Day: December 6, 2021

Twenty-one people, including two Frenchmen, went on trial in Madagascar on Monday accused of a plot to stage a coup and assassinate President Andry Rajoelina.

The defendants face charges ranging from criminal association to compromising state security and planning to kill the head of state.

The alleged operation has been called the “Apollo 21” plot.

The defendants “put together a plan to eliminate or neutralise various Malagasy public figures including the head of state,” according to the prosecution.

The two Frenchmen are Paul Rafanoharana, 58, a dual French-Malagasy national who is a former advisor to the president, and Philippe Francois, 54, an ex-colonel in the French army, who ran an investment company in Madagascar called Tsarafirst.

The spouses of the pair are also among the defendants.

A clean-shaven Rafanoharana, wearing a dark blue suit and black glasses, smiled repeatedly to friends in the public throughout the first hours of the court sitting.

Francois, dressed in a white shirt, appeared thin and tired-looking.

Dozens of special forces and police officers lined the room’s faded yellow walls, an AFP stringer said at the scene. Some were armed and in plainclothes.

Some of the 21 have been placed under legal supervision while others, including the two French nationals, are in prison detention.

Arlette Rafanomadio, defending Rafanoharana and his wife, told AFP at the weekend that the trial was “unjust.”

“We haven’t had enough time to prepare our defence strategy and access to our clients has been difficult,” she said.

In a case whose supporting documents run to 400 pages, she had been able to spoke to her clients for just half an hour on Friday, Rafanomadio added.

A group of Francois’ former classmates at France’s elite Saint-Cyr military academy said in a statement that they were certain of his innocence and urged “the calmest debates possible and respect for the defendants’ rights” during the trial.

Journalists were allowed to attend the public hearing, which defence lawyers said should last three or four days, although cameras have been banned.

Source: Seychelles News Agency

Three 2021 Nobel Prize laureates said Monday that climate change is the biggest threat facing the world — yet they remain optimistic — as this year’s winners began receiving their awards at scaled-down local ceremonies adapted for pandemic times.

For a second year, COVID-19 has scuttled the traditional formal banquet in Stockholm attended by winners of the prizes in chemistry, physics, medicine, literature and economics, which were announced in October. The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded separately in Oslo, Norway.

Literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah was first to get his prize in a lunchtime ceremony Monday at the Swedish ambassador’s grand Georgian residence in central London.

Ambassador Mikaela Kumlin Granit said the U.K.-based Tanzanian author had been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

“Customarily you would receive the prize from the hands of His Majesty, the king of Sweden,” she told Gurnah at the ceremony attended by friends, family and colleagues. “However, this year you will be celebrated with a distance forced upon us because of the pandemic.”

Gurnah, who grew up on the island of Zanzibar and arrived in England as an 18-year-old refugee in the 1960s, has drawn on his experiences for 10 novels, including “Memory of Departure,” “Pilgrims Way,” “Afterlives” and “Paradise.” He has said migration is “not just my story — it’s a phenomenon of our times.”

Italian physics laureate Giorgio Parisi was receiving his prize at a ceremony in Rome. U.S.-based physics laureate Syukuro Manabe, chemistry laureate David W.C. MacMillan and economic sciences laureate Joshua D. Angrist will be given their medals and diplomas in Washington.

MacMillan, German physics prize winner Klaus Hasselmann and economics prize winner Guido Imbens, who is Dutch but lives in the United States, had a joint virtual news conference Monday where they were asked what they consider the biggest problem facing humanity and what they worry about most. All three answered climate change, with Imbens calling it the world’s “overarching problem.”

“Climate change is something which is clearly going to have a large impact on society,” MacMillan said. “But at the same time given the science, given the call to arms amongst scientists, I really feel more optimism. And I feel there’s a real moment happening with scientists moving towards trying to solve this problem.”

“I would bet on that fact that we would solve this problem,” MacMillan said.

Hasselmann, whose work on climate change won him the prize, said he’s more hopeful because the world’s youth and movements like Fridays for the Future “have picked up the challenge and are getting across the message to the public that we have to act and respond to the problem.”

Hasselmann said he’s more optimistic now about climate change than 20 or 30 years ago.

Imbens said he also is disturbed that misinformation, especially about COVID-19 and vaccines, is splitting society apart. He recalled growing up in the Netherlands and nearly everyone agreed on the need for the polio vaccine.

“And yet, here we don’t seem to have found a way of making these decisions that we can all live with,” Imbens said. “And that’s clearly made it much harder to deal with the pandemic.”

More ceremonies will be held throughout the week in Germany and the United States. On Friday — the anniversary of the death of prize founder Albert Nobel — there will be a celebratory ceremony at Stockholm City Hall for a local audience, including King Carl XVI Gustav and senior Swedish royals.

A Nobel Prize comes with a diploma, a gold medal and a $1.5 million (10-million krona) cash award, which is shared if there are multiple winners.

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo because Nobel wanted it that way, for reasons he kept to himself. A ceremony is due to be held there Friday for the winners — journalists Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia.

The Norwegian news agency NTB said the festivities would be scaled down, with fewer guests and participants required to wear face masks. Norway has seen an uptick in cases of the new omicron variant, and a spokesman for the Norwegian Nobel Committee told NTB it was “in constant contact with the health authorities in Oslo.”

Source: Voice of America

More than 5 million people worldwide have had their lives cut short by COVID-19, and the number keeps rising as many countries experience another wave of transmission.

The best defense against this disease is a vaccine, experts say.

Since the outbreak was first reported in 2019, the best scientists all over the world have been working on a vaccine to protect against SARS CoV 2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The acronym stands for “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2” to distinguish it from the first SARS outbreak in 2003.

Historically, when scientists make vaccines, they have used a live virus that is so weak it can’t reproduce, or they use a dead virus. When these weakened or inactive viruses are injected into the body, the body recognizes them as intruders, produces antibodies and fights them off.

Polio vaccines have used both weakened live viruses as well as dead ones with enormous success. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative reports that polio cases were reduced by 99.9% between 1988, when the global effort to eliminate polio was started, and 2021. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that without the global polio vaccination program, more than 18 million people who are currently healthy would have been paralyzed by the virus.

As of December 6, three children in the entire world have contracted the wild polio virus in 2021.

Three of the vaccines developed against COVID-19 are vector vaccines. A vector is simply a delivery system. In this case, scientists use an adenovirus — a cold virus, for example — to deliver a fragment of the coronavirus. The fragment is a gene from a spike on the crown of the coronavirus. This trains the body to fight off any other similar infections, including COVID-19.

The spike cannot infect someone with the coronavirus.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine uses a chimpanzee virus, not a human one. The Johnson & Johnson and Sputnik V vaccines use human adenoviruses. J&J uses a rare adenovirus. Sputnik V uses the same virus in its first dose. In its second dose, Sputnik V uses a common adenovirus that some people might be immune to. For this reason, many scientists are concerned that Sputnik V may not be an effective vaccine.

Once injected, the viruses enter the cells and start to produce the spike protein, but not COVID-19. Then, the body mounts an attack.

Dr. Andrea Cox, a professor with a specialty in immunology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, says our bodies don’t just mount an immune response to the adenovirus, but they also produce an immune response to the spike protein from the coronavirus. In this way, the body learns to fight off the coronavirus if it sees it again.

The World Health Organization has authorized use of the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines but not Sputnik V. The WHO says it needs more data from the Sputnik V trials.

Cox says the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are preferred because they have been given to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Scientists have more information about their side effects and their immune responses than Sputnik V’s simply because Sputnik has been used far less frequently and there are fewer international studies that have assessed it.

Another issue with Sputnik V, Cox says, is “that the data are not showing the kinds of efficacy rates that we would like to see in a vaccine.”

Some scientists expect COVID-19 to be with us for three to four years. But even with the best scientists in the world working on vaccines, they are concerned that as the virus continues to infect unvaccinated people and mutate, at some point, the vaccines we have now won’t be able to offer full protection against COVID-19.

Source: Voice of America