Deeply grateful for support shown by global community to India's membership of UNSC: PM Modi

Washington, Jul 1: The United States has approved four coronavirus vaccine candidates for clinical trials, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) head Stephen Hahn told reporters.

"Four vaccines have been approved for moving into clinical trials... and another six are in the pipeline for us to review," Hahn said during a press briefing on Tuesday.

The US Administration launched in May Operation Warp Speed, a joint project of Health and Defense Departments, which aims to deliver 300 million doses of a vaccine for COVID-19 by January 2021.

The country's top pandemics expert Anthony Fauci warned on Tuesday, however, that there is no certainty the United States will be able to develop a vaccine against COVID-19 that works and will be safe.

Data on vaccine effectiveness, he added, may be available in the winter or early next year.

Beijing, Feb 6: The number of confirmed fatalities from China's coronavirus outbreak rose to at least 560, after authorities in hardest-hit Hubei province reported 70 new deaths on February 6.

In its daily update, the health commission in Hubei also confirmed the number of confirmed infections in the outbreak has reached 28,018 nationwide with 3,694 new cases reported.

The epidemic, which has spiralled into a global health emergency, is believed to have emerged in December from a market that sold wild game in Hubei's capital Wuhan.

Hu Lishan, an official in Wuhan, warned Wednesday that despite building a hospital from scratch and converting public buildings to accommodate thousands of extra patients, there was still a "severe" lack of beds in the region.

There was also a shortage of "equipment and materials," he told reporters, adding that officials were looking to convert other hotels and schools in the city into treatment centres.

Authorities in several other cities in China have placed restrictions on the number of people allowed to leave their homes.

Global concerns have also risen about the virus, with cases confirmed in more than 20 countries.

Jan 13: India lost more than $1.33 billion to internet restrictions in 2019 as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government pushed ahead with his party’s Hindu nationalist agenda, raising tensions and sparking nationwide protests.

The worst shutdown has been in Kashmir, where after intermittent closures in the first half of the year, the internet has been cut off since Aug. 5 following the government’s decision to revoke the special autonomous status of the country’s only Muslim-majority state, a study said. The prologued closure was criticized by India’s highest court, which ruled Friday that the “limitless” internet shutdown enforced by the government for the last five months was illegal and asked that it be reviewed.

India imposed more internet restrictions than any other large democracy, according to the Cost of Internet Shutdowns 2019 report released by Top10VPN, a U.K.-based digital privacy and security research group. The South Asian nation recorded the third-highest losses after Iraq and Sudan, which lost $2.31 billion and $1.86 billion respectively to disruptions. Worldwide internet restrictions caused losses worth $8.05 billion, the report said.

The cost of internet blackouts was calculated using indicators from groups including the World Bank, International Telecommunication Union, and the Delhi-based Software Freedom Law Center. It includes social media shutdowns in its calculations.

India’s ministry of information and technology didn’t respond to an email seeking a response to the report’s findings.

‘Conservative Estimates’

Through 2019, India shut access to the internet for over 4,000 hours. The report added shutdowns in India were often narrowly targeted, down to the level of blocking city districts for a few hours to allow security forces to restore order. Many of these incidents were not included in the report.

“These are conservative estimates,” said Simon Migliano, head of research at U.K.-based Top10VPN. “Internet shutdowns are increasing and it shows a damaging trend.”

India’s other major internet disruptions coincided with two moves by the government that affect India’s Muslim minority. The first disruption took place in November in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan after the Supreme Court handed a victory to Hindu groups over Muslim petitioners in a long-simmering dispute over a plot of land.

There were further disruptions in December when protests erupted against the introduction of a religion-based law that allows undocumented migrants of all faiths except Islam from neighbouring countries to seek Indian citizenship. The government enforced shutdowns across Uttar Pradesh and some Northeastern states in order to quell the protests, the report said.