leader Sharif said Khan’s ouster was the chance for a new beginning.

“A new dawn has started. A new day is coming. Allah has answered the prayers of millions of Pakistani mothers, sisters, daughters, elders and youth”, Sharif, 70, said in parliament.

Elections are not due until August 2023. However, the opposition has said it wants early elections, but only after it delivered a political defeat to Khan and passes legislation it says is required to ensure the next polls are free and fair.

Khan earlier accused the United States of backing moves to oust him because he had visited Moscow for talks with President Vladimir Putin just after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. Washington rejected the charge.

Sharif, who is affiliated with the Pakistan Muslim League, has been in ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s shadow during their three decades in politics, forging a reputation as a workaholic administrator obsessed with infrastructure mega-projects in the vast Punjab province, the family’s powerbase that is home to more than half of Pakistan’s 190 million people.

His hands-on style as chief minister of Punjab — peppering officials with WhatsApp messages in the dead of night — has won him, admirers, in the provincial capital Lahore, a Mughul-era city spruced up with slick highways and manicured boulevards.

Sharif’s governing style is in sharp contrast to Nawaz’s hands-off approach, but the two brothers espouse a similar pro-business ideology. Their biggest difference may be in their relations with the military, which plays an outsized role in Pakistani politics and currently controls key areas of policy such as relations with India and the United States.

Published : April 10, 2022

By : Reuters

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The Russian Defence Ministry has dismissed Ukraine reports that Russia launched a missile attack on a railway station in the Donetsk region on Friday resulting in multiple civilian casualties.

The Russian Embassy in Bangkok on Saturday published the Russian Defence Ministry’s statement on its Facebook page.

“All statements by representatives of the Kyiv nationalist regime about an alleged missile attack by Russia on the railway station in Kramatorsk city on April 8 are a provocation and absolutely untrue,” the statement said.

It maintained that the Russian armed forces had no plans to carry out any attacks on the city that day.

The Russians also claimed that the Tochka-U tactical missiles, the wreckage of which was found near the Kramatorsk railway station and published by eyewitnesses, are used by the Ukrainian armed forces only.

On March 14, 2022, a Tochka-U missile struck the centre of Donetsk, killing 17 people on the spot and injuring another 36 civilians, the statement said.

Published : April 09, 2022

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The Ax-1 mission is the first American all-private human spaceflight mission to the ISS.

NASA, Axiom Space, and SpaceX launched a first private astronaut mission to the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday.

The four-person multinational crew is composed of Commander Michael López-Alegría and Pilot Larry Connor of the United States, Mission Specialist Eytan Stibbe of Israel, and Mission Specialist Mark Pathy of Canada.

The mission, codenamed Ax-1, was launched on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket at 11:17 a.m. Eastern Time from the historic Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

About three minutes after launch, SpaceX confirmed main engine cutoff and stage separation.

Following stage separation, Falcon 9’s first stage landed on the A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.

The Dragon spacecraft supporting this mission previously flew the Demo-2 and Crew-2 missions.

The crew is scheduled to dock with the ISS at approximately 5:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Saturday.

During the 10-day mission, the crew will spend eight days on the International Space Station, conducting scientific research, outreach, and commercial activities, according to NASA.

Their scientific research includes self-assembling technology for satellites and future space habitats, cancer stem cell study, and air purification, according to Axiom Space.

The Ax-1 mission is the first American all-private human spaceflight mission to the ISS.

The mission represents both a culmination of NASA’s efforts to foster a commercial market in low-Earth orbit, and a beginning of a new era of space exploration that enables more people to fly on more kinds of missions, said NASA.

“This private astronaut mission is one part of our overall effort,” said Angela Hart, manager for NASA’s Commercial Low-Earth Orbit Development program.

“We’re also enabling the commercial activities the crew will conduct on the space station, and we’re working with private industry to develop future commercial stations in orbit to create a robust ecosystem of destinations for future space travelers,” Hart said.

Published : April 09, 2022

By : Xinhua

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One reason why many cancers are so dangerous is that they metastasize. A new study led by Chinese scientists revealed that the bacteria in the tumor cells assist cancer’s relocation and promote cell survival during tumor progression.

Researchers from the Westlake Laboratory of Life Sciences and Biomedicine found that microbes could hijack tumor cells and bolster the strength of those host cells against mechanical stress in the bloodstream.

“Our study reveals that the cancer cell’s behavior is also controlled by the microbes hiding inside tumors, the majority of which were originally thought to be sterile,” said the paper’s senior author Cai Shang with the laboratory.

Cai and his collaborators used a mouse model of breast cancer with significant amounts of living bacteria inside cells, similar to human breast cancer.

The bacteria in the cancer tissue is about 10 times richer than those in normal mammary tissue, according to the study published on Thursday in the journal Cell.

They found that the microbes can travel through the circulatory system with the cancer cells and those passenger bacteria are able to regulate the network of cellular actin, a protein that participates in many kinds of cell movement, including muscle contraction.

The study also showed that those microbes specialized in relocating cancer cells, instead of affecting the carcinoma in situ.

“Only one shot of bacteria injection into the breast tumor can cause a tumor that originally rarely metastasizes to start to metastasize,” said Cai.

Then, the researchers injected antibiotics into the mice’s blood to specifically eliminate the tumor bacteria. They found that the tumor did not shrink but the lung metastasis noticeably decreased.

Also, injecting those microbes back into the mice, metastasis noticeably increased, according to the study.

Tumor cells in the blood tend to die under mechanical stress called “flow shear pressure,” but the microbes within could make them stronger by rebuilding their skeletons, the researchers tried to explain.

The study did not explain how the bacteria manage to invade and thrive in the tumor cells so as to render such postitive mutualism.

The researchers said a further in-depth study could lend a clue to a new strategy in properly implementing antibiotics for cancer therapeutics in the clinic.

Currently, the findings do not prove that using antibiotics during cancer treatment will benefit patients, said Cai.

Published : April 09, 2022

By : Xinhua

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Shanghai has built over 100 makeshift hospitals for COVID-19 treatment with over 160,000 beds, the Shanghai municipal government said at a press conference on Saturday.

There are also eight designated hospitals with over 8,000 beds in Shanghai, and more will come into operation this weekend. Resources will be further transferred to and reserved in the designated hospitals and makeshift hospitals, said Zong Ming, vice mayor of Shanghai.

Shanghai reported 1,015 new locally-transmitted confirmed COVID-19 cases and 22,609 local asymptomatic carriers on Friday.

Citywide antigen testing is being carried out on Saturday and another citywide nucleic acid testing is planned to contain the epidemic, according to the press conference. 

Published : April 09, 2022

By : Xinhua