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The mysterious Denisovans

3 Oct 2022 3 Oct 2022

Little is known of the mysterious Denisovans. These distant relatives of the Neanderthals roamed eastern and southern Eurasia but left little trace of their time on Earth.

“Hominin Denisova” was discovered by Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo, the winner of this year’s Nobel prize in medicine.

In 2012, Paabo and his team sequenced the DNA of a remarkably well-preserved fragment of bone, 40,000 years old, found four years earlier in the Denisova cave in southern Siberia.

The result was astounding — they had come across an entirely novel hominin, distinct from Neanderthals and even more from Homo sapiens, aka modern humans.

The Denisovans shared a common ancestor with the Neanderthals until their populations diverged 380,000 to 470,000 years ago.

This was much later than the split between modern humans and Neanderthals/Denisovans, which occurred between 550,000 and 760,000 years ago.

In the same cave, paleontologists later discovered the fossil of a young girl who was part Neanderthal, part Denisovan, proving that these two archaic species interbred.

But while we know the Neanderthals disappeared around 40,000 years ago, we have little idea as to when our other closest evolutionary relative went extinct.

We don’t know what the Denisovans looked like either as they left only rare fossilised traces of their time on Earth other than the fragments found in Siberia and a jawbone discovered on the Tibetan Plateau in 2019.

The work of Paabo and his team at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig have nonetheless shed some light on our mysterious ancestor.

By comparing DNA sequences, they found a “gene flow” between both Denisovan and Neanderthals, and between Denisovans and modern humans.

In other words, before they went extinct, Denisovans also interbred with our species.

Up to six percent of Denisovan DNA is still found in present-day humans in Asia-Pacific and southeast Asia — Australian Aborigines, Melanesians and the Negritos of the Philippines — suggesting our far-distant relative roamed over a vast swathe of east and south Eurasia.

Neanderthals, by contrast, lived in western Eurasia.

Scientists believe the ancient ancestors of today’s Melanesians interbred with Denisovans from southeast Asia, far from the frozen mountains of Siberia and Tibet.

Proof that the Denisovans had spread as far as the warm tropics of Asia was lacking until a missing link — a child’s tooth at least 130,000 years old — was discovered in a cave in Laos in 2018.

One of the biggest remaining mysteries is why modern humans were so successful in their expansion and why the Denisovans and Neanderthals went extinct, after having adapted to a Eurasian environment for several hundred thousand years.

Kim Kardashian pays $1.26 mn for unlawful crypto promo

3 Oct 2022 4 Oct 2022

US reality star Kim Kardashian has agreed to pay a $1.26 million fine after unlawfully pushing a cryptocurrency on Instagram without revealing that she was paid to do so, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Monday.

The agency accused Kardashian, who has 331 million followers on Instagram — making her one of the top ten most followed people on the global social network — of failing to disclose that she was paid $250,000 to post about EMAX tokens, the crypto asset security being offered by EthereumMax.

The fine includes a penalty of $1 million plus $260,000, representing the amount Kardashian paid plus interest, the SEC said in a statement. She also agreed not to promote any crypto asset securities for three years.

“Are you guys into crypto????” the post, published in June of 2021, read.

“This is not financial advice but sharing what my friends just told me about the Ethereum Max token!”

SEC Chair Gary Gensler said the case was “a reminder that, when celebrities or influencers endorse investment opportunities, including crypto asset securities, it doesn’t mean that those investment products are right for all investors.”

“We encourage investors to consider an investment’s potential risks and opportunities in light of their own financial goals,” Gensler said in a statement.

– ‘Fully cooperated’ –

Reality-star-turned entrepreneur Kardashian came to fame with the US reality show “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” which tracked the lives of her family members in Los Angeles.

The 41-year-old has steadily built her business empire in recent years — most visibly with her apparel and beauty brands — and has a net worth of $1.8 billion, according to Forbes.

She announced last month that she was branching into a new business arena with the launch of a private equity firm SKKY Partners.

“Ms. Kardashian is pleased to have resolved this matter with the SEC,” a lawyer for the star said in a statement sent to AFP.

She “fully cooperated with the SEC from the very beginning and she remains willing to do whatever she can to assist the SEC in this matter,” it said.

Kardashian “wanted to get this matter behind her to avoid a protracted dispute. The agreement she reached with the SEC allows her to do that so that she can move forward with her many different business pursuits.”

Other celebrities have been nabbed in the past by US authorities for illegally promoting cryptocurrencies, including boxer Floyd Mayweather, rap star DJ Khaled, actor Steven Seagal and rapper T.I.

In January, investors also launched a class action lawsuit against Kardashian, Mayweather and former basketball player Paul Pierce, as well as the two founders of EthereumMax, accusing them of artificially inflating the cryptocurrency’s price.

The ultra-volatile and poorly regulated crypto market has plunged in 2022.

Many central banks and financial market regulators have warned about the dangers posed by cryptocurrencies. But in the absence of a clear legislative framework, users are rarely informed when making their investments, say crypto critics.

Kim Kardashian pays $1.26 mn for unlawful crypto promo

3 Oct 2022 4 Oct 2022

“Are you guys into crypto????” the post, published in June of 2021, read.

“This is not financial advice but sharing what my friends just told me about the Ethereum Max token!”

“We encourage investors to consider an investment’s potential risks and opportunities in light of their own financial goals,” Gensler said in a statement.

– ‘Fully cooperated’ –

Reality-star-turned entrepreneur Kardashian came to fame with the US reality show “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” which tracked the lives of her family members in Los Angeles.

The 41-year-old has steadily built her business empire in recent years — most visibly with her apparel and beauty brands — and has a net worth of $1.8 billion, according to Forbes.

She announced last month that she was branching into a new business arena with the launch of a private equity firm SKKY Partners.

“Ms. Kardashian is pleased to have resolved this matter with the SEC,” a lawyer for the star said in a statement sent to AFP.

She “fully cooperated with the SEC from the very beginning and she remains willing to do whatever she can to assist the SEC in this matter,” it said.

Other celebrities have been nabbed in the past by US authorities for illegally promoting cryptocurrencies, including boxer Floyd Mayweather, rap star DJ Khaled, actor Steven Seagal and rapper T.I.

The ultra-volatile and poorly regulated crypto market has plunged in 2022.

Svante Paabo, Swedish medicine Nobel-winner follows in father's footsteps

3 Oct 2022 4 Oct 2022

Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo, who won the Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday for using DNA to reveal the link between humans and Neanderthals, drew early inspiration from his Nobel laureate father.

However Paabo later learned that his father had been living a “double life”, and his existence had been kept a secret from his father’s other family.

Paabo, 67, was awarded the medicine Nobel for a long list of achievements including sequencing the Neanderthal genome for the first time and discovering the existence of a distant human relative called the Denisovans.

He was born in Stockholm in 1955 to Estonian chemist Karin Paabo and Sune Bergstrom, a biochemist who won the Nobel Medicine Prize in 1982. His father died in 2004.

In his 2014 memoir “Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes”, Paabo wrote that he gained inspiration to study medicine at Sweden’s Uppsala University from his father, who had previously been a medical doctor.

Later he learned that his father “had two families, one of which did not know about the other,” he wrote.

“I had grown up as the secret extra-marital son of Sune Bergstrom,” Paabo wrote, adding that he had “only occasionally” seen his father as an adult.

Paabo also followed in his father’s footsteps by studying biochemistry, earning a PhD at Uppsala University for using DNA research to study a protein of adenovirus, common viruses which cause cold-like symptoms.

But Paabo had long been fascinated with mummies and “could not quite shake off my romantic fascination with ancient Egypt,” he wrote in his memoir.

– An impossible task –

The crossover of his medical research using DNA and preoccupation with mummies put him on the path that would become his life’s work.

“Could it be possible to study ancient DNA sequences and thereby clarify how ancient Egyptians were related to one another and to people today?” he asked in his book.

“Such questions were breathtaking. Surely they must have already occurred to someone else.”

Finding that they had not, Paabo sought his own answers.

It proved a difficult task, because there are only trace amounts of DNA left in ancients remains.

He first made international news in 1985, when he published research that found a DNA fragment in the mummy of a 2,400-year-old child.

Paabo then turned his focus toward Neanderthals when he was recruited by Germany’s Munich University in 1995.

A year later, he managed to sequence some mitochondrial DNA from a 40,000-year-old piece of Neanderthal bone.

He then became the head of the genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

He accomplished the “seemingly impossible task” of publishing the first Neanderthal genome sequence in 2010, according to a statement from the Nobel Assembly.

The research surprised by the scientific world by showing that Neanderthal genomes are still present in one to four percent of humans from European or Asian descent.

“We find traces of their DNA everywhere,” Paabo told AFP in 2018.

– ‘Normal human beings’ –

Also in 2010, Paabo and his team revealed the existence of Denisovans, an extinct human relative, just by sequencing the DNA from a 40,000-year-old finger bone.

Only a year before these breakthroughs were published, Paabo developed potentially life-threatening blood clots in his lungs.

While researching his illness, “to my amazement I stumbled upon references to my father’s work in 1943”, Paabo wrote in his memoir.

His father had “elucidated the chemical structure of herapain,” the drug “which had perhaps saved my life,” he wrote.

In an interview published by the Nobels on Monday, he said that having a Nobel-winning parent may have also given him confidence by showing that “such people are normal human beings and it’s not such an amazing thing”.

“You don’t put your parents on a pedestal,” he added.

Paabo wrote in his memoir that he “had always thought of myself as gay,” before meeting the woman who would become his wife.

He now identifies as bisexual and has two children with primatologist Linda Vigilant, who also works at the Max Planck Institute.

Vodafone, Hutchison in talks to merge UK ops

3 Oct 2022 4 Oct 2022

Vodafone on Monday confirmed it was in talks over merging its UK operations with rival Three UK, owned by Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison.

Vodafone said a combination would allow “the necessary scale to be able to accelerate the rollout of full 5G in the UK”, which has been partly hampered by Britain banning Chinese giant Huawei from involvement in the technology offering faster downloads than 4G.

Vodafone said it would have a majority 51-percent stake and CK Hutchison the remainder in a non-cash deal.

A merger would “expand broadband connectivity to rural communities and small businesses” in the UK, the statement said.

“The UK government rightly sees 5G as transformational for the economy and society and critical to the UK becoming more competitive in an increasingly digital world,” it added.

Vodafone’s share price was up about three percent in late trading on London’s FTSE 100 index, which was rising only slightly.

Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, noted the possibility of “significant regulatory hurdles ahead for the deal, as the authorities weigh up the potential ceding ownership of more core UK infrastructure to an overseas owner”.

“Clearly much still needs to be agreed and it’s far from certain that this is a done deal, but if it is signed the joint venture with Three UK would create the biggest player in the UK mobile industry,” she added.

Biden heads to storm-hit Puerto Rico

3 Oct 2022 3 Oct 2022

President Joe Biden headed to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico on Monday, where he will announce $60 million in funding to strengthen storm defences in a US territory whose people have complained of neglect after past natural disasters.

First Lady Jill Biden accompanied the president on the trip, with the couple also visiting Florida on Wednesday to see the devastating damage caused by Hurricane Ian.

Both Puerto Rico and Florida have suffered fatalities, widespread power outages, dangerous flooding and grievous property damage from the recent hurricanes — first Fiona, then Ian.

The Bidens will visit the city of Ponce on Puerto Rico’s southern coast, where they will meet with families and community leaders impacted by the storm and help pack food and other supplies for those in need.

“I’m heading to Puerto Rico because they haven’t been taken very good care of,” the president said as he departed.

“They’ve been trying like hell to catch up from the last hurricane. I want to see the state of affairs today and make sure we push everything we can.”

During the visit, Biden is to announce the new funding “to shore up levees, strengthen flood walls, and create a new flood warning system to help Puerto Rico become better prepared for future storms,” a White House official said.

Twenty-five deaths in Puerto Rico have been linked to Hurricane Fiona, according to the island’s public health department, which is still investigating how 12 of the fatalities occurred.

The entire US territory lost power and about one million people were left temporarily without drinking water, when Fiona — then a Category 1 storm — hammered the island in mid-September.

Biden declared a state of emergency for Puerto Rico on September 18.

Island residents, all US citizens, have complained of being overlooked by Washington after previous disasters, including the hit from twin hurricanes, Irma and Maria, in 2017.

Florida, where Hurricane Ian roared on land Wednesday as a Category 4 storm, is still struggling to assess the extensive damage, particularly on its southwest coast.

The confirmed death toll from Ian, one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the US mainland, has soared to at least 58 in Florida and four in North Carolina with rescuers still searching for survivors in submerged neighborhoods.

US authorities — federal, state and local — are often judged by the effectiveness of their response to such disasters.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf coast, critics castigated then-president George W. Bush after photos showed him surveying damage while flying high overhead.

And after then-president Donald Trump, on a visit to Puerto Rico following storms there, took a basketball-style shot to distribute rolls of paper towels, the mayor of capital city San Juan called it “insulting” and “abominable.”

Far-right Trump backers on trial for Capitol riot 'sedition'

3 Oct 2022 3 Oct 2022

Opening arguments began on Monday in the US sedition trial of five members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, including its founder, who joined the 2021 attack on the Capitol in Washington.

Stewart Rhodes — the eyepatch-wearing former soldier who plotted a military-style assault on the Capitol — and his followers are charged with taking up arms against the United States to keep Donald Trump in the White House, despite his election defeat.

The Oath Keepers’ attorneys are expected to argue that they believed Trump would invoke the 1807 “Insurrection Act,” deputizing them to protect the country.

That claim has raised expectations that the trial could reveal more about links between the Capitol attack and members of Trump’s administration or his personal advisors.

A jury was seated last week after Judge Amit Mehta rejected efforts by the defense to move the trial out of Washington on the grounds that residents are likely to be biased against the defendants because of the January 6, 2021 violence.

Rhodes’s attorney has also asked the judge to forbid use of terms frequently used to describe the Oath Keepers — such as “anti-government,” “organized militia,” “extremists,” “racist” and “white nationalist” — during the trial.

With a potential 20-year prison sentence, the sedition charge is the toughest yet in the prosecutions of hundreds who took part in the Capitol assault, which aimed to reverse President Joe Biden’s victory in the November 2020 election.

Four other Oath Keepers are to go on trial beginning November 29.

Rhodes, a Yale Law School graduate, and his followers conspired “to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power,” according to the indictment.

At Rhodes’s direction, “they equipped themselves with a variety of weapons,” as well as combat and tactical gear, in preparation for January 6, it says.

“We aren’t getting through this without civil war,” Rhodes told the Oath Keepers in a group chat weeks before the assault on Congress, it adds.

The Oath Keepers are the first to go on trial for seditious conspiracy of the 870 people charged in the Capitol attack.

The majority have been charged with illegally entering the Capitol, illegally disrupting a session of the legislature — the confirmation of Biden as president-elect — and assault on law enforcement officers.

The sedition charge is rarely used by US prosecutors. The last time a conviction was obtained on the charge was against Ramzi Yousef, the planner of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Members of the Proud Boys, another far-right group and key player on January 6, were also charged with seditious conspiracy in June, but their case has not gone to court yet.

US manufacturing growth slows to lowest since 2020: survey

3 Oct 2022 4 Oct 2022

US manufacturing growth slowed in September to its weakest pace in more than two years amid a decline in orders, as well as easing price pressures, according to an industry survey released Monday.

The Institute for Supply Management said its manufacturing index dropped 1.9 points to 50.9 percent, well below expectations and just barely above the 50-percent threshold indicating expansion.

It was the weakest result since May 2020, ISM said.

“The US manufacturing sector continues to expand, but at the lowest rate since the pandemic recovery began,” ISM manufacturing survey chair Timothy Fiore said in a statement.

After companies surveyed for the past four months have reported “softening new orders rates, the September index reading reflects companies adjusting to potential future lower demand,” he said.

The new orders index fell sharply, sinking into contraction territory at 47.1 percent, though production edged up slightly, the report said.

The prices index also fell, still showing rising prices at 51.7 percent, but posting the lowest reading since June 2020.

Seven of the industries surveyed contracted compared to August, while nine reported growth.

“Concerns of global economic slowdown are growing, and (we are) experiencing some customers pulling back orders,” a chemical products firm said.

Several others pointed to ongoing supply chain issues hampering output.

Factory employment slowed sharply, and while Fiore said there was an uptick in hiring freezes, “Markedly absent from panelists’ comments was any large-scale mentioning of layoffs; this indicates companies are confident of near-term demand.”

US manufacturing growth slows to lowest since 2020: survey

3 Oct 2022 3 Oct 2022

US manufacturing growth slowed in September to its weakest pace in more than two years amid a decline in orders, as well as easing price pressures, according to an industry survey released Monday.

The Institute for Supply Management said its manufacturing index dropped 1.9 points to 50.9 percent, well below expectations and just barely above the 50-percent threshold indicating expansion.

It was the weakest result since May 2020, ISM said.

“The US manufacturing sector continues to expand, but at the lowest rate since the pandemic recovery began,” ISM manufacturing survey chair Timothy Fiore said in a statement.

After companies surveyed for the past four months have reported “softening new orders rates, the September index reading reflects companies adjusting to potential future lower demand,” he said.

The new orders index fell sharply, sinking into contraction territory at 47.1 percent, though production edged up slightly, the report said.

The prices index also fell, still showing rising prices at 51.7 percent, but posting the lowest reading since June 2020.

Seven of the industries surveyed contracted compared to August, while nine reported growth.

“Concerns of global economic slowdown are growing, and (we are) experiencing some customers pulling back orders,” a chemical products firm said.

Several others pointed to ongoing supply chain issues hampering output.

OPEC+ tipped to make big cut in oil output

3 Oct 2022 5 Oct 2022

Major oil-producing nations led by Saudi Arabia and Russia are expected to make this week their biggest output cut since the start of the Covid pandemic in efforts to buttress prices.

Energy prices soared after Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, pushing inflation to decades-high levels that have put pressure on economies across the world.

But crude prices have fallen in recent months on concerns over demand amid a slowdown in the global economy.

The 13 members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), led by Riyadh, and their 10 allies headed by Moscow will hold on Wednesday their first in-person meeting at the group’s headquarters in Vienna since March 2020.

Collectively known as OPEC+, the alliance drastically slashed output by almost 10 million barrels per day in April 2020 to reverse a massive drop in crude prices caused by Covid lockdowns.

OPEC+ began to raise production last year after the market improved — output returned to pre-pandemic levels this year, but only on paper as some members struggled to meet their quotas.

The group agreed last month on a slight cut of 100,000 bpd from October, the first in more than a year.

– One million cut –

Analysts now expect — and financial media have reported — that OPEC+ will discuss taking one million bpd out of the market from November at Wednesday’s meeting.

“There’s been plenty of rumours about how the alliance will respond to the deteriorating economic outlook and lower prices,” said Craig Erlam, analyst at trading platform OANDA.

“A sizeable cut now looks on the cards, the question is whether it will be large enough to offset the demand destruction caused by the impending economic downturn,” he added.

After soaring close to $140 per barrel in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, oil prices have dropped below the $90 mark.

According to the UBS bank, a cut of at least 500,000 bpd would be necessary to stop the price plunge.

In anticipation of Wednesday’s meeting, oil prices jumped on Monday, with Brent North Sea crude, the international benchmark, rising by almost five percent to reach $89.15 — still far from its March peak.

– Ignoring the West –

Stephen Brennock, an analyst with PVM Energy, said OPEC+ would “want to reassert its influence” when the group meets this week.

“After all, the producer group has lost control over the oil market in recent weeks,” he said.

It remains to be seen how the United States and other major oil consumers will react to any OPEC+ decision to slash output.

Consumer countries have pushed for OPEC+ to open taps more widely to bring down prices — calls which the group has largely ignored.

US President Joe Biden made a controversial trip to Saudi Arabia in July in part to convince the kingdom to loosen the production taps, meeting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman despite his promise to make Riyadh a “pariah” following the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

“OPEC will not be making any friends among Western leaders, especially petroleum importers whose economies and currencies are ravaged by higher oil prices due to a deterioration in the trade balance,” said Stephen Innes, an analyst with SPI Asset Management, ahead of Wednesday’s meeting.

Observers have cast doubt how much more OPEC+ could possibly be pumping with some of its members struggling to meet quotas.

Bjarne Schieldrop, chief commodities analyst at SEB research group, predicted it would be “very easy for the group to implement cuts given that most members are stretched to the limit of what they can produce”.

He said Saudi Arabia was currently producing 11 million barrels per day.

“It hasn’t maintained such a high production more than twice in history and then only for 1-2 months,” he said.