Chinese seek foreign vaccines for their kids, and shark disguised as baby by abductors
Global Pulse

Chinese seek foreign vaccines for their kids, and shark disguised as baby by abductors

Facebook has identified an online campaign to interfere with this year's US midterm polls, and Bangladesh is concerned about India's 'anti-Muslim' NRC move. 

   
A researcher prepares a sample inside a laboratory ~ Gilles Sabrie/Bloomberg

Representational image | Gilles Sabrie/Bloomberg

Facebook has identified an online campaign to interfere with this year’s US midterm polls, and Bangladesh is concerned about India’s ‘anti-Muslim’ NRC move. 

Fear of indigenous vaccines has gripped China

In China, parents are increasingly choosing to source medicines for their children from abroad as they fear vaccination with a wrong or defective drug in the wake of the recent scandal involving paediatric immunisation, The Washington Post reports.

Two of China’s leading pharmaceutical companies — Changchun Changsheng Biotechnology and the state-owned Wuhan Institute of Biological Products — were recently found to be administering either defective or ineffective vaccines to children. The former also reportedly faked inspection reports, authorities found.

Hundreds of thousands of children were thought to have been injected with useless medicine before the scandal was detected. While the children appear unharmed, they now stand exposed to a prolonged vulnerability to otherwise preventable diseases.

China, which produces 95 per cent of its vaccines, has vowed that anyone found engaging in deceitful or negligent administration of drugs would be banned from the pharmaceutical industry for life.

Bangladeshi media concerned over India’s NRC project

Expressing concern over the National Register of Citizens (NRC) draft, Bangladeshi newspaper Daily Star writes in an editorial, “We consider it a matter of grave concern that four million people in Assam have been de-registered, mostly Bengali Muslims, who have become foreigners in their own land. We are equally confounded by this move particularly at a time when Indo-Bangladesh relations are at their peak.”

A report in the paper describes the move as the latest “by (India’s) Right-wing government to bolster India’s Hindu majority at the expense of minorities… as the country moves towards a national election in 2019”.

Facebook detects another political campaign to sway polls

Facebook announced Tuesday that it had identified a coordinated political influence campaign involving dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages aimed at disrupting November’s midterm elections, The New York Times reports.

The social media giant recently made a public announcement that it had identified 32 pages and accounts — eight Facebook pages, 17 Facebook profiles, and seven Instagram accounts — reportedly made between March 2017 and May 2018 but spotted only two weeks ago.

Though the numbers may sound small, their influence was spreading, with more than 290,000 followers on at least one of the suspect pages, the report adds.

Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said the company had yet to see any evidence connecting the accounts to Russian IP addresses.

Sexual abuse is endemic to aid sector, UK report says

According to a UK government report published Tuesday, sexual abuse of vulnerable girls and women by international aid workers is “endemic and has been happening for years”, CNN reported.

The report by the House of Commons International Development Committee comes after allegations of harassment and sexual misconduct by employees of several top NGOs, including Oxfam and Save the Children, surfaced earlier this year, including reports that senior Oxfam staff paid for prostitutes during the 2010 Haiti earthquake relief mission.

According to the report, cases of severe sexual harassment date back to 20 years ago. It also recounted the sexual exploitation of girls aged between 13 and 18 by United Nations and aid agency staff at refugee camps in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone in 2001. Victims suffered problems including abortions and exposure to sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS, the report noted.

The report blamed a “boy’s club” culture within organisations, which meant sexual harassment and abuse of staff thrived unchallenged.

Writers in China are moving towards reality from fiction

More and more internet writers in China are dropping out of fiction and increasingly moving towards writing that reflects the country’s political and economic achievements, Global Times reported.

Internet writers in China, who have built up their reputation on major websites by writing about mythological characters, feel they should choose themes closer to the present times and ones that are more relevant.

According to the report, some writers are joining literary programmes launched by writers’ associations in different regions to explore ‘red stories’, which are narratives about their local areas and retrace the footprints of former “leaders and revolutionary martyrs”.

Shark disguised as baby to be smuggled out of aquarium

A shark abducted from an aquarium in the US after being disguised as a baby has been found and returned, The Independent reports.

According to the report, the grey horn shark known as Ms Helen, was wrapped in a wet blanket and taken out in a pram cart by two men and a woman.

The shark seems to have been stolen to add to the suspects’ personal collection of marine animals, rather than for sale.

Tom Cruise’s most extreme stunts

The older Tom Cruise gets, the more fun it is to watch him risk death in elaborate age- and gravity-defying ways, writes The New York Times.

The newspaper asked Christopher McQuarrie, who directed the two most recent Mission: Impossible movies — Fallout, currently in theatres, and Rogue Nation — to rank the stunts performed by the 56-years-old actor. McQuarrie ranked them in order of what he called “inherent danger, that is, risk multiplied by the amount of time which Cruise was exposed to that risk”.

Here’s his list of Tom Cruise’s top five stunt scenes from the series:

  1. Underwater sequence, Rogue Nation

Without the benefit of oxygen, Cruise swaps a file in an underwater security system.

4. Motorcycle chase, Fallout

Having been separated from his co-star Henry Cavill, Cruise evades capture on two wheels.

3. Sky-diving, Fallout

2. Hanging off a plane, Rogue Nation

Tom Cruise dangles from an Airbus A400M as it takes off.

  1. Helicopter chase, Fallout
    Cruise pilots a chopper through mountainous terrain to retrieve and disable the remote detonator of two nuclear bombs.