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The post Armenian troops once again fire at Azerbaijani army’s positions – News.Az first appeared on The South Caucasus News.
Day: June 22, 2024
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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — A commercial ship traveling through the Gulf of Aden saw explosions near the vessel, authorities said Saturday, likely the latest attack by Yemen’s Houthi rebels attempting to target the shipping lane.
The apparent fire by the Houthis comes after the sinking this week of the ship Tutor, which marked what appears to be a new escalation by the Iranian-backed Houthis in their campaign of attacks on ships in the vital maritime corridor over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials reportedly ordered the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, the aircraft carrier leading America’s response to the Houthi attacks, to return home.
The captain of the ship targeted late Friday saw “explosions in the vicinity of the vessel,” the British military’s United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center said.
“The crew are reported safe and the vessel is proceeding to its next port of call,” the UKMTO said, without elaborating on whether the ship sustained any damage.
The Houthis, who have held Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, since 2014, did not immediately claim the attack. However, it can take the rebels hours or even days to acknowledge their assaults.
The Houthis on Friday released footage of one of their drone boats, the “Tufan,” or “Flood,” which they said targeted the Tutor.
The Houthis have launched more than 60 attacks targeting specific vessels and fired off other missiles and drones in their campaign that has killed a total of four sailors. They have seized one vessel and sunk two since November. A U.S.-led airstrike campaign has targeted the Houthis since January, with a series of strikes May 30 killing at least 16 people and wounding 42 others, the rebels say.
In March, the Belize-flagged Rubymar carrying fertilizer became the first to sink in the Red Sea after taking on water for days following a rebel attack.
The Houthis have maintained that their attacks target ships linked to Israel, the United States or Britain. However, many of the ships attacked have little or no connection to the Israel-Hamas war.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Naval Institute’s news service reported, citing an anonymous official, that the Eisenhower would be returning home to Norfolk, Virginia, after an over eight-month deployment in combat that the Navy says is its most intense since World War II. The report said an aircraft carrier operating in the Pacific would be taking the Eisenhower’s place.
The closest American aircraft carrier known to be operating in Asia is the USS Theodore Roosevelt.
MADRID — A cruise ship rescued 68 migrants and found five bodies in a traditional fishing boat that was drifting off the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, Spain’s maritime rescue agency said Thursday.
It said an oil tanker traveling from northwestern Spain to Brazil spotted the drifting boat on Wednesday afternoon about 815 kilometers south of Tenerife, one of the seven islands in the Canaries archipelago.
Spanish authorities diverted the Insignia, a cruise ship, to rescue the migrants. The Insignia crew also recovered three of the five bodies on the fishing boat. The remains of two people were left at sea because of bad weather hampering their recovery.
The canoe-shaped boats, known as pirogues, are used by fishermen in Mauritania and Senegal.
It is unusual for cruise ships to make rescues of migrants on the Atlantic route, but the pirogue “was a long way out and they could be in danger,” said a maritime rescue’s spokesperson, speaking on condition of anonymity under departmental rules.
One of the passengers on the cruise ship, Steve Dilbeck from Huntington Beach, California, said they were not told about the dead.
“They did say the boat had been at sea for 20 days,” Dilbeck told The Associated Press in a text message. “We were diverted in the evening and took us two hours to reach them. They were brought on board and placed in the Insignia Lounge, which is where they have all their shows.”
“The area has been closed off to passengers. Told they had them remove their clothes and put on jumpsuits. Then they asked passengers if they had shoes and clothes they could donate, particularly for men. Their announcement said 62 were men, with the rest women and children,” he added.
The Marshall Islands-flagged Insignia had left Mindelo, a port city in Cape Verde, on Tuesday. Its operator, Miami-based Oceania Cruises, did not immediately comment on the rescue.
The Spanish rescue agency emailed a statement saying the Insignia is expected to arrive on Friday at the port of Santa Cruz, Tenerife.
The Canary Islands is a destination for boats packed with migrants departing from northwestern Africa on a perilous Atlantic route in search of a better life in Europe.
Spain’s Interior Ministry says a record 55,618 migrants arrived by boat — most of them in the Canary Islands — last year, almost double the number of the previous year. More than 23,000 have landed so far this year, the ministry said.
The Spanish nonprofit organization Caminando Fronteras (Walking Borders) says more than 5,000 migrants have died so far this year through May while trying to reach Spanish coasts, most of them on the Atlantic route. The figure for all 2023 was 6,600, more than double the number for 2022.
In response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), numerous vaccines have been developed to protect against SARS-CoV-2 infection. Ad5-nCoV (Convidecia) is a vaccine listed for emergency use by the WHO and has been administrated to millions of people globally. It comprises a series of human adenovirus 5 (Ad5) replication-incompetent vectored vaccines that transduce the spike protein (S) gene of various SARS-CoV-2 strains. Despite promising clinical data demonstrating its safety and effectiveness, the underlying molecular mechanism of its high immunogenicity and incidence of adverse reactions remains less understood. Here we combined cryo-ET, fluorescence microscopy and mass spectrometry to characterize the in situ structures, density and site-specific glycan compositions of the Ad5-nCoV_Wu and Ad5-nCoV_O vaccine-induced S antigens, which encode the unmodified SARS-CoV-2 Wuhan-Hu-1 S gene and optimized Omicron S gene, respectively. We found that the vaccine-induced S are structurally intact, antigenic and densely distributed on the cell membrane. Compared to Ad5-nCoV_Wu induced S, the Ad5-nCoV_O induced S demonstrate significantly better stability and is less likely to induce syncytia among inoculated cells. Our work demonstrated that Ad5-nCoV is a prominent platform for antigen induction and cryo-ET can be a useful technique for vaccine characterization and development.
The post Molecular basis of Ad5-nCoV Vaccine-Induced Immunogenicity first appeared on The CoronaVirus Alerts – The News And Times.
