The first COVID-19 vaccine to reach phase I clinical trial is safe, well-tolerated, and capable of generating an immune response against the novel coronavirus in humans, says a new research published in The Lancet journal.
According to the study of 108 adults, the vaccine produced neutralising antibodies, and a response mediated by the immune system's T-cells against the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.
However, the scientists, including those from the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology in China said further research is needed to confirm whether the vaccine protects against SARS-COV-2 infection.
In the trial, carried out in 108 healthy adults, the vaccine demonstrated promising results after 28 days, with the final results to be evaluated in six months, the study said.
"These results represent an important milestone. The trial demonstrates that a single dose of the new adenovirus type 5 vectored COVID-19 (Ad5-nCoV) vaccine produces virus-specific antibodies and T cells in 14 days," said 

First COVID-19 vaccine human trial finds it is safe, induces immune response

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Actor Charlie Hunnam is set to star in Spyglass Media Group's adaptation of author Ben Moon's memoir "Denali: A Man A Dog, A Friendship Of A Lifetime".
The film, titled "Denali", will be written and directed by Max Winkler, who recently worked with Hunnam on drama movie "Jungleland", reported Deadline.
Itstarted as an eight-minute film that Moon, who works as a photographer, created as a love letter to his dog.
His memoir, which was published by Penguin Random Housein January this year, chronicles Moon's 15-year friendship with Denali, who Moon rescued from a shelter upon moving to Oregon and feeling an instant connection with the pup.
The two of them set out on an adventure across the American west but their journey was cut short when Moon was diagnosed with colorectal cancer at age 29.
He faced a difficult battle with the disease, but Denali never once left his side, and ultimately, Moon made a full recovery. A short time later, Denali was diagnosed with cancer as well, and it was ..

Charlie Hunnam to lead adaptation of dog story 'Denali'

China has reported 28 new asymptomatic cases, majority of them from COVID-19 epicentre Wuhan, while no new confirmed infection has been detected in the country, health officials said on Saturday.
China's National Health Commission said that so far, 370 asymptomatic cases, including 26 from overseas, were under quarantine.
No new confirmed COVID-19 case was reported on Friday, the health officials said.
It said that 28 new asymptomatic cases were reported in the country on Friday, with majority of them from Wuhan.
Hubei province, for which Wuhan is the capital, has reported 25 new asymptomatic cases on Friday.
The total number of such cases under medical observation in the province was 295 by Friday, the local health commission said.
Asymptomatic cases are those which test COVID-19 positive but develop no symptoms such as fever, cough or sore throat. However, they pose a risk of spreading the disease to others.
Local health authorities are conducting mass testing of all of its 11.2 ...

China reports 28 new asymptomatic coronavirus cases

"Good Omens" duo Michael Sheen and David Tennant are teaming up once again for BBC One's lockdown comedy "Staged".
The show will see the two stars play actors who are furloughed when their upcoming West End production is suddenly brought to a halt.
The six-part series, based on an idea from Simon Evans and Phin Glynn, follows the cast as they try their best to keep the rehearsals on track in lockdown, BBC said in a statement on Friday.
Evans has written and directed the show.
The two actors will be joined by Lucy Eaton and Anna Lundberg, as well as Tennant's wife Georgia Tennant. The show will also have a selection of guest stars, such as Nina Sosanya.
"It's vital that the BBC provides moments of light relief and this mischievous idea shows what great sports Michael and David are in sending themselves up," said Charlotte Moore, Director BBC Content.
The show has been produced by Phin Glynn, Victor Glynn and Georgia Tennant with Sheen and Tennant also serving as executive ...

Michael Sheen, David Tennant reuniting for BBC One's comedy 'Staged'

Abhas Jha, an Indian economist, has been appointed by the World Bank to a key position on climate change and disaster management in South Asia, the global lender said.
Jha's appointment comes at a time when Cyclone Amphan has badly hit West Bengal, Orissa in India and Bangladesh.
In his capacity as World Bank's Practice Manager for Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management for South Asia, one of the top priorities of Jha will be to encourage and help the South Asia region (SAR) Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change team to connect and collaborate across Global Practice boundaries, the bank said in a statement on Friday.
And also to the World Bank to conceive and deliver innovative and high-quality development solutions to respond to client demands and strengthen disaster risk management and climate action in the region, the statement said.
Based out of Singapore, Jha will also work closely with other Practice Managers, Global Leads and Global Solutions Groups to incubate, ...

Indian economist appointed to key World Bank position in South Asia

Australia's premier fast Pat Cummins is well aware of Chesteshwar Pujara's capabilities, insisting that they will need to "take their medicine" to outlast the Indian middle-order mainstay in the home series this summer.
Pujara's exploits with the bat in India's series win in 2018-19 is still fresh in Cummins' mind and he would like to avoid a repeat of the same in the upcoming tour.
Pujara was the star of India's breakthrough 2-1 series win over Australia, amassing 521 runs from four Tests at an average of 74.42 with three centuries and one fifty.
"He (Pujara) had a mammoth series for them (in 2018-19). He's one of those players that'll take his time, he's in his own little bubble and he doesn't get disturbed by too much," Cummins told cricket.com.au.
"We've got to find a way to outlast him if he bats the way he did last time. There wasn't too much in the pitch so you couldn't manufacture anything. So I think (we need to) take our medicine a bit more and try and outlast him."
Cummins .

Need to find a way to outlast Pujara in summer series: Cummins

A bipartisan group of lawmakers have for the first time introduced a legislation in both the chambers of the US Congress proposing major reforms in the H-1B work visas by giving priority to the best and brightest US-educated foreign youths, a move that could benefit Indian students already in the country.
The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in speciality occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise. Companies depend on it to hire tens of thousands of employees each year from countries like India and China.
On April 1, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said that the US received nearly 275,000 unique registration requests for the Congressional mandated 85,000 H-1B visas for foreign technology professionals, of which more than 67 per cent are from India.
As far as the students are concerned, India accounts for the second largest number of foreign students in the US after China. There are more than ...

Lawmakers introduce H-1B legislation in Congress to give priority to US-educated foreign youths

The Indian-Americans have welcomed the decision of the Indian government to ease the coronavirus-linked global travel restrictions imposed on those having OCI cards, describing it as a big relief for them.
Overseas Citizens of India or OCI card is issued to people of Indian origin globally which gives them almost all the privileges of an Indian national except for the right to vote, government service and buying agricultural land. The OCI card gives them a visa free travel to India.
On Friday, the central government allowed certain categories of OCI card holders, who are stranded abroad, to come to the country. Earlier, according to the regulations issued by the Indian government in April, visas of foreign nationals and OCI cards were suspended as part of the new international travel restrictions following the COVID-19 pandemic.
This privilege of visa free travel to India was causing distress among a large number of people of Indian-origin and Indian citizens in countries like the US .

COVID19: Indian-Americans welcome relaxation in visa, travel restrictions for OCI card holders

Bianca Andreescu and Sofia Kenin, winners of the past two Grand Slam titles, headline a 16-player field for an invitational women's tennis tournament in Charleston, South Carolina in June.
The Tennis Channel is set to air the event and a release on Tennis.com said 16 WTA players would take part, divided into teams and playing 16 singles matches and eight doubles matches.
The tournament starts June 23 and is so far the largest scale tennis event to be confirmed since the ATP and WTA tours were shut down amid the coronavirus pandemic with the French Open postponed and Wimbledon cancelled outright.
Canada's Andreescu, the reigning US Open champion, and Australian Open winner Kenin head the field, but it will be Americans Madison Keys and Bethanie Mattek-Sands serving as team captains.
Former world No. 1 Victoria Azarenka, 2017 US Open champion Sloane Stephens and 2016 Olympic gold medalist Monica Puig are also scheduled to compete.
Charleston has long hosted a WTA tournament, but this ...

Slam winners Andreescu, Kenin headline June tennis invitational field

Formula 1 teams have agreed to cap spending at $145 million next season as the sport attempts to counter the financial fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, media reports claimed.
With the 2020 season yet to get underway and with 10 of the scheduled 22 races already either cancelled or postponed, the 10 teams hammered out the new agreement.
The BBC reported that the teams voted to lower the budget cap to be introduced in 2021 by $30m to $145m.
This will be reduced again to $140m in 2022 and $135m for the period 2023-25.  Other measures were also agreed, said the report, including a research-and-development handicap system.
Friday's agreement still needs to be officially approved by the world motorsport council of governing body the FIA next week.
Initially, a spending cap of $175 million was set to be introduced next year in a bid to help even up the competition.
But that was before international sport was halted by the global pandemic.
Earlier this month, F1's managing director Ross 

F1 teams agree to cut costs with budget limit of $145m - report

Bayern Munich will not activate a 120-million-euro ($130 million) option to buy on-loan Brazilian star Philippe Coutinho from Barcelona, the German champions' chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge told Der Spiegel magazine.
The option expired and "we haven't activated it," said Rummenigge.
"Now we're going to draw up squad planning internally (for next season) and we'll see if he still has a role to play with us or not." Coutinho joined Bayern last August but has failed to shine on a consistent basis.
He featured in 23 of 25 league games before the season was halted in March due to the coronavirus but started just 15 times.
Coutinho, who has eight goals and six assists to his name, sat out last weekend's resumption of the season having undergone ankle surgery in April.
Rummenigge also said there will be a tightening of belts in the transfer market once the crisis had passed.
So much so that paying a club record fee for a player would not be an option.

Bayern won't exercise 120-million-euro option to buy Coutinho

Tiger Woods couldn't resist a little last-minute needling before Sunday's charity showdown with Phil Mickelson, with a deadpan prediction that he and partner Peyton Manning would dominate.
"At the end of the day, our team's going to win, it's just a matter of how much we're going to win by," 15-time major champion Woods said in an interview posted on Golf Digest's YouTube channel.
"Do we keep it close, do we blow them out ... we don't want to have viewers turn off if we're 9-up through nine, that's probably not going to be good. So we'll just be 8-up through nine -- something like that."
Reigning Masters champion Woods will team with Manning, a superstar NFL quarterback who retired in 2016 after winning his second Super Bowl title.
Five-time major winner Mickelson will team with Tom Brady, who recently signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after winning six Super Bowl titles in 20 years with the New England Patriots.
The 18-hole match will include nine holes of four-ball and nine holes 

Woods vows victory in star-studded charity match

Formula One's hopes of hosting two races at Silverstone were dealt a blow as elite sport was not handed any exemption to the UK government's plans to introduce a 14-day quarantine period for those entering the country.
The measures will be introduced from June 8 to help curb the spread of coronavirus, but will reviewed every three weeks meaning an agreement could still be found in time for the two races at Silverstone to go ahead in July.
F1 stressed the need earlier this week for a quarantine exemption by highlighting the impact the new rules will have on "tens of thousands of jobs linked to F1 and supply chains."
However, Silverstone managing director Stuart Pringle is hopeful that an agreement can be reached that allows both races to go ahead.
"I am very clear that the importance of the industry is understood by government," he told Sky Sports.
"So I remain optimistic that a sensible and pragmatic solution, which puts the onus on the sport quite rightly to come up with the right ...

No quarantine exemption puts British Grand Prix at risk

A Paris court has rejected an appeal from relegated French Ligue 1 clubs Toulouse and Amiens as well as rivals Lyon who claimed the season had wrongly been abandoned last month.
While Toulouse and Amiens were both relegated, Lyon fell short of European qualification when time was called on the campaign due to the coronavirus.
When the LFP, which runs the top two divisions in French football, decided late last month to call an end to the season, there were still 10 of the 38 scheduled rounds of games to play.
That was after the French government ruled out any prospect of matches returning before August.
The decision confirmed Paris Saint-Germain as champions and also meant that the bottom two, Amiens and Toulouse, were condemned to Ligue 2.
Lorient and Lens have been promoted in their place.
The judge of the Paris administrative court "has logically retained...that the decisions taken by the league's board of directors on April 30 could only be challenged before the Council of State," .

Court rejects appeals against ending French football season

NASCAR had been planning sweeping changes for 2021 in hopes of finding new fans and adding some energy to a staid, stale schedule.
The coronavirus pandemic put those plans on hold and NASCAR is frantically trying to recover from a 10-week layoff.
So far, the stock car series is succeeding.
NASCAR came up with a health plan that allowed it to resume racing last Sunday at Darlington Raceway, the first of 20 events scheduled in seven Southern states through June 21.
Although spectators are not permitted, making for eerie, empty venues, the racing itself has delivered.
Kevin Harvick scored his 50th career victory in NASCAR's first race back with seemingly everyone watching to see if the safety protocols would work. The next event was the first Cup Series race on a Wednesday in 36 years and it was about as good as it gets for a series dependent on miles upon miles of left turns.
Reigning champion and resident villain Kyle Busch angered fan favorite Chase Elliott, who flipped off his ...

NASCAR grabs much-needed momentum in return to live racing

Mexico's top flight Liga MX cancelled its Clausura campaign with no title winner in a bid to protect the football community in the country.
Mexico has two championships per year, the Apertura and the Clausura, and the latter was halted by coronavirus in March with 10 of the 17 rounds of matches completed.
At a general meeting Liga MX decided to end the term "to make sure nobody in the football family, players, coaches, directors, referees, fans or media, get hurt".  No start date for the next Apertura has been decided.
"Guidelines from the Ministry of Health will establish the date," a statement said.
The move comes a day after attempts to restart the league were hampered when eight Santos Laguna players tested positive for coronavirus.
In mid-April the league had already decided to tackle issues of stability by suspending promotion and relegation for its top two divisions for five years.  With more than 6,000 fatalities, Mexico has the second highest COVID-19 death toll in Latin ...

Mexican season cancelled with no champion to protect 'football family'

Premier League chief executive Richard Masters is confident the top-flight season will resume in June as 'Project Restart' gathers pace.
Clubs returned to socially distanced training in small groups this week and the league hope to begin playing the remaining 92 matches on June 12 or 19.
Premier League players and staff have been checked for the coronavirus, with six people testing positive including Watford defender Adrian Mariappa.
"We've taken the first step. It's great for everybody, including the fans, to see our players back on the training ground," Masters told BBC Sport on Friday.
Masters said he was "as confident as we can be" that teams would be able to start in June.
Asked if the Premier League had an exact date for a return, Masters said the organisation had to be "flexible".
While the top tier is taking baby steps towards emulating the Bundesliga's return to action, leagues in France, Scotland and the Netherlands have been abandoned because of the pandemic.
Masters said ..

Premier League chief 'confident' of June restart

Hosts Hertha claimed the Berlin derby bragging rights over Union with a convincing 4-0 victory in their almost empty 74,000-capacity Olympic Stadium.
Hertha moved up to 10th place after the opening match of the second round of games since the Bundesliga restarted last week under strict coronavirus measures thanks to second-half goals from Vedad Ibisevic, Dodi Lukebakio, Matheus Cunha and Dedryck Boyata.
"It would have been fantastic if we could have played a game like that in front of 75,000 spectators. But I hope that the fans at least had fun in front of their TVs," said Hertha coach Bruno Labbadia.
"In the first half we played very well against well-organised opponents. I had to make that clear to my team at half-time because they were feeling a bit negative.
"By the end we were happy because these were important points in the relegation battle." Labbadia started Czech Republic midfielder Vladimir Darida in the only change from last Saturday's win at Hoffenheim in his first home ...

Hertha hammer Union at empty Olympic Stadium

A federal judge on Friday criticized the Trump administration's handling of detained immigrant children and families, ordering the government to give the court detailed information about its efforts to quickly release them in the wake of the coronavirus.
U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee on Friday ordered the U.S. government to better explain why it hasn't released some of the approximate 350 parents and children in three family detention centers.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has come under fire for allegedly asking parents in custody if they would allow their children to be released without them.
Parents at all three facilities  one in Pennsylvania and two in Texas  were called into short meetings and asked if there were sponsors available to care for their children, lawyers who represent the families reported that late last week. They were then asked to sign a form.
ICE has declined to release the form.
Gee wrote that she didn't find that ICE officially sought to get those .

Judge demands ICE better explain why it won't release kids

Ninety-seven people were killed and two passengers miraculously survived a deadly crash after a Pakistan International Airlines plane with 99 travellers on board plunged into a densely populated residential area near the Jinnah International Airport here, officials said on Saturday.
Flight PK-8303 from Lahore crashed at the Jinnah Garden area near Model Colony in Malir on Friday afternoon, minutes before its landing in Karachi, they said. Eleven people on the ground were injured.
Sindh health officials have said that 97 people have been confirmed dead, while two survived the crash, Dawn News reported on Saturday.
Both the survivors are in stable condition and 19 victims have been identified, the report said.
The Airbus A320 aircraft of the national carrier had 91 passengers and a crew of eight.
A third person, who had earlier been identified as a survivor from the plane, was later confirmed to be a resident of the area where the plane crashed. She was among the 11 persons, who were ...

97 dead, 2 survived in Pakistan plane crash: Officials

Hertz filed for bankruptcy protection Friday, unable to withstand the coronavirus pandemic that has crippled global travel and with it, the heavily indebted 102-year-old car rental company's business.
The Estero, Florida-based company's lenders were unwilling to grant it another extension on its auto lease debt payments past a Friday deadline, triggering the filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.
By the end of March, Hertz Global Holdings Inc. had racked up $18.7 billion in debt with only $1 billion of available cash.
Starting in mid-March, the company  whose car-rental bands also include Dollar and Thrifty  lost all revenue when travel shut down due to the novel coronavirus, and it started missing payments in April. Hertz has also been plagued by management upheaval, naming its fourth CEO in six years on May 18.
No business is built for zero revenue, former CEO Kathryn Marinello said on the company's first-quarter earnings conference call May 12. There's only so long that ...

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