LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) – The chief epidemiologist for the state of California has called for a pause on the distribution of a specific batch of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine after several people suffered allergic reactions after receiving the vaccine at a drive-thru vaccination site in Southern California.

California State Epidemiologist Dr. Erica S. Pan issued a statement Sunday night calling on healthcare providers to pause the use of lot 41L20A of the Moderna vaccine due to possible allergic reactions.

The allergic reactions occurred at Petco Park’s mass drive-thru vaccination site, a state Department of Public Health spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times.

“A higher-than-usual number of possible allergic reactions were reported with a specific lot of Moderna vaccine administered at one community vaccination clinic, Pan said in a statement. “Fewer than 10 individuals required medical attention over the span of 24 hours. Out of an extreme abundance of caution and also recognizing the extremely limited supply of vaccine, we are recommending that providers use other available vaccine inventory and pause the administration of vaccines from Moderna Lot 041L20A until the investigation by the CDC, FDA, Moderna and the state is complete.”

More than 330,000 doses from that batch were distributed to 287 providers statewide between Jan. 5 and Jan. 12, the DPH reported.

Moderna, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration are all investigating.

Source: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/california-health-officials-pause-moderna-vaccine-batch-allergic-reactions/

Turkey and Azerbaijan have abandoned their plans to launch further military operations in the region after the recent war in Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh), says a Yerevan-based military expert.

In an interview with Tert.am, Tigran Abrhamyan, the director of the analytical center Henaket, warned of the serious threats stemming from the recently announced plan to conduct joint exercises in the Turkish city of Kars. Admitting that neither of the countries seem to be willing to hide their ambitions, he called attention, particularly, to the repeatedly voiced territorial claims towards the south of Armenia. Abrahamyan noted that “time and history have proven their unrestrained behavior” when it comes to realizing such objectives. 

The reports on conducting the joint military drills were released earlier by RazmInfo, a military intelligence website which cited the Turkish Haberturk. The exercises are expected to attract tank, helicopter and special detachment subdivisions.

Abrahamyan did not rule out the possibility of future similar events, calling for  a prompt action by the domestic policymakers in the face of the Turkish-Azerbaijani military agenda. 

“As a result of the military actions, regrettably, Azerbaijan and Turkey have gained major leverages of psychological pressure, which they are currently applying to Armenia. And those military exercises are only one thing to mention in essence. It is also important to consider that they pursue big ambitions to gain advantages in the region and excel the rivals. Hence, they are doing all their best to strengthen their positions across the region,” he said. 

Asked whether Armenia is recommended to follow suit, considering the existing realities, the expert ruled out the expediency of such a plan. Abrahamyan noted that the General Headquarters of the Armed Forces have their schedule of military trainings, which also includes exercises of the kind as an integral part of the program. Admitting that the conduct of drills, as well as other steps towards raising the efficiency of troops or neutralizing dangers are “expected measures” under the current circumstances, Abrahamyan highlighted the General Headquarters’ decision-making role in situations of the kind.  

Source: Tert.am

Across the US, governors are readying themselves for possible attacks from violent pro-Trump mobs ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration later this week. 

To prepare, states are deploying hundreds of National Guard troops, building security fences around their capitol buildings, barricading windows, closing statehouses and roads, and holding online legislative sessions.

The moves come after the FBI warned that “armed protests” involving extremists were being planned in all 50 states in the days leading up to the inauguration, according to an Associated Press report.

Some examples of the preparation underway:

👉 California Gov. Gavin Newsom authorized 1,000 National Guard personnel to protect the state Capitol. 

👉New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy ordered state employees to work remotely on Jan. 20, because of the “level of tension in the country,” the AP reported.

👉 The National Guard is on call in Arizona, and a chain-link fence was installed around the Capitol complex in Phoenix.

👉 Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine authorized 580 National Guard troops and announced that the Ohio Statehouse would be closed from Jan. 17 through Jan. 20.

• The unrest came after Tunisia imposed a nationwide lockdown to stem a rise in coronavirus infections on Thursday

TUNIS: More than 600 people have been arrested and troops have been deployed after a third consecutive night of riots in several Tunisian cities, officials said Monday.
The unrest came after Tunisia imposed a nationwide lockdown to stem a rise in coronavirus infections on Thursday — the same day as it marked the 10th anniversary of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s fall from power.
Interior ministry spokesman Khaled Hayouni said a total of 877 people were arrested, notably “groups of people between the ages of 15, 20 and 25 who burned tires and bins in order to block movements by the security forces.”
Defense ministry spokesman Mohamed Zikri meanwhile said the army has deployed reinforcements in several areas of the country.
Hayouni said that some of those arrested lobbed stones at police and clashed with security forces.
“This has nothing to do with protest movements that are guaranteed by the law and the constitution,” said Hayouni.
“Protests take place in broad daylight normally… without any criminal acts involved,” he added.
Hayouni said two policemen were wounded in the unrest.
It was not immediately clear if there were injuries among the youths and Hayouni did not say what charges those arrested faced.
The clashes took place in several cities across Tunisia, mostly in working-class neighborhoods, with the exact reasons for the disturbances not immediately known.
But it came as many Tunisians are increasingly angered by poor public services and a political class that has repeatedly proved unable to govern coherently a decade on from the 2011 revolution.
GDP shrank by nine percent last year, consumer prices have spiralled and one third of young people are unemployed.
The key tourism sector, already on its knees after a string of deadly jihadist attacks in 2015, has been dealt a devastating blow by the pandemic.
Tunisia has registered more than 177,000 coronavirus infections, including over 5,600 deaths since the pandemic erupted last year.
The four-day lockdown ended on Sunday night, but it was not immediately know if other restrictions would be imposed.

The army has deployed troops in Bizerte in the north, Sousse in the east and Kasserine and Siliana in central Tunisia, the defense ministry spokesman said.
Sousse, a coastal resort overlooking the Mediterranean, is a magnet for foreign holidaymaking that has been hit hard by the pandemic.
The health crisis and ensuing economic misery have pushed growing numbers of Tunisians to seek to leave the country.
On Sunday evening in Ettadhamen, a restive working-class neighborhood on the edge of the Tunisian capital, the mood was sombre.
“I don’t see any future here,” said Abdelmoneim, a waiter, as the unrest unfolded around him.
He blamed the violence on the country’s post-revolution political class and said the rioting youths were “bored adolescents” who reflected the “failure” of politicians.
Abdelmoneim said he was determined to take a boat across the Mediterranean to Europe “as soon as possible, and never come back to this miserable place.”

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was handed a 30-day sentence after facing a judge inside a police station on the outskirts of Moscow. Navalny accused Russian officials of “ultimate lawlessness” and urged resistance.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was rushed to a makeshift courtroom on Monday, just a day after his arrest at a Moscow airport. The court session was set up at the police station in Khimki, on the outskirts of the Russian capital. 

Navalny’s aide accused authorities of denying him access to his lawyers, saying he was notified at the last minute of the makeshift hearing. 

The judge handed Navalny a sentence of 30 days in prison.

“I’ve seen a lot of mockery of justice… but they have ripped up and thrown away” Russia’s criminal code, Navalny said in a video of the proceedings that was released by his team. 

“This is impossible. It’s ultimate lawlessness,” the 44-year-old added. 

Navalny called on Russians to join him in protesting the government, in a video posted on YouTube from the police station.

“Do not be silent. Resist. Take to the streets,” he said. “Don’t go out for me, go out for yourself and your future,” the anti-corruption activist added.

Some 200 hundred Navalny supporters gathered outside the police station to demand his release, Reuters reported.

Merkel: Navalny’s case ‘weighs’ on relations

Navalny was arrested on Sunday, as he was returning home from a months-long stay in Berlin. He was flown to Germany for treatment at the city’s Charite Hospital, suffering from what the German government determined to be poisoning with a Novichok nerve agent.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday decried Navalny’s “arbitrary” arrest.

“The chancellor condemns the arbitrary arrest of Mr Navalny… which violates the principles of the rule of law,” Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters, saying Germany called on Russia “to release Mr Navalny immediately.”

Seibert said Russia had arrested the “victim” of “attempted murder with chemical weapons” and “not the perpetrator.”

Merkel had “repeatedly” noted that Russia’s treatment of Navalny “weighed on” relations between Berlin and Moscow, Seibert added.

Charged with fraud

Russian authorities have said Navalny was detained for violating the terms of a suspended sentence he was given in 2014 on fraud charges. Critics view the proceedings as a pretense designed to prevent him from running for office in future elections. Monday’s hearing’s nominal goal was to decide whether he had violated the terms of that suspended sentence. 

The Armenian side did not immediately submit complete lists of prisoners of war kept in Azerbaijan, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a press conference on Monday. January 18.

Lavrov noted that the exchange of POWs is part of the agreement signed by Armenia, Russia and Azerbaijan on the night of November 10.

“And this issue was discussed in subsequent telephone conversations of Russian President Vladimir Putin with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, as well as in my telephone conversations with the Foreign Ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia. And it was part of a fairly lengthy discussion when the President of Azerbaijan and the Prime Minister of Armenia arrived in Moscow on January 11,” Lavrov said․

The Russian foreign policy chief said prisoners of war from both sides who participated in hostilities and were captured before the statement of November 10 have been exchanged. He added that the sides are now working to settle “the question that arose in early December in Hadrut region.”

A group of more than 62 Armenians were taken captive near the villages of Khtsaberd and Hin Tagher in Hadrut, Karabakh, both settlements having remained under Armenian control after the war. The situation around the two villages came to a head when Azerbaijan launched new offensives to capture them on December 11, having seized most of the region of Hadrut during the war.

Lavrov said the Azerbaijani side at that stage stated that, “insofar as these people were sent into the area after the announcement of a ceasefire and տհե end of hostilities”, they should be considered separately, not as part of the November 10 statement.

“We, both President Putin and I, are still promoting the need to continue consideration of this issue in order to settle it, guided by the principle of “all for all”,” Lavrov added.

The first batch of 44 Armenian POWs returned from Azerbaijan in mid-December, although Armenian officials said many more people were being held in Baku. Dozens of others, both servicemen and civilians, have been captured after the completion of military hostilities. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has said in one of his speeches that the newly detained persons are not prisoners of war but “terrorists”. Human rights lawyer Siranush Sahakyan has said, meanwhile, that at least 120 Armenian prisoners of war are being held in Azerbaijan. Sahakyan represents the rights of some of the Karabakh POWs before the European Court of Human Rights. The lawyer said there is enough evidence proving the capture of said persons, which the Armenian side will submit to international agencies and courts.

President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian signed a decree on appointing Anahit Avanesyan Minister of Healthcare, the Presidential Office told Armenpress.

The President signed the respective decree based on the Prime Minister’s proposal.

According to another presidential decree, Arsen Torosyan has been relieved from the position of Minister of Healthcare.

YEREVAN. – The National Assembly (NA) on Monday voted against putting on the NA sessions’ agenda the draft statement submitted by the opposition Bright Armenia faction, and with respect to deciding on an action plan to get out of the current situation in the country.

A total 76 MPs were against the inclusion of this draft in the NA agenda, 37 were in favor, and one lawmaker abstained.

The opposition Prosperous Armenia faction supported the initiative.

During the respective debates, the MPs of Bright Armenia and majority My Step faction made mutual accusations.

To note, the first point of the “roadmap” presented in this draft statement demands that PM Nikol Pashinyan must resign.

Guardian hears claims that oil-rich country tried to bribe members of human rights body to secure votes against reports criticising its president

One of Europe’s oldest human rights bodies is being urged to set up a far-reaching anti-corruption investigation next week, amid fresh allegations of vote rigging that have put its credibility on the line.

Two people with high-level experience of the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly (Pace) have told the Guardian they believe its members have been offered bribes for votes by Azerbaijan. The 324-member body is made up of delegates from national parliaments who meet four times a year in Strasbourg.

Arif Mammadov, a former Azerbaijani diplomat turned dissident, alleged that a member of the oil-rich country’s delegation at the Council of Europe had €30m (£25m) to spend on lobbying its institutions, including the Council of Europe assembly.

What is the Council of Europe?

The Council of Europe was founded in 1949 by Winston Churchill and other European statesmen after the Second World War as a bulwark of democracy and human rights. It both predates the European Union and is separate to it. The Strasbourg-based organisation now has 47 members, from Iceland to Turkey, and including Russia. It elects judges to the European court of human rights and monitors elections in the Balkans and former Soviet Union. Azerbaijan joined in 2001 and like all members pledged to “accept the principles of the rule of law” and “guarantee human rights and fundamental freedoms”.

“Everyone” in the Azerbaijani delegation had heard of this number, although “it was never written down”, he told the Guardian. “It was said this money was to bribe members of the delegations and Pace generally.”

Tobias Billström, a Swedish delegate to the assembly and former justice minister, said “very credible members” had told him they had been offered bribes to vote in a certain way. He is one of 64 parliamentarians to have signed a resolution calling for an independent investigation into “serious and credible allegations of grave misconduct” centred on an Azerbaijani vote. 

Allegations of “caviar diplomacy” have swirled around the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly for years, with Azerbaijan accused of offering cash and luxury gifts in exchange for favourable votes.

The claims were first laid out in a 2012 report by the European Stability Initiative thinktank, but have gathered momentum since Italian prosecutors began investigating a former chair of the centre-right group, Italian deputy Luca Volontè.

Volontè is accused of accepting €2.39m in bribes from Azerbaijan in exchange for supporting its government in the Council of Europe. He faces a trial for money laundering, and Milan’s public prosecutor is appealing a decision to drop a corruption charge against him. He has always denied any wrongdoing.

Although one fifth of MPs at the Council of Europe called for an urgent inquiry in January, assembly leaders failed to take a decision at their last meeting in March.

Pressure is building on the assembly president, Pedro Agramunt, to ensure that a robust investigation is set up when it meets later this month.

Agramunt, a Spanish centre-right politician, is already facing criticism for meeting the Syrian president, Bashar al-Asssad, on a Syria visit organised by the Russian government. He was accompanied by Leonid Slutsky, the head of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, as well as MPs from Belgium, Italy and Serbia, according to Russian media.

Members of the assembly believe the trip, which came two weeks before chemical attacks near Idlib, could tarnish the credibility of the Council of Europe as a human rights defender. The Socialist group has declared itself “extremely concerned and worried” and the head of the French delegation has made an official complaint.

Critics say Azerbaijan uses the assembly to add a veneer of legitimacy to the authoritarian rule of its president, Ilham Aliyev, who has ruled the country since 2003.

One case concerns the decision of assembly members in 2013 to vote down a critical report on political prisoners in Azerbaijan by German social democrat Christoph Strässer. The Strässer report concluded that Azerbaijan’s judicial system was used to silence or intimidate critics of the Aliyev regime and was rejected by 125 votes to 79 with 20 abstentions.

Volontè is alleged to have played a key role in orchestrating the defeat with payments to him channelled through a company with a connection to Azerbaijan’s ruling family, according to a recent report by the investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

Strӓsser said he knew Azerbaijan was giving out money but had no proof votes were bought. He said he wanted to see an investigation “as a point of credibility”. 

“If there is any suspicion that there could be corruption within these structures and this was ignored, I think it might be the end of the Council of Europe.”

Thorbjørn Jagland, the former Norwegian prime minister and CoE secretary general, has urged Agramunt to personally ensure “an independent external investigation body without any further delay” – an unprecedented appeal from an official to the Council of Europe’s most senior elected leader.

Billström said it would be inconceivable for the Council of Europe to turn down a request for an independent investigation when it faces “so many serious allegations… which concern the ability of the parliamentary assembly to function as it was intended, as a watchdog against corruption.”

He urged MPs in the assembly to endorse “very good” proposals drawn up by its most senior official, Wojciech Sawicki, setting out the terms for an independent inquiry.

A spokesman for Agramunt said a revised version of the Sawicki report was being prepared by leaders of the five political groups in the assembly and the report in its current form “was not applicable”.

“Mr Agramunt has not participated in any deliberation with the political leaders and will not interfere with their work,” the spokesperson said, adding that the assembly had “no legal authority to conduct such investigations”.

“Mr Agramunt will not tolerate unacceptable pressures on MPs’ work that come from some NGOs, lobbies, the media or interest groups.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/apr/20/council-of-europe-urged-to-investigate-azerbaijan-bribery-allegations