The 16th meeting of Mongolia-China Intergovernmental Commission for Trade, Economic, Scientific and Technical Cooperation was held online on November 23. The meeting was co-chaired by Deputy Prime Minister of Mongolia Ya.Sodbaatar and Chinese Minister of Commerce Zhong Shan and attended by delegates from corresponding ministries and authorities of the two countries.

During the meeting, Chinese side informed the decision of Hubei prefecture and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China to donate medical equipment and items worth CNY 4 million to Mongolia to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

Furthermore, the sides concurred to enrich Intergovernmental Cooperation Plan to forward Mongolia’s Steppe Road plan and China’s Belt and Road initiative with new content and implement it as well as to renew mid-term program for Mongolia-China trade and economic cooperation.

While expressing commitment to actively cooperate for achieving a goal to bring bilateral trade turnover to USD 10 billion, the sides voiced to closely collaborate for ensuring normal bilateral trade and economic cooperation as much as possible amid the pandemic situation and to continue measures such as “Green Gateway”, Mongolia-China temporary regulation on border crossing ports further.

In the frameworks of deepening railroad cooperation with a view to support trade and transit transportation between the two countries, the delegates also exchanged views on matters including defining railway border crossing point at the Gashuunsukhait-Gantsmod border crossing port, renewing Mongolia and China Border Railway Agreement and opening of Khangi-Mandal railway border checkpoint

Support from coal miners helped Donald Trump win the US presidency four years ago. Now, the leader of the nation’s top mining union is calling on Trump to “move on”, adding that ongoing efforts to challenge vote counts and pressure state elections officials are a “threat to our entire form of government and the American way of life.”

While the US General Services Administration — the federal agency that allows the transition process to begin — said late on Monday President-elect Joe Biden’s team could get in touch to begin changeover, Trump continues to hold on to power.

Trump tweeted on Tuesday he would soon present evidence of widespread ballot fraud and other wrongdoing in “great detail” in a “big lawsuit”.

The president of the United Mine Workers of America International (UMW or UMWA), Cecil E. Roberts, said Trump’s relentless denial of Biden’s victory is putting the US on a path to subvert “the very foundation of what actually does make America great — government of, by and for the people.”

“The cockamamie notion that there was some plot launched in a failed state in South America that somehow affected the count of millions of voters is just absurd,” Roberts said in a statement issued Friday.

“Whether you like the outcome or not, the American people have spoken, and their will must now be placed ahead of everything else.”

The union, which represents around 80,000 mine workers, did not endorse a presidential candidate this year.

Digging coal, but down

Trump’s campaign vowed to “give back” coal miners their lost jobs, but that promise was never fulfilled. During the July-September period, the coal sector recorded a new low in average employment with just 40,458 posts, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

“Despite a slight increase in coal production in the third quarter compared to the previous one, average coal mining employment fell 23.6% from the first quarter of 2017, when Trump took office, to the most recent quarter,” S&P Global reported.

While Trump stocked his administration with coal-industry executives and lobbyists, took hefty donations from the industry and rolled back environmental regulations, coal’s decline only accelerated in recent years.

Production of the commodity was down 31.5% in the third quarter of the year compared to the first quarter of 2017, when Trump took office.

Total production in 2020 is expected to decline to 511 million tonnes, down from 775 million tonnes in 2017. That 34% fall is the largest four-year production drop since at least 1932, data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows.

Exacerbated by the effects of disruptions related to the spread of covid-19 , the industry downturn has translated into 5,300 coal mining jobs, or nearly 10%, being eliminated during Trump’s administration.

European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) published a proposed airworthiness directive on Tuesday that could see Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft cleared within weeks after a 20-month grounding over two deadly crashes.

The publication of the directive opens a 28-day public consultation period after which the agency will review the input and then approve the aircraft for flight. According to the agency, the step signals “its intention to approve the aircraft to return to Europe’s skies within a matter of weeks.”

The move by EASA follows last week’s flight clearance for the 737 MAX in the US by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). FAA chief Stephen Dickson said that he was “100 percent comfortable with [his] family flying on it.”

EASA’s Executive Director Patrick Ky said in a statement on Tuesday: “EASA made clear from the outset that we would conduct our own objective and independent assessment of the 737 MAX, working closely with the FAA and Boeing, to make sure that there can be no repeat of these tragic accidents, which touched the lives of so many people.

“I am confident that we have left no stone unturned in our assessment of the aircraft with its changed design approach,” he added.

According to EASA, the “fundamental problem” of the 737’s new software function program, which was intended to make the aircraft easier to handle, was that many pilots did not even know it was there.

Regulators grounded the troubled Boeing aircraft worldwide in March 2019, after two almost-new 737 MAX planes crashed within five months of one another. The crashes, which occurred in Indonesia and Ethiopia, killed all 346 people on board. They prompted a lengthy safety review that was met by numerous delays, driving up losses and costs for Boeing.

In both crashes, the new flight control software caused the aircraft to unexpectedly nosedive shortly after takeoff.

A Mongolian tech start-up is preparing to expand through a pioneering new method of attracting investors.

erxes is a software company that merges multiple tools into one application. (image via erxes)erxes is a software company that merges multiple tools into one application. (image via erxes)

erxes is a software company that merges multiple tools into one application. (image via erxes)

Erxes (stylized as erxes, all lower case) is a software company that merges marketing, sales and customer service tools into one application. It was founded by three Mongolian entrepreneurs in 2017; Mend-Orshikh Amartaivan (MJ), Bat-Amar Battulga and Naran Batjargal, who are now the company’s chief executive officer, chief technical officer and chief operating officer respectively.

The trio aim to take market share from companies that offer marketing and management software individually, such as Mailchimp (email marketing) and ConvertFlow (website conversion). According to its website, erxes says its single application, which costs $29 per month for five people, could save small marketing teams thousands of dollars every year.

“We have 18 staff in three offices,” MJ said to Mongolia Weekly. “Due to these challenging times, we're operating from the Mongolia office, as all core members are Mongolian nationals. We have a few remote staff working from the US and France.

"In 2021, we're planning to set up our US office.”

The idea started after the founders had worked in tech for a while but couldn’t find software that could wrap different services into one application.

“We couldn't find a complete solution that addressed our needs,” MJ said. “That's when we decided to create a customizable customer engagement platform. The main goal was to meet the unique needs and requirements of each startup or company at a reasonable price.”

In the three years since it started, the company’s software has been picked up by KFC, Xerox, Toyota, Volkswagen, Toto, Pizza Hut and others.

In order to fund more growth, erxes has chosen to undertake what’s known as a Continuous Agreement for Future Equity (CAFE), which is based on the continuous securities offering (CSO) approach. It allows investors to make cash investments in a company at any single time to get company equity at a later date.

This means erxes will put 9 percent of their equity on the market, allow the market to say what it thinks the company is worth, and raise money when that valuation goes up.

According to Fairmont, this approach avoids some of the barriers associated with traditional public offerings, such as issuing a fixed number of shares and negotiating their price with investors.

Another key difference is that erxes won’t be listed on any public stock exchange. Instead, it will simply have an ‘Invest Now’ button on its website.

The CSO model doesn’t necessarily mean the company won’t hold a traditional IPO sometime in the future, although Amartaivan said that the approach isn’t on the cards for now.

“We're still open to any opportunity that might arise in the future,” he said. “But we're not expecting to launch a traditional IPO anytime soon, as it does not align with our current focus.”

Over the next two years, Amartaivan says the company is focused on setting up shop in the US to improve their customer experience.

“We're planning to set up our US team in the upcoming year. This will allow us to provide faster and smoother customer service,” he said. “It's kind of a no-brainer considering more than 40 percent of our existing 1 million downloads and the majority of our SaaS customers are from the US.”

Even though erxes is now hitting the big time, it remains keenly focused on its Mongolian roots and the role it plays in diversifying the Mongolian economy beyond mining. Amartaivan told Mongolia Weekly that he’s optimistic about the tech industry in Mongolia.

“People are getting hired as remote engineers for foreign tech companies,” he said. “Some are setting up offices in Mongolia as a gateway to other Asian markets. So, I think this is proof that there is a bigger potential in Mongolia.

“One of our goals is to bring forth Mongolian engineers on the global tech stage. Once we pass this benchmark, hopefully, it will set the path and make it easier for other Mongolian startups to follow.”

On 23 November 2020, the European Union and Mongolia took stock of their good trade relations, and looked at opportunities to further strengthen their bilateral trade and investment cooperation agenda.

The discussion took place at the third annual sub-committee on trade and investment in the framework of the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) between the EU and Mongolia, which entered into force in 2017.

On trade, the Parties:

discussed ways for Mongolia to make better use of tariff preferences under the special incentive arrangement for sustainable development and good governance (GSP+) as part of the EU’s Generalised Scheme of Preferences;

followed up on Mongolia’s GSP+ commitments, including in the areas of child labour and environmental protection;

took note of positive results from the European Commission’s Trade Related Assistance for Mongolia (TRAM) project;

discussed a possible bilateral agreement on geographical indications, and;

explored a possible regular dialogue on food safety and animal and plant health.

They also discussed the investment environment in both markets and the EU’s concerns on some Mongolian laws hindering foreign investment.

Next steps

The sub-committee on trade and investment will be followed by the EU-Mongolia Joint Committee on 3 December 2020 via videoconference. The Joint Committee (chaired alternately by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Mongolia and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy) is entrusted to ensure the proper functioning of the PCA, set priorities in relation to its aims, and make recommendations for promoting the objectives of the agreement.

Background

In 2017 the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) between the EU and Mongolia entered into force. On trade, the PCA commits the Parties to establish a dialogue on food safety and plant and animal health, cooperate on investment, facilitate trade, and implement international standards as well as to cooperate on GSP+ and support Mongolia’s economic diversification.

In 2019, trade between the European Union and Mongolia amounted to €562 million, which makes the EU Mongolia’s fourth biggest trading partner. The value of EU exports accounted for €486 million and consisted mainly of industrial goods (82.6%) and agricultural products (17.2%). In the same year, Mongolia’s total exports to the EU amounted to €76 million, of which 87% were agricultural products and 33% industrial goods

Mongolia registered 32 new COVID-19 cases in the last 24 hours, bringing the national caseload to 672, the country's National Center for Communicable Diseases (NCCD) said Tuesday.

"A total of 4,335 tests for COVID-19 were conducted across the country yesterday and 32 of them were positive," said Amarjargal Ambaselmaa, head of the NCCD's Surveillance Department, at a press conference.

The latest confirmed cases are locally transmitted. A total of 245 such cases have been reported so far across the country.

Domestically transmitted cases have been reported in the capital city of Ulan Bator and provinces of Selenge, Darkhan-Uul, Govisumber, Orkhon and Dornogovi.

More than half of the total domestically transmitted cases were reported in the northern Mongolian province of Selenge which borders Russia.

Until mid-November, many Mongolian citizens had returned home from Russia via Altanbulag border point in Selenge province, and international freight transport trucks had entered Mongolia through the border point.

The first locally transmitted case was a woman whose 29-year-old husband, a transport driver, returned from Russia and tested positive for the virus four days after he was released from a 21-day mandatory isolation on Nov. 6.

The country has imposed a nationwide lockdown until Dec. 1 to halt the virus's spread and identify all people who had contact with locally transmitted COVID-19 patients. Enditem

XacBank, a leading universal bank in Mongolia, and Infosys Finacle, part of EdgeVerve Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Infosys on Tuesday announced the selection of Finacle’s core banking, treasury, and corporate banking solution suites to power bank’s digital transformation.

The Finacle solution suite will enable the bank to drive all-round business transformation to improve customer engagement, operational excellence, and the flexibility to launch tailored offerings on-demand, for continuous innovation and growth. With Finacle digital core banking suite, XacBank will gain a comprehensive set of capabilities and an open platform to establish a robust foundation for its digital future. The digital product factory will enable the bank to evolve its offerings at speed to keep in sync with market dynamics, a statement from the company said.

Tsevegjav Gumenjav, Chief Executive Officer, XacBank, said, “at XacBank, we aspire to be the preferred bank in Mongolia for all our customers' segments, by providing a modern digital banking experience, while securely serving their financial needs. To power our leadership position into the future, in an increasingly competitive environment, we felt the need for a modern platform. Given its growing deployment base in Mongolia, Finacle is a proven solution for our needs. With Finacle’s new-age digital core banking platform, I believe we are well placed to meet the present and future demands of our customers with ease while contributing to the economic development of Mongolia," Gumenjav said.

“Ulaanbaatar MMC Energy” has qualified for the FIBA 3x3 World Tour Final 2020, which will take place in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on December 18-19, 2020. To qualify, the teams had to finish inside the Top 12 in the World Tour season standings after the last Masters.

Here's the list of the 12 participating teams sorted by tour standings:

1. Riga (LAT) - 320 pts

2. Liman (SRB) - 320 pts

3. NY Harlem (USA) - 179 pts

4. Novi Sad (SRB) - 170 pts

5. Utena Uniclub (LTU) - 150 pts

6. Jeddah (KSA) - 140 pts

7. Lausanne Katapult (SUI) - 135 pts

8. Piran (SLO) - 130 pts

9. Sakiai Gulbele (LTU) - 118 pts

10. Ub (SRB) - 98 pts

11. Ulaanbaatar MMC Energy (MGL) - 53 pts

12. Amsterdam (NED) - 50pts

Amsterdam and Princeton were tied with 50 points and the same winning percentage and the Dutch qualified based on the third tie-breaker, points average.

Utena Uniclub, Ub and Ulaanbaatar MMC Energy will make their debut at a World Tour Final (the latter becoming the first-ever Mongolian team to do it).

The other nine already featured last year at the Utsunomiya Final, which saw Novi Sad win their 4th FIBA 3x3 World Tour title.

LONDON/FRANKFURT (Reuters) - It took Oxford University’s brightest minds decades of work to give them the expertise to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. In the end, it was a momentary error - and a dose of good fortune - that carried them over the line.

The Oxford vaccinologists were exhilarated on Monday when drugmaker AstraZeneca, with whom they developed the shot, announced that it could be around 90% effective, citing data from late-stage trials.

“It can only happen if extraordinary support is provided,” Adrian Hill, director of Oxford University’s Jenner Institute which developed the shot, told Reuters. “We had pretty well the whole institute in Oxford working on this vaccine.”

While skill and hard work drove development, AstraZeneca said it was a minor mistake that made the team realise how they could significantly boost the shot’s success rate, to as much as 90% from around 60%: by administering a half dose, followed by a full dose a month later.

“The reason we had the half dose is serendipity,” Mene Pangalos, head of AstraZeneca’s non-oncology research and development, told Reuters.

The plan was for trial participants in Britain to receive two full doses, but researchers were perplexed when they noticed that side effects, such as fatigue, headaches or arm aches were milder than expected, Pangalos said.

“So we went back and checked ... and we found out that they had underpredicted the dose of the vaccine by half.”

He said the team nonetheless decided to press ahead with that half dose group, and to administer the second, full dose booster shot at the scheduled time.

The results showed the vaccine was 90% effective among this group, while a larger group who had received two full doses produced an efficacy read-out of 62%, leading to an overall efficacy of 70% across both dosing patterns, Pangalos said.

“That, in essence, is how we stumbled upon doing half dose-full dose (group),” he told Reuters. “Yes, it was a mistake.”

The vaccine uses a harmless adenovirus to deliver genetic material that tricks the human body to produce proteins known as antigens that are normally found on the coronavirus surface, helping the immune system develop an arsenal against infection.

Pangalos said more analysis was needed to explain why an initial lower dose bolstered protection. One possible explanation was that lower antigen levels to begin with triggered an overall better immune system build-up, he added.

1991 TO TODAY

Even though good fortune played its part, the development of what Oxford scientists hailed as “a vaccine for the world” was built upon 30 years of testing and tweaking of methods.

The adenovirus “viral vector” platform that their candidate uses has been around since 1991, said Hill of the university’s Jenner Institute.

He had been working with Sarah Gilbert, another vaccinologist, to fine-tune the technology. This has involved using a chimpanzee cold virus as the vector to deliver the instructions, in trials with diseases such as flu, MERS and Ebola over the last decade. The hope was that it would one day prove its potential against one or more such deadly diseases.

They turned their attention to the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, in January. Oxford Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson said she was told of Gilbert’s work and that it looked promising for the new coronavirus, but was operating on a shoestring.

The university then offered a million pounds to underwrite the research until more funding came on board, Richardson told reporters, which duly arrived when the government and AstraZeneca became involved in May.

The unprecedented urgency and resources given to Oxford to prove the platform’s effectiveness against COVID-19 meant it leap-frogged the vaccines against those other pathogens, which are still in early-stage trials.

Gilbert said the experience with MERS, or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, which is caused by a different type of coronavirus, was especially instructive.

“It showed us that we could make a vaccine with this technology that would induce good immune responses against the coronavirus spike protein,” she told reporters.

“We’d also been thinking about how to go really quickly when a new pathogen arises and we need to make a new vaccine. We’d done some work preparing for that.”

2020: ‘A VERY LONG YEAR’

Andrew Pollard, head of the Oxford Vaccine Group and a professor who has spent two decades running clinical trials, said this experience gave him confidence in the prospects for Oxford’s new vaccine, known initially as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19.

“I think we knew right from the beginning of the year that if we could go through this development, we may well have something which can make a difference,” Pollard told Reuters.

But there was an issue. Limited interest in Oxford’s vaccines for other pathogens before this year meant they didn’t have the funding to prove the platform’s efficacy: until now.

“You either need a massive amount of money, or a pandemic to bring in that resource, and it’s tremendous that we’ve had this opportunity to validate that chimpanzee adenovirus technology for this coronavirus,” Hill said.

“If you’d said to me a year ago that in 2020 anybody would make a vaccine for a global pandemic - and in months rather than years - I would have thought that was hugely challenging.”

Pollard said that while speed of the COVID-19 vaccine’s development was in some ways extraordinary, 2020 had “been a very long year” since the team started work on the vaccine in January.

That culminated this past weekend, Pollard said, in having “an enormous mountain to climb to pull all of the information together” to be able to issue Monday’s data release showing the vaccine can be up to 90% effective.

“The last few weeks have been pretty exhausting. The feeling is absolutely one of extreme fatigue and tiredness at this point,” he told Reuters, speaking before he briefed the office of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the findings.

“If the results have not met those regulatory requirements, they would have told us just to carry on with the trial. So it was a great relief.”

Reporting and writing by Kate Kelland and Alistair Smout in London, and Ludwig Burger in Frankfurt; Editing by Pravin Char

A MASSIVE flying ancient beast the size of a small plane has been found in the Gobi Desert.

The dinosaur had enormous 36ft long wings and would be one of the largest winged reptiles ever known to live on Earth.

The giant lived 70 million years ago in a warm climate that was desert-like but not quite as dry as today.

At this time there were lots of dinos roaming around - the offspring of which would have been dinner for this large beast.

It was part of a mysterious branch of dinos known as the azhdarchids and was likely one of the largest that ever lived, researchers claim in the study published in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

It joins another large dinosaur, from the same family called the Hatzegopteryx, which was unearthed earlier this year.

Discovered in Romania, the terrifying bird had a massive neck and jaws that could swallow other horse-sized dinosaurs whole.

The region of the Gobi desert where the latest fossil was discovered is called the Nemegt Formation.

It is home to numerous incredible Jurassic Park-style finds dating back to the Cretacious period.

But this is the first time the fossil patch has yielded a pterosaur - proving how international the species was.

The team worked this new finds gigantic size from predicting the chunks of neck fossil they have to go by, they predicted its footprint would be the same as the Hatzegopteryx which had a wing span of up to 39 feet.