Australia pension giant pressing Rio over heritage site blasts www.bloomberg.com

Australia’s biggest pension fund said it is pressing Rio Tinto Group on the destruction of a 40,000-year-old Aboriginal heritage site, though isn’t yet contemplating selling down its stake in the world’s second-biggest miner.

New sports field opens in Bayanzurkh district www.montsame.mn

Governor of the Capital City and the Mayor of Ulaanbaatar S.Amarsaikhan made a decision to build a football field in each district and it is being successfully implemented. The construction of a football field and sports facilities, covering 1.8 hectares of land near the General Authority for Border Protection in the 4th khoroo of Bayanzurkh district has been completed and opened today.

The construction of the field was implemented by “Mongol Management Center” LLC. Within this framework, a 4.4-meter-wide, four-lane 450-meter jogging track, a 5,500-square-meter football field, an 880-square-meter basketball and volleyball court, an 84-meter-long 1.2-meter-wide walkway, and 1,155 square meters of sidewalks have been built. In addition, the sports field was built with spectator seats, shade, children's playgrounds, parking lots and restrooms, adding one more place for children and youth to visit.

The opening ceremony was attended by Governor of the Capital City and the Mayor of Ulaanbaatar S.Amarsaikhan Member of the Parliament B.Saranchimeg, Deputy Minister of Education, Culture, Science and Sports G.Ganbayar, General Manager of Ulaanbaatar and Head of the Mayor's Office T.Gantumur and athletes of the national football team.

Mayor S.Amarsaikhan first visited the site on May 9, 2019 which is more than a year ago and got acquainted with the situation and instructed relevant organizations including the Mayor's Office of Ulaanbaatar, the Land Management Department of the capital city, the City Planning and Development Department, and the Investment Department to urgently develop a design for the sports field, provide the necessary funds and start the construction work. Accordingly, the construction of a sports field was intensified since last autumn.

Mayor S.Amarsaikhan said, “As part of our people-centered policy, we have been building public parks, sports fields, bicycle paths etc. in stages by revoking the licenses for the land lots which have not been used properly, polluted the environment and most importantly, posed a risk to human life, health and property. Today, the construction work to transform this 1.8 hectares of area into a comprehensive sports field that meets international standards is being inaugurated. In the past, we have built parks in Chingeltei and Bayanzurkh districts and Central square. Currently, a park covering 3.8 hectares of land is being built at the foot of Bayankhoshuu Mountain, and green areas and winter sports arenas are under construction in Takhilt, Tsagdaa Tolgoi and Khan-Uul district. There are also plans to build more green areas and children’s playground in every corner of Ulaanbaatar. I would like to inform you that the park in the central square will be opened soon. In the past year, a total of 158 land lots have been reclaimed by the city for public use.”

Residents of the 4th khoroo of Bayanzurkh district expressed their gratitude to the Mayor and other officials for the construction of the football field and asked for more such places to be established in the future.

Mongolia reports 413 negative tests for COVID-19, 1 more recovery www.xinhuanet.com

June 16 (Xinhua) -- Mongolia conducted 413 tests for COVID-19 in the last 24 hours and the results were all negative, the country's National Center for Communicable Disease (NCCD) said Tuesday.

Former Prime Minister J.Erdenebat imprisoned amidst protests www.news.mn

Former Mongolian Prime Minister J.Erdenebat was imprisoned (16 June) after failed to pay the hefty MNT 10 billion bail issued by the Sukhbaatar District Court of Ulaanbaatar. His trail has been postponed until 22 June, two days before election. This comes after J.Erdenebat dismissed his lawyer. He is accused of abuse of power for illegally owning protected areas with special licenses in Tost, in the Tosonbulba Mountain Range in the South Gobi Province under his name when he was working as Prime Minister.

World Bank Group supports Mongolia’s efforts to improve investment climate, inspire investor confidence www.montsame.mn

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/ IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, and the National Development Agency (NDA) are launching an institutional platform to help the government resolve investor grievances efficiently and transparently, thereby improving investor confidence in Mongolia.

The platform — the Systemic Investor Response Mechanism (SIRM) — will enable investors to register and track resolution of grievances at an early stage. In addition, the IFC and NDA partnership will build a national database of investment climate issues that investors face as well as cases of breaching investment protection guarantees.

“The government recognizes the need for a robust and transparent investment climate that is conducive to Mongolia’s economic growth,” said B. Bayarsaikhan, Chairman of the National Development Agency. “Our collaboration with the World Bank Group will help create a more favorable business environment for investors, retaining and expanding existing FDI as well as domestic investment in Mongolia.”

“Political and policy instability is one of the main challenges for Mongolia in terms of attracting and sustaining foreign direct investments (FDI). Effective cooperation and coordination between the public and private sectors are important to tackle this issue and much needs to be done in this respect. An online system to track and resolve investors’ grievances launched today is crucial to address issues faced by investors,” said Amartuvshin, President of the National Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Rufat Alimardanov, IFC’s Resident Representative for Mongolia, said, “At a time when economies across the world are impacted by COVID-19, it is even more important to develop innovative ways to attract and retain investment, and protect jobs.”

“More predictable investment policies and consistent government action could help emerging markets like Mongolia attract more investment flows, thereby supporting financial stability and creating the conditions for a robust economic rebound. The new SIRM platform affirms the government of Mongolia’s efforts towards investment climate reforms and restoring investor confidence,” he said.

The launch was attended by foreign embassies in Ulaanbaatar and representatives from business associations and chambers. Officials from government agencies involved in investor protection, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, NDA, and the Ministry of Agriculture, also attended the event.

IFC — in partnership with the government of Japan and Hungary — has been supporting Mongolia’s investment reforms through its Investment Policy and Agriculture Promotion advisory project since 2014. The project aims to help the government improve its investment policies, promote economic diversification, enhance investor protection, and further attract and retain private investments.

As part of its efforts to improve accessibility, transparency, and efficiency of public services in Mongolia, the World Bank is helping the government to set up an online one-stop service center for investors under the Smart Government Project. The SIRM platform will be linked to this center.

IFC—a sister organization of the World Bank and member of the World Bank Group—is the largest global development institution focused on the private sector in emerging markets. We work in more than 100 countries, using our capital, expertise, and influence to create markets and opportunities in developing countries. In fiscal year 2019, we invested more than $19 billion in private companies and financial institutions in developing countries, leveraging the power of the private sector to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity. For more information, visit www.ifc.org.

Source: World Bank Group

Coronavirus: Dexamethasone proves first life-saving drug www.bbc.com

A cheap and widely available drug can help save the lives of patients seriously ill with coronavirus.

The low-dose steroid treatment dexamethasone is a major breakthrough in the fight against the deadly virus, UK experts say.

The drug is part of the world's biggest trial testing existing treatments to see if they also work for coronavirus.

It cut the risk of death by a third for patients on ventilators. For those on oxygen, it cut deaths by a fifth.

Had the drug had been used to treat patients in the UK from the start of the pandemic, up to 5,000 lives could have been saved, researchers say.

And it could be of huge benefit in poorer countries with high numbers of Covid-19 patients.

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About 19 out of 20 patients with coronavirus recover without being admitted to hospital. Of those who are admitted to hospital, most also recover, but some may need oxygen or mechanical ventilation. These are the high-risk patients whom dexamethasone appears to help.

The drug is already used to reduce inflammation in a range of other conditions, and it appears that it helps stop some of the damage that can happen when the body's immune system goes into overdrive as it tries to fight off coronavirus.

The body's over-reaction is called a cytokine storm and it can be deadly.

In the trial, led by a team from Oxford University, around 2,000 hospital patients were given dexamethasone and were compared with more than 4,000 who did not receive the drug.

For patients on ventilators, it cut the risk of death from 40% to 28%. For patients needing oxygen, it cut the risk of death from 25% to 20%.

Chief investigator Prof Peter Horby said: "This is the only drug so far that has been shown to reduce mortality - and it reduces it significantly. It's a major breakthrough."

Lead researcher Prof Martin Landray says the findings suggest that for every eight patients treated on ventilators, you could save one life.

For those patients treated with oxygen, you save one life for approximately every 20-25 treated with the drug.

"There is a clear, clear benefit. The treatment is up to 10 days of dexamethasone and it costs about £5 per patient. So essentially it costs £35 to save a life. This is a drug that is globally available."

Prof Landray said, when appropriate, hospital patients should now be given it without delay, but people should not go out and buy it to take at home.

Dexamethasone does not appear to help people with milder symptoms of coronavirus - those who don't need help with their breathing.

The Recovery Trial has been running since March. It included the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine which has subsequently been ditched amid concerns that it increases fatalities and heart problems.

Another drug called remdesivir, an antiviral treatment that appears to shorten recovery time for people with coronavirus, is already being made available on the NHS.

The first drug proven to cut deaths from Covid-19 is not some new, expensive medicine but an old, cheap-as-chips steroid.

That is something to celebrate because it means patients across the world could benefit immediately. That's why the top-line results of this trial have been rushed out - because the implications are so huge globally.

Dexamethasone has been used since the early 1960s to treat a wide range of conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis and asthma. Half of all Covid patients who require a ventilator do not survive, so cutting that risk by a third would have a huge impact.

The drug is given intravenously in intensive care, and in tablet form for less seriously ill patients. So far, the only other drug proven to benefit Covid patients is remdesivir, an antiviral treatment which has been used for Ebola.

That has been shown to reduce the duration of coronavirus symptoms from 15 days to 11, but the evidence was not strong enough to show whether it reduced mortality. Unlike dexamethasone, remdesivir is a new drug with limited supplies and a price has yet to be announced.

Hannes Takacs new head of EBRD in Mongolia www.ebrd.com

Hannes Takacs has been appointed to lead the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in Mongolia. He will start his new role as head of office on 14 July and move to Ulaanbaatar as soon as conditions allow.

Israeli Archaeologists Shed New Light on Great Wall of Mongolia www.ebrd.com

The Great Wall of China is one of the most prominent mysteries on the face of the planet. We can see it from outer space, yet surprisingly little is known about much of it. What purpose did the Great Wall of China really serve, whose purpose did it serve, and when did it serve said purpose?

In fact, the so-called great wall is a series of ancient high walls uncomfortably grouped under the soubriquet “Great Wall of China” in today’s China and Mongolia, and a bit in Russia and North Korea too. The earliest one dates to 2,500 years ago and the latest was erected in the 17th century. Their purpose has been assumed to have been defensive.

Now, an unusual collaboration of Israeli, Mongolian and American archaeologists propose that at least one of these great walls – dubbed the “Genghis Khan Wall” and stretching almost 750 kilometers (466 miles) from Mongolia to China – doesn’t have the hallmarks of a military installation. Nor does it separate between ecological regions, as had been suggested by some: the ecology on both sides is much the same.

The collaboration reported on surveying the “understudied” stretch in Mongolia, erected during the medieval period, and the discovery of clues to its functions, in the journal of Antiquity.

Genghis Khan and the great walls

In total, the “great walls” built over more than 2,000 years stretch 21,196 kilometers, according to the China Highlights website, which qualifies that the calculation is downside because it doesn’t count sections built on older ones, or isolated sections. Some segments were later connected.

The new report relates to the 737 kilometer-long structure in Mongolia dubbed the “Genghis Khan Wall,” though it seems Genghis Khan (aka Chinggis Khaan) or fear of him had nothing to do with its construction.

Let us describe it first: The Great Wall of Mongolia is the northernmost of the great walls and, like most of the rest, it stretches east-west. About half of it is in Mongolia; it continues into China, passes through Russia (southeast Siberia) and ends back in China. There has been some archaeological investigation of this wall by Mongolian, Chinese and Russian archaeologists.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the eminent Chinese historian Wang Guowei suggested that after the rise of the fierce nomad chief Genghis Khan in the 13th century, the terrified Jin dynasty built the walls to stop him. Not that it worked, and ultimately one of Khan’s horde of grandchildren would conquer all of China. However, the consensus now and the opinion of the team is that the Mongolian wall predated the Mongol horde by a century or two.

The argument then turned to whether the Mongolian wall was built by the Khitan-Liao dynasty (907-1125) or the Jin dynasty (1115–1234). For all the vast labor that went into their construction, no dynasty whatsoever left behind records of building it, let alone why.

Yet it is now widely agreed that it dates to the Liao period. Their new surveys and analysis support that thesis, the team writes.

Asked if the Great Wall of Mongolia might have been erected in stages by both the Liao and Jin dynasties, Shelach-Lavi says evidently not: it seems to have been built during one period, though research continues.

“It’s very systematic, with a fort every 30 kilometers. It’s all very consistent,” he tells Haaretz. “It definitely looks like one monument, and was built fast. Historic documents on the Liao show they could recruit a big workforce. The historic records show, for example, that they could enlist 200,000 people to construct roads or other projects. Maybe building the wall took a few years, but that’s all.”

It wasn’t made of stone, he elaborates: there were none in that area. It was fashioned from pounded earth covered with plaster, which sounds vulnerable to the archaeologically uninitiated. But actually a structure made of robustly pounded earth structure can survive thousands of years of weathering, Shelach-Lavi explains. Though indeed the Mongolian wall has eroded to a maximal height of about a meter today compared with an estimated theoretical historic height of 2 or 3 meters, he says.

A Chinese tradition

The earliest of the great walls is the 600-kilometer Great Wall of Qi, which had been postulated to date to the seventh century B.C.E., but is now believed to have been erected in the fifth century B.C.E. That was made of stone, and much of it still stands. It stretches from the present-day city Jinan to Qingdao. Many more great walls would be built after it, mostly in China and some in eastern Mongolia, with bits in the territory of southern Siberia and North Korea.

The Mongolian wall wasn’t erected by a Chinese dynasty: neither the Jian nor the Liao were Chinese dynasties but were polities of nomadic people related to the Mongols, called the Khitan people. The Khitan had their own language, which was related to Mongolian, and their own writing. The dynasties controlled northern china and much of what is now Mongolia, and adopted certain characteristics of their southern Chinese neighbors but maintained their nomadic identity, Shelach-Lavi says.

“The Khitan established five capital cities and their ruler would travel between them by season, roaming with the migration of the people,” he says. “These ‘cities’ were walls within which they put up tents.”

In other words, classical thinking that the Great Wall of Mongolia had been erected to protect hapless Chinese farmers from nomadic marauders from the steppes is likely off, the team suggests. It was apparently built because of issues between the nomadic, pastoralist peoples in the steppe, though it followed a tradition dating back centuries of building great walls in China.

To be sure, the Great Wall of Qi was a border wall; so was the latest wall, built by the Ming dynasty from the 15th to 17th century, which was intended to stop armies, and did, Shelach-Lavi says.

“The Liao knew the tradition and certainly were influenced by it, but even if the construction itself was influenced by the Chinese, it was located 800 kilometers north and westward of the traditional walls,” he says.

Which leads to a key argument over why the Mongolian wall was built.

It did sport square fort-like structures every 30 kilometers. But the sparse archaeological evidence found on the ground indicating sparse occupation, and the fact that much of the wall runs along low-lying land rather than the commanding heights of mountains, argues against a purely defensive role against invading enemies. So what was it for?

Flint tools and no coins

The new study relies on surveying by satellite and drones, and boots on the ground, focusing on a section of the northern wall in Dornod Province, northeastern Mongolia. The results of two excavation seasons suggest that the region was occupied in two periods: the prehistoric, attested by stone flint tools; and the medieval period when the wall was built.

The stone tools predate the wall by thousands of years and have nothing to do with it. Then there are meager remains, including pottery fragments, from the construction period. “There was nothing else, no cities or settlements that left archaeological remains, other than these two periods,” Shelach-Lavi says. “That shows the wall was established in a very sparsely occupied place.”

They found no coins, but not for lack of trying. Asked what they deduce from that, Shelach-Lavi answers, “Only that we didn’t find any.” Some excavation within the wall and structures didn’t produce any coins either, though coinage was in circulation during the Liao and Jin dynasties. Maybe some will be found in future digs there.

Holistically, the team claims the Great wall of Mongolia wasn’t built for defensive purposes per se, but to control mass migration of peoples. The nomadic peoples of the steppes were vulnerable to climatic conditions from drought to freeze, and would move en masse when necessary.

“Our thinking is that the wall was meant to control mass migrations of refugees,” Shelach-Lavi sums up. People could only cross the great wall through the structures every 30 kilometers, in a controlled manner in which they might have been taxed in exchange for passage, he suggests.

At the postulated crossing points, the archaeologists also found ruined circular wall structures that they think may have been pens for animals, which could have served for taxation purposes.

In future work, the team plans to test ground samples for animal remains, in labs in Israel and in Cambridge, England. It’s hard to say when. For the moment, the archaeological investigation of the Great Wall of Mongolia bogged down because of the coronavirus.

Mongolia reports no new COVID-19 cases, 10 recoveries www.xinhuanet.com

June 15 (Xinhua) -- Mongolia conducted 258 tests for COVID-19 in the last 24 hours and the results were all negative, the country's National Center for Communicable Disease (NCCD) said Monday.

Petro Matad books annual loss on Mongolia well costs www.stockmarketwire.com

Mongolia-focused oil company Petro Matad booked a full-year loss, owing to exploration and staff expenses.