Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine
(AFP)
North Korean hackers tried to break into the computer systems of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer in a search for information on a coronavirus vaccine and treatment technology, South Korea’s spy agency said Tuesday, according to reports.
The impoverished, nuclear-armed North has been under self-imposed isolation since closing its borders in January last year to try to protect itself from the virus that first emerged in neighbouring China and has gone on to sweep the world, killing more than two million people.
Leader Kim Jong Un has repeatedly insisted that the country has had no coronavirus cases, although outside experts doubt those assertions.
And the closure has added to the pressure on its tottering economy from international sanctions imposed over its banned weapons systems, increasing the urgency for Pyongyang to find a way to deal with the disease.
Seoul’s National Intelligence Service “briefed us that North Korea tried to obtain technology involving the Covid vaccine and treatment by using cyberwarfare to hack into Pfizer”, MP Ha Tae-keung told reporters after a hearing behind closed doors.
North Korea is known to operate an army of thousands of well-trained hackers who have attacked firms, institutions and researchers in the South and elsewhere.
Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine, developed jointly with Germany’s BioNTech, began winning approval from authorities late last year.
It is based on technology that uses the synthetic version of a molecule called “messenger RNA” to hack into human cells and effectively turn them into vaccine-making factories.
Pfizer says it expects to potentially deliver up to 2 billion doses in 2021.
The company’s South Korean office did not immediately respond to a request for comment by AFP.
© 2021 AFP
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After a seven-month journey, NASA’s Perseverance rover prepares to touch down on Mars on Thursday after first negotiating a risky landing procedure that will mark the start of its multi-year search for signs of ancient microbial life.
The Mars 2020 mission, which set off late from Florida in late July, includes the largest ever vehicle to be dispatched to the Red Planet.
<p>Built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it weighs a ton, has a robotic arm that’s seven feet (two meters) long, has 19 cameras, and two microphones to record the Martian soundscape.</p><p>Should it arrive intact, Perseverance will be only the fifth rover to successfully complete the journey since Pathfinder in 1997. All have been American and the last, Curiosity, is still active.</p><p>China last week placed its Tianwen-1 spacecraft in orbit around Mars carrying both a lander and a rover, which it is hoped to land in May.</p><p>At around 3:55pm EST Thursday (2055 GMT), Perseverance will place its six wheels on a landing site described as “spectacular” by Ken Farley, a NASA scientist.</p><p>Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer-wide) basin located in the Martian northern hemisphere, had been considered for previous missions, but was considered too difficult to land in until now.</p><p>Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the mission control room will have fewer people than normal.</p><p>”But assuming we do have confirmation of landing, I don’t think Covid is gonna be able to stop us from jumping up and down and fist pumping,” said Matt Wallace, the mission’s deputy project manager.</p><p>The first low resolution photos of the surface will arrive quickly. Video footage, including entry into the atmosphere, is expected later.</p><h1>Lakes and rivers</h1><p>Scientists believe that around 3.5 billion years ago, the crater was home to a river that flowed into a lake, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta.</p><p>During this period, “Mars was very similar to Earth in several important ways,” said Farley.</p><p>”It had a substantial atmosphere, it had lakes and rivers on its surface, and it had habitable environments, places where organisms that we know about on earth today could have thrived.”</p><p>Mars is the only known place where such conditions arose outside our planet.</p><p>Mars 2020 is the first mission with the explicit aim of finding evidence that life once existed there.</p><p>Over the course of several years, Perseverance will collect and store up to 30 rock and soil samples that will eventually be returned to Earth where labs will analyze them. </p><p>Its top speed is 152 meters per hour (about 0.1 miles per hour) — sluggish by Earth standards but faster than any of its predecessors, as it traverses first the delta, then the ancient lake shore, and finally the edges of the crater.</p><p>The rover could return the samples as part of a planned joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency in the 2030s.</p><p>”The scientists who will analyze these samples are in school today, they might not even be born yet,” said Farley.</p><h1>Producing oxygen</h1><p>What would these long awaited signs of life look like? “We should not be looking for fossil teeth or fossil bones or fossil leaves,” he said. </p><p>Rather, it’s hunting for organic molecules and other signs of past microbial life, a discovery that would be “fabulous.”</p><p>The first months of the mission won’t however be devoted to this primary objective. Parallel experiments are also planned.</p><p>NASA notably wants to fly, for the first time, a powered aircraft on another planet. The helicopter, dubbed Ingenuity, must be able to ascend in an atmosphere just one percent the density of Earth’s.</p><p>Another goal is to help pave the way for future human missions, by developing a system that can convert oxygen from Mars’ primarily carbon dioxide atmosphere, much like a plant.</p><p>The space agency is deploying an instrument called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), using a process called electrolysis to produce about 10 grams of oxygen an hour.</p><p>NASA is spending approximately $2.4 billion on the Mars 2020 million. Landing and operating the rover costs around $300 million.</p>
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Johnny Pacheco, the Dominican-born musician considered one of the fathers of salsa, died Monday at the age of 85 in New Jersey, his family said.
A musician, composer and producer, Pacheco founded the Fania Records label, as well as the historic Fania All Stars band, which included salsa icons Celia Cruz, Hector Lavoe and Willie Colon.
<p>”With great pain in my soul and an emptiness in my heart I inform you that maestro Johnny Pacheco passed away this afternoon with great peace,” his wife, Cuqui Pacheco, said in a statement published on the musician’s official Facebook page.</p><p>”A thousand thanks for all your prayers and all the love you always gave him.”</p><p>Pacheco had been urgently hospitalized a few days ago for pneumonia.</p><p>Born Juan Azarias Pacheco in Santiago de los Caballeros, in the northern Dominican Republic, on March 25, 1935, he emigrated to New York as a child with his family.</p><p>There, he studied at the Juilliard arts school and began his musical career in the 1950s. He rose to fame with his band Pacheco y Su Charanga.</p><p>He founded Fania Records in 1964 with attorney Gerald Masucci.</p><p>He recorded or composed more than 100 songs during his career, including “El Faisan” and “Quitate tu.”</p><p>”DEP (Rest In Peace) my dear friend and teacher,” Colon tweeted after Pacheco’s death was announced, calling his former bandmate “unique.”</p>
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The United Nations warned Tuesday that Iraq could spin out of control after a rocket attack on the Kurdish regional capital Arbil killed a foreign contractor for the US military and wounded several other people.
The attack late Monday was the first time in nearly two months that Western military or diplomatic installations have been targeted in Iraq after a series of similar incidents last year that were blamed on pro-Iranian Shiite factions.
<p>The United Nations’ top representative in Iraq, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, slammed the attack on Tuesday morning.</p><p>”Such heinous, reckless acts pose grave threats to stability,” she posted on Twitter, calling for “restraint” and cooperation between the federal and regional governments on a probe.</p><p>On Monday evening, more than a dozen 107 mm rockets — the same calibre used in attacks in Baghdad — were fired from around eight kilometers (five miles) west of Arbil.</p><p>They appeared to be targeted at a military complex in Arbil airport that hosts foreign troops deployed as part of a US-led coalition helping Iraq fight jihadists since 2014.</p><p>But they struck all over the northwest of the city, including residential neighborhoods where they wounded five civilians, the Arbil health directorate told AFP.</p><p>Coalition spokesman Wayne Marotto said three rockets hit Arbil airport, killing one foreign civilian contractor who is not an American national.</p><p>Another nine people were wounded, including eight civilian contractors and one US soldier, he said.</p><p>By Tuesday morning, the remnants of the rockets had been cleared, leaving small craters in the paved streets of Arbil and in the plaster walls outside homes. </p><p>”Of course this bombing affected us — it put our lives at risk,” said resident Nariman Mohammad, 51. </p><p>”I don’t see any meaning to any of this. We’re also people, and we want to live.”</p><p>After being closed to flights throughout the morning, Arbil airport resumed its normal schedule at midday (0900 GMT), a government spokesman told AFP.</p><h1>US ‘outraged'</h1><p>Late Monday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he was “outraged” by the attack and pledged US support in holding those responsible to account.</p><p>”I have reached out to Kurdistan Regional Government Prime Minister Masrour Barzani to discuss the incident and to pledge our support for all efforts to investigate and hold accountable those responsible,” he said.</p><p>Barzani had earlier condemned the attack “in the strongest terms,” while Iraqi President Barham Saleh called it a “dangerous escalation and a criminal terrorist act”.</p><p>Western military and diplomatic facilities have been targeted by dozens of rockets and roadside bombs since late 2019, but most of the attacks have been on Baghdad, not Arbil.</p><p>Several of the attacks have been deadly, with both foreign and Iraqi personnel killed. </p><p>Iraqi and US security officials have blamed hardline pro-Iran factions, including Kataeb Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq, which are both vehemently opposed to the US presence in Iraq.</p><p>Late Monday, a shadowy group calling itself Awliyaa al-Dam (Guardians of Blood) said it carried out the attack but security officials have told AFP they believe it to be a front group for those same prominent pro-Iran factions. </p><p>Authorities have struggled to hold them to account.</p><p>Last year, an attempt by Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi to arrest more than a dozen members of Kataeb Hezbollah accused of rocket attacks ended in the swift release of all but one of the fighters. </p><p>Instead, then US president Donald Trump ordered several rounds of bombing raids on Kataeb Hezbollah in response to the deaths of US service members.</p><h1>Troop drawdown</h1><p>Before leaving office in January, Trump had threatened that any further fatal attacks would prompt a mass bombing campaign, with Iraqi sources telling AFP that more than 100 sites would be targeted. </p><p>Iraqi and even US officials have told AFP in recent weeks that it was not clear whether the Joe Biden administration would pursue the same “tripwire.”</p><p>Since Iraq declared victory over the Islamic State group in late 2017, the coalition presence has been reduced to fewer than 3,500 troops, 2,500 of them American.</p><p>Most are concentrated at the military complex at Arbil airport, a coalition source told AFP. </p><p>Arbil has been targeted very rarely, although Iranian forces fired missiles at the same airport in January last year, a few days after Washington assassinated prominent Iranian general Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad airport.</p><p>Both Iran and hardline Iraqi armed groups have repeatedly pledged to take revenge for Soleimani’s killing.</p><p>The same groups have recently vowed to boost their military activity in the Kurdistan region, ostensibly against a Turkish incursion.</p>
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