A COVID-19 vaccine is back in the news with the recent Pfizer's press release claiming 90 per cent efficacy from the very early figures in the Phase 3 trials of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. BioNTech is the German company that Trump had attempted to buy, leading to a furore in Germany. Pfizer, the US pharma giant, is now its partner, with US big capital successfully wooing the German company where Trump's crude tactics had failed. The figures are from a Pfizer press release, so the scientific community has little to analyse independently Pfizer's claims.

THE policies pursued by the BJP central government are very much harmful to the interests of Andhra Pradesh, said B V Raghavulu, CPI(M) Polit Bureau member while inaugurating the political campaign at Vijayawada on November 7. CPI(M) AP committee has taken up a political campaign throughout the state from November 7-15, explaining the people about the policies of BJP central government that have been inimical to the state’s interests and that are pauperising the people of India.

CPI(M)  Polit Bureau has issued the following statement on November 12THE Reserve Bank of India has now officially confirmed the severe slowdown of the Indian economy and said “India has entered a technical recession in the first half of 2020-21 for the first time in its history”.After the GDP plummeting by 23.9 per cent in April-June quarter, it has now further fallen by 8.6 per cent on top of this in the quarter ending September 2020.This continuous contraction of the GDP is destroying lives, livelihoods, pushing crores of our people into poverty, hunger and deprivation.

ELECTIONS to the United States of America had concluded and almost all the results are out (counting is still taking place and a re-counting ordered in Georgia). The elections results are conclusively called in favour of Joe Biden, the Democratic Party presidential candidate, who served as former vice-president during the Obama presidency. After nearly thirty years, an incumbent president was defeated in the US, but Donald Trump is refusing to concede.

ON the fourth anniversary of demonetisation, Narendra Modi has claimed that it succeeded in curbing black money. He probably believes he can get away with making this claim because of the passage of time. But most people in the country know this to be a lie for a simple reason.For demonetisation to curb black money, there must be some mechanism through which it can be shown to do so. Otherwise it would be no different from claiming that the Olympic Games of 2016 curbed black money in India.