North Korea rouses neighbours to reconsider nuclear weapons

As North Korea races to build a weapon that for the first time could threaten American cities, its neighbours are debating whether they need their own nuclear arsenals.

The North’s rapidly advancing capabilities have scrambled military calculations across the region, and doubts are growing the United States will be able to keep the atomic genie in the bottle.

For the first time in recent memory, there is a daily argument raging in both South Korea and Japan — sometimes in public, more often in private — about the nuclear option, driven by worry that the United States might hesitate to defend the countries if doing so might provoke a missile launched from the North at Los Angeles or Washington.

In South Korea, polls show 60 per cent of the population favours building nuclear weapons. And nearly 70 per cent want the United States to reintroduce tactical nuclear weapons for battlefield use. There is very little public support for nuclear arms in Japan, the only nation ever to suffer a nuclear attack, but many experts believe that could reverse quickly if North and South Korea both had arsenals.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has campaigned for a military build-up against the threat from the North, and Japan sits on a stockpile of nuclear material that could power an arsenal of 6,000 weapons.

This brutal calculus over how to respond to North Korea is taking place in a region where several nations have the material, the technology, the expertise and the money to produce nuclear weapons. Beyond South Korea and Japan, there is already talk in Australia, Myanmar, Taiwan and Vietnam about whether it makes sense to remain nuclear-free if others arm themselves — heightening fears that North Korea could set off a chain reaction in which one nation after another feels threatened and builds the bomb.
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China to benefit more from CPEC than Pakistan will: Report

The multibillion-dollar China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is part of Chinese President Xi Jinping's 'Belt and Road Initiative', will benefit China more than Pakistan due to lack of Pakistani input in the project.

The lack of Pakistani input into the CPEC, which the government said would drive economic growth to a targeted 6 per cent this financial year, adds to concerns that its benefits might not be as widely distributed as initially thought, the South China Morning Post reported, adding that it runs the risk that Islamabad will be left paying interest on loans to Chinese banks way into the future.

According to the news report, Chinese banks are keenly waiting to get their share of the pie, holding more than $20 billion for potential financing, much of it has already been filled by the Chinese, with Pakistani lenders getting a little look in.

"As of now, around $6 billion to $7 billion worth of projects are likely going on. Out of that, 10 per cent, or around 50 billion rupees ($470 million), can be local financing," the South China Morning Post quoted Saad Hashemy, research director at Karachi brokerage Topline Securities, as saying.
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Britain's four-year-old Prince George on ISIS hit list: Report

Britain's Prince George is on the hit list of the Islamic State terror group which has threatened to kill the four-year-old son of Prince William and Kate Middleton, according to a UK media report.

The threat appeared as part of a message posted by ISIS members on social media.

George, who is the third-in-line to the British throne, had started his term at a primary school near the family's Kensington Palace home in central London last month.

According to the 'Star on Sunday', apicture was posted of George next to his new school Thomas's Batterseawith the caption "School Starts Early" on a popular ISIS channel on the secretive messaging service Telegram.

The newspaper said the post also featured words in Arabic which translate as - "When war comes with the melody of bullets, we descend on disbelief, desiring retaliation".

ISIS is known to favour Telegram because messages are encrypted and keep the user's location hidden.

The newspaper claimed its investigators discovered the message that seemed to target the young royal.

British intelligence officials are believed to be regularly monitoring the messaging service for ISIS activity.
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Scientists develop experimental vaccine to prevent HIV

Scientists have developed a novel vaccine candidate that may prevent HIV infection by stimulating an immune response against sugars that form a protective shield around the virus.

"An obstacle to creating an effective HIV vaccine is the difficulty of getting the immune system to generate antibodies against the sugar shield of multiple HIV strains," said Lai-Xi Wang, a professor at University of Maryland in the US.

"Our method addresses this problem by designing a vaccine component that mimics a protein-sugar part of this shield," said Wang.

Researchers designed a vaccine candidate using an HIV protein fragment linked to a sugar group. When injected into rabbits, the vaccine candidate stimulated antibody responses against the sugar shield in four different HIV strains.

The protein fragment of the vaccine candidate comes from gp120, a protein that covers HIV like a protective envelope.

A sugar shield covers the gp120 envelope, bolstering HIV's defenses. The rare HIV-infected individuals who can keep the virus at bay without medication typically have antibodies that attack gp120.

Researchers have tried to create an HIV vaccine targeting gp120, but had little success as the sugar shield on HIV resembles sugars found in the human body and therefore does not stimulate a strong immune response.
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Twitter bans Trump's ex-adviser Roger Stone for abusing journalists

Twitter has suspended the account of US President Donald Trump's former adviser Roger Stone after he sent a volley of tweets threatening several journalists at the CNN news channel.

Stone, a Republican political operative and longtime friend of Trump, went on a vicious, profane tirade after CNN on Friday night reported that a federal grand jury in Washington DC had filed initial charges in the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election.

Stone attacked several CNN anchors and contributors by name including Jake Tapper, Bill Kristol, Carl Bernstein, Don Lemon and Ana Navarro as well as New York Times columnist Charles Blow.

He called Lemon an "ignorant lying c********r", and a "dull witted arrogant partyboi", adding: "You fake news you dumb piece of s**t."

In addition to throwing insults, he insisted that Lemon should be "confronted, humiliated, mocked and punished" while Tapper should be "very severely punished", the recode.net reported late on Saturday.

His account was suspended permanently on Saturday as his tweets violate Twitter's anti-abuse rules, which state that users cannot incite or engage in the targeted abuse or harassment of others.

This is not the first time Stone's account has been banned.

His account was suspended in March and again in April after he wrote threatening tweets to a spokeswoman of Media Matters, a progressive media watchdog group.
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They shot my 2 daughters in front of me: Rohingya tell stories of loss

If there’s anything positive about the sprawling Rohingya refugee camps near Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh, it’s that the residents – despite their appalling recent experiences and obvious deprivation – are at least safe here from Myanmar’s military.

I’ve been visiting Rohingya refugee camps close to the Bangladesh/Myanmar border, and the scale of the forced migration is truly horrifying. Land unoccupied in late August is now a cramped shanty city of bamboo, tarpaulin and mud that seems to go on forever.

Interviews in the camps paint a desperately sad picture. The details of these interviews are invariably confronting and often distressing, and explain why so many Rohingya fled Myanmar so quickly.

A farmer becomes understandably emotional when he tells me:

I lost my two sons, and two daughters. At midnight the military come in my house and burnt the house, but first they raped my two daughters and they shot my two daughters in front of me.

I have no words to express how it was for me to suffer to look at my daughters being raped and killed in front of me. My two sons were also killed by the government. I was not able to get the dead bodies of my daughters, it is a great sorrow for me.
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Body of Sherin Mathews released by US officials, no confirmation to whom

The body of 3-year-old Indian born Sherin Mathews who disappeared from her Indian-American foster parents home in Richardson has been released by the Dallas County medical examiner's office, though it declined to say to whom.

Sherin, who went missing on October 7 from her suburban Dallas home, was found dead in a culvert on October 22.

The missing child has become an international point of discussion and has raised several questions on the process of adoption.

Sherin was adopted last year by the Indian-American couple, Wesley Mathews and Sini Mathews.

Wesley Mathews was re-arrested after he changed his story about Sherin's disappearance from their home. He had earlier claimed that she went missing after he sent her outside their home at around 3 am as punishment for not drinking her milk.

On Monday, Wesley voluntarily told the police that Sherin choked on milk and died in the family's garage before he removed her body from the home.

Police are still investigating how Sherin died and how long her body had been in the drainage ditch located nearly 1 km from her home.
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