WORLD

The coronavirus pandemic may be the most serious in living memory but it should be seen as a recurring challenge and not as a one-off episode, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Thursday, noting that India is particularly going through a difficult situation. Jaishankar also said the nature of the pandemic has also brought to fore concerns of trust and transparency and warned that opacity can no longer be overlooked as it has real implications for the rest of the world.

In an online address at the 'Future of Asia' conference organised by Nikkei, the external affairs minister India, Japan and Australia are working on a supply chain resilience initiative and called for strengthening and de-risking the global economy through effective partnerships. He said meeting the health and medical requirements of the world effectively requires a mature recognition of the global nature of the underlying supply chains. "Barring a select few, it cannot be addressed purely nationally and in fact needs a collaboration of a very different order," Jaishankar said.

President Joe Biden called for significant de-escalation from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday after 10 days of heavy fighting between Israelis and Palestinians. It was Biden's toughest public pressure so far on the U.S. ally, with the president asking Netanyahu in a telephone call to move toward the path to a cease-fire, according to a White House statement on their conversation.

Pressure has been mounting Biden, too, to do more as the death toll in the conflict has topped 200. 

A Spanish study on mixing COVID-19 vaccines has found that giving a dose of Pfizer’s (PFE.N) drug to people who already received a first shot of AstraZeneca (AZN.L) vaccine is highly safe and effective, preliminary results showed on Tuesday.

The Combivacs study, run by Spain’s state-backed Carlos III Health Institute, found the presence of IgG antibodies in the bloodstream was between 30 and 40 times higher in people who got the follow-up Pfizer shot than in a control group who only received one AstraZeneca dose.

Meanwhile, the presence of neutralising antibodies rose sevenfold after a Pfizer dose, significantly more than the doubling effect observed after a second AstraZeneca shot.

In a nuanced statement on the Middle-East situation, India has opposed “indiscriminate rocket firing” by Hamas from Gaza to target civilian population in Israel while supporting the Palestinian cause and its commitment to the two-state solution.

While the UN Security Council could not issue a statement on the escalating situation after what Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi called a “block by one country”, the US is coming under pressure to reconsider its position on the Israel-Hamas conflict.

The fortune of Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates exceeds the size of Morocco’s annual economy, combines the value of Ford, Twitter and Marriott International and is triple the endowment of Harvard. While few know how their wealth will be divided in the divorce, one thing is clear:

breaking it up can’t be easy.

Gates built one of the great fortunes in human history when he founded Microsoft in 1975 with Paul Allen. The Gateses’ net worth is estimated to be more than $124 billion, and includes assets as varied as trophy real estate, public company stocks and rare artifacts.