Argentine Soccer Legend Diego Maradona dies at 60 .

 Diego Armando Maradona, the mop-haired boy from a Buenos Aires slum who dribbled and dazzled his way to world fame, becoming one of the greatest soccer players of all time but also one of the most self-destructive, has died. 

Maradona died on Wednesday from a heart attack, the Associated Press has confirmed. Maradona had been plagued by health issues in recent years . He was 60 years of age .

As the news of Maradona’s death circulated around the world Wednesday, Argentine President Fernandez called for three days of national mourning while UEFA, soccer’s governing body in Europe, announced there would be a minute of silence before its Champions League and Europa League games this week.  

Pele, the Brazilian legend and perhaps the greatest player of all time, wrote on Twitter that he “lost a great friend and the world lost a legend. … One day, I hope we can play ball together in the sky.”

Such was the complexity of Maradona’s personal life, according to news accounts, that he was the father of eight children, including two daughters with his wife at the time, Claudia Villafañe — they later divorced — and three children fathered while he was in Cuba undergoing treatment for his cocaine addiction. His survivors include those daughters, Dalma and Gianinna, as well as three children from other relationships: Diego Armando Maradona Sinagra, an Italian soccer player; Jana Maradona; and Dieguito Fernando Maradona.

Diego Armando Maradona was born Oct. 30, 1960, in Lanus, Argentina, and raised in the Buenos Aires shantytown Villa Fiorito, where he took up soccer on dusty streets with an urchin’s resourcefulness. By age 15, he had turned professional. He later starred with the European club powers Napoli and Barcelona. In 1986 he won the Fifa World Cup held in Mexico . And, in 2010, coached Argentina in the 2010 World Cup, held in South Africa.

Pakistan Approves Castration Law For Rapists .

 Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has approved a law on chemical castration of rapists .

He approved, in principal, the law during a federal cabinet meeting where the country’s law ministry presented a draft of the anti-rapist ordinance .

Prime Minister  stressed that it’s a serious matter, hence, there should not be any delay in implementing the law to provide a safe environment for citizens.

Rape survivors will be able to register their complaint without fear - with the government protecting their identity.  He said the legislation will be clear and transparent with strict enforcement.

The rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl in Lahore in January 2018 and more recently the motorway gang-rape in Lahore sparked a debate on the severity of punishment to prevent sexual assaults. Notably, a Pakistani woman was allegedly gang-raped in front of her children by robbers on a motorway in Punjab province on September 9 this year, triggering a public outcry and sending shockwaves across the nation .

Pfizer and BioNTech submit their Covid vaccine for US approval

 Pfizer and BioNTech submitted their Covid-19 shot for emergency authorisation in the US  becoming the first pharmaceutical companies to apply for regulatory approval of a coronavirus vaccine .

If Pfizer’s application is approved, the vaccine will likely be limited and rolled out in phases, with health-care workers, the elderly and people with underlying health conditions getting the first inoculations. Essential workers, teachers and people in homeless shelters and prisons would likely be next, followed by children and young adults.

The FDA process is expected to take a few weeks, and an advisory committee meeting to review the vaccine has been tentatively scheduled  for early December. Some Americans could get their first dose of the vaccine in about a month.

The final analysis evaluated 170 confirmed Covid infections among the late-stage trial’s more than 43,000 participants. The companies said 162 cases of Covid were observed in the placebo group versus eight cases observed in the group that received its two-dose vaccine. That resulted in an estimated vaccine efficacy of 95%, they said.

 

Pfizer Coronavirus Vaccine Is Safe and 95% Effective

 The drug maker Pfizer said that its coronavirus vaccine was 95 percent effective and had no serious side effects — the first set of complete results from a late-stage vaccine trial as Covid-19 cases.

The data showed that the vaccine prevented mild and severe forms of Covid-19, the company said. And it was 94 percent effective in older adults, who are more vulnerable to developing severe Covid-19 and who do not respond strongly to some types of vaccines.

There have been no serious side effects among the 41,135 adults who received two doses, the companies said in a joint statement. The most common reactions were that 3.7 percent of participants experienced fatigue and 2 percent had a headache, it said.

Pfizer and BioNTech said they will now submit a request "within days" for emergency use authorization with the Food and Drug Administration, while sharing their data with regulators in Europe and elsewhere.

The figure of 95 percent comes from Pfizer and BioNTech analyzing 170 confirmed cases among the 40,000-plus people involved in the trial. Just eight people who were given the vaccine got sick, compared with 162 who were given a placebo.

Moderna’s Covid-19 Vaccine Is 94.5% Effective in Early Results

 

 

Moderna  said its experimental Covid-19 vaccine was 94.5% effective at protecting people from Covid-19 in an early look at pivotal study results, the second vaccine to hit a key milestone in U.S. testing. 

Ninety-five people in the study developed Covid-19 with symptoms; of those, 90 had received a placebo and only five Moderna’s vaccine. 

Moderna had the first vaccine  to enter clinical trials in March 2020 ,Only 63 days after the genetic sequence of the virus was posted online, the company injected the first volunteer with its vaccine candidate. It was able to move so quickly because it used a gene-based technology to create its vaccine. Those types of vaccines are relatively simple to create once researchers know the viral gene they’re trying to target. 

 Moderna said it would have 20 million doses of its two-shot vaccine available by the end of 2020 and 500 million to 1 billion doses in 2021.

Meanwhile, the US is seeing record numbers of COVID-19 cases each day, with no end in sight. Even with this promising data, a vaccine won’t be available to most people for a few months at the very least.