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  It has taken two years, three months and 13 days for Barcelona fans to be able to proudly show off the LaLiga league table. The Catalan side are back at the top of the table almost two and a half years later, level on 19 points with Real Madrid, but lead the ranking by virtue of a superior goal difference, where they have a +18 difference compared to the +11 held by Real Madrid. The last time Barcelona were leaders was under Quique Setién and one has to go back to matchday 29 of the 2019/20 season, when the Catalan outfit had 64 points after beating Leganés 2-0, while Real Madrid were two points behind, 62, after beating Valencia (3-0). However, the following week, Barcelona drew (0-0) at the Sánchez Pizjuán, while Real Madrid recorded a controversial win at Anoeta (1-2) and the side from the capital topped the table with a better head to head having played both league games with Los Blancos going on to claim the title. Under Ronald Koeman, Barça never reached the summit of the table and the arrival of former player Xavi Hernandez has seen the Catalan club find the form they lacked under the Dutch coach. The first ‘El Clasico’ of the season is just two weeks away with Madrid travelling away to Getafe next weekend as Barcelona welcome Celta to Camp Nou. (All Football)

At the Pre-COP 27 meeting in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt’s COP27 Presidency, spelled out the importance that the developed world keep its climate pledges to avoid a “crisis of trust” in the COP process whilst holding out hope for progress at COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh this November.  Speaking to an audience including over 60 ministers from around the world about the impact of pledges not being met by the developed world, Sameh Shoukry, Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs and COP27 President-Designate, said: “We have not yet delivered on the $100bn pledge, which in itself is more a symbol of trust and reassurance than a remedy to actual climate needs”.  Commenting on the current levels of support to protect people’s lives and livelihoods in the developing world he highlighted that “mitigation finance is receiving more attention than adaptation” and that “instruments of finance are still mostly non-concessional loans rather than concessional loans and grants which account for only six percent of climate finance.  We must find a way to address this challenge. Without appropriate and fair finance serving as a catalyst, we will all continue to struggle in delivering impactful climate action.”  Despite the scale of the challenge facing many nations, given current geopolitical and economic issues, the Egyptian Presidency-Designate spoke about the need to make progress stating that: “delaying action will only make it harder and more expensive.”   Speaking about the recent Heads of Delegation meetings held in Cairo, Shoukry stated his hopes about progress, saying that he: “witnessed a constructive exchange of views” which he believed had “paved the way for ... a smooth opening of our agenda and a constructive negotiation around the crucial issues of funding arrangements for loss and damage”.   The inclusion of loss and damage on the agenda would indicate a significant shift in the debate and would enable COP27 to make progress on four key areas of climate action: adaptation, mitigation, finance and loss and damage, which featured prominently in Pre-COP27’s agenda.  Recently, Denmark followed Scotland in providing unilateral support for loss and damage by earmarking$13m through a financial instrument for loss and damage.  Urging nations to address the trust deficit, Shoukry said: “we must develop and cultivate a sense of mutual trust and understanding.  Our effort must not be approached as a zero-sum equation.  We must all rise to the occasion and demonstrate leadership, set aside narrow national interests and appreciate the potential in cooperation, compromise and collective win-win scenarios”.

Nepal reported 35 new Covid-19 cases on Monday. According to the Ministry of Health and Population, 455 swab samples were tested in the RT-PCR method, of which 26 returned positive. Likewise, 994 people underwent antigen tests, of which 9 were tested positive. The Ministry said that no one died of the virus in the last 24 hours and 65 infected people recovered from the disease. As of today, there are 850 active cases in the country.

The meeting of the Nepali Congress Central Executive Committee has decided to select the candidates for the House of Representatives and the Provincial Assembly. This decision was taken at the meeting held on Monday under the chairmanship of the Prime Minister and President of Congress Sher Bahadur Deuba.  General Secretary Bishwa Prakash Sharma presented the proposal in the meeting. In the resolution unanimously passed by the meeting, it was decided that while selecting the candidates, the recommendations made by the various levels of the party, personal qualifications, morals, efficiency, contribution to the democratic movement, social role, contributions to different levels and areas of the party, popularity and prospects for the future will be the basis.  The Congress has also decided not to select any candidate who participated in the local level elections.

A meeting of top leaders of the ruling coalition is going on in Baluwatar to discuss the distribution of seats for the House of Representatives and Provincial Assembly elections. It is believed that the meeting will discuss and finalize the report sent by the five-party working group. Keshavraj Joshi, Secretary of the Working Group, informed that the report of the seat allocation for the House of Representatives has reached the final stage and based on that, the report for the Provincial Assembly will also be finalized. Himalal Puri, who is a member of the working group on behalf of the Rastriya Janamorcha Party, said that only a few points remained to be agreed for the House of Representatives. He said that the working group has completed its work so that today's top leadership can distribute the seats to the House of Representatives and the Provincial Assembly. Prime Minister and President of Nepali Congress Sher Bahadur Deuba, Chairman of CPN (Maoist Center) Pushpa Kamal Dahal, Chairman of CPN (Unified Socialist) Madhav Kumar Nepal, Chairman of Janata Samajbadi Party Upendra Yadav and Vice-chairman of Janamorcha Durga Paudel participated in the meeting.

CPN-UML Chairman KP Sharma Oli has reached home district Jhapa along with his wife Radhika Shakya to celebrate Dashain. He will organize a greeting program on the occasion of Dashain, Tihar, Chhath and other festivals in Jhapa on Tuesday.  Oli will receive tika from his father Mohan Prasad Oli on the auspicious occasion of Vijaya Dashami at Prithvi Nagar in Bhadrapur Municipality of Jhapa. He will return to Kathmandu on the same day.

CPN (Maoist Center) Vice-chairman Krishna Bahadur Mahara has withdrawn his name from the proportional list of Nov 20 federal election. He has withdrawn his name from the list after there was widespread protest for putting his name in proportional list. He was at the top in the Khas Arya cluster in the proportional list submitted by the Maoists. The party sources said that Hitraj Pandey has replaced Mahara. Mahara’s candidacy for the House of Representatives from Dang-2 is still not fixed, said an undisclosed source.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology 2022 is awarded to Svante Paabo for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution, announced the award-giving organization on Monday.  "The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Svante Paabo for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution," read the Nobel Prize statement. The 2022 Nobel Prize laureate Paabo found that gene transfer had occurred from the now extinct hominins to Homo sapiens. This ancient flow of genes to present-day humans has physiological relevance today, for example affecting how our immune system reacts to infections, the statement said.  Paabo has established an entirely new scientific discipline, paleogenomics. By revealing genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, his discoveries provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human.  Through his pioneering research, Paabo accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans. He also made the sensational discovery of a previously unknown hominin, Denisova, entirely from genome data retrieved from a small finger bone specimen.  Importantly, Paabo also found that gene transfer had occurred from these now extinct hominins to Homo sapiens following the migration from Africa around 70,000 years ago, the statement read.  Paabo is a Swedish geneticist specializing in the field of evolutionary genetics who was recruited to the University of Munich in 1990, where, as a newly appointed Professor, he continued his work on archaic DNA. Earlier in 2020, David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian jointly won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch. David Julius utilized capsaicin, a pungent compound from chili peppers that induces a burning sensation, to identify a sensor in the nerve endings of the skin that responds to heat.  Ardem Patapoutian used pressure-sensitive cells to discover a novel class of sensors that respond to mechanical stimuli in the skin and internal organs.  These breakthrough discoveries launched intense research activities leading to a rapid increase in the understanding of how the nervous system senses heat, cold, and mechanical stimuli. (ANI)