16 dead after plane carrying parachutists crashes

Emergency specialists work at the crash site of an L-410 plane near the town of Menzelinsk in the Republic of Tatarstan, Russia, on Sunday. Sixteen people were killed after in the crash, the emergencies ministry said. The L-410 plane carrying 22 people crashed during a flight over the republic of Tatarstan, the ministry said on its Telegram channel.Xinhua

US-based trio wins

Nobel economics prize

Economists David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens won the 2021 Nobel economics prize on Monday for pioneering the use of “natural experiments” to understand the causal effects of economic policy and other events.

Natural experiments use real-life situations to work out impacts on the world, an approach that has spread to other fields and revolutionized empirical research.

One such experiment by Canada-born economist Card on a minimum wage increase in the U.S. state of New Jersey in the early 1990s prompted researchers to review their view that such increases should always lead to falls in employment.

Sydney opens after 100-plus days of lockdown

Sydney hairdressers, gyms, cafes and bars reopened to fully vaccinated customers on Monday for the first time in more than 100 days after Australia’s largest city achieved a vaccination benchmark.

Sydney planned to reopen after 70 percent of the New South Wales state population aged 16 and older were fully vaccinated.

By Monday, 73.5 percent of the target population was fully vaccinated and more than 90 percent have received at least one dose.

Some businesses opened at midnight due to demand from people impatient to enjoy their freedom.

More pandemic restrictions will be removed at the 80 percent benchmark, and New South Wales residents will be free to travel overseas for the first time since March last year.

Father of Pakistan

nuclear bomb dies

Abdul Qadeer Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, died on Sunday after a lengthy illness, the country’s interior minister said. He was 85.

Khan launched Pakistan on the path to becoming a nuclear weapons power in the early 1970s. Interior Minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmad said he died in a hospital Islamabad. He didn’t elaborate.

Khan, who held a doctorate in metallurgical engineering from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, offered to launch Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program in 1974 after neighbor India conducted its first “peaceful nuclear explosion.”

He reached out to then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto offering technology for Pakistan’s own nuclear weapons program.

Japan PM vows strong economic stimulus

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Thursday said he will fulfill his pledge to provide a “large-scale” package to stimulate the economy hit by the pandemic.

“I strongly feel that I need to carry out a large-scale economic stimulus or a large-scale coronavirus response, and I need people to judge whether to let me do so through elections,” Kishida said.

Kishida, leader of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), was elected as the new Japanese prime minister last week, the 100th in the Asian country’s political history.

Kurz to quit as Austrian chancellor

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said on Saturday that he will step down in a bid to defuse a government crisis triggered by prosecutors’ announcement that he is a target of a corruption investigation.

Kurz, 35, said he has proposed to Austria’s president that Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg become chancellor. But Kurz himself will remain in a key political position: he said he will become the head of his conservative Austrian People’s Party’s parliamentary group.

The Greens’ leader, Vice Chancellor Werner Kogler, welcomed Kurz’s decision as “a right and important step.”(SD-Agencies)