Hush money: Voter rating of ex-US President Trump soar as son admits he signed cheque for porn star
Donald Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records in a Manhattan court – and looked “vulnerable”, a former ambassador has said. But a pollster says the case is “helping” him electorally, and it is now “almost inevitable” he will win the Republican nomination. Donald Trump...
Crime against humanity? New evidence indict Pfizer for hiding data on low efficacy of its Covid vaccine
Late 2020, the airways became saturated with triumphant reporting of Pfizer and Moderna’s “95 per cent effective” Covid vaccines. Millions rolled up their sleeves with the belief that reaching herd immunity would end the pandemic. But by June 2021, the pandemic endgame story had gone off script. Highly vaccinated countries...
Marburg: Death of Tanzanian fisherman turns searchlight anew on Africa’s capacity to detect outbreaks early
If a virus like Marburg is spreading, being able to do genetic sequencing locally is particularly useful to find a way of reining it in. Genetic sequencing helps researchers keep track of any changes to the virus, and how these could affect patients. But in countries like Tanzania and Equatorial...
Exit Covid, enter Marburg: An Ebola ‘cousin’ that has put East and West Africa on red alert
In February, a 23-year-old Tanzanian fisherman suddenly fell ill, having just returned from a busy trading outpost in the middle of Lake Victoria. Back at home in Bukoba, a district in north-western Tanzania, he was hit by bouts of vomiting and diarrhoea. He developed a fever and began bleeding from...
UN report accuse Republican lawmakers of fuelling ‘tyranny’ of world growing hotter, emerging ‘climate divorce’
That so many states in the US have been passing legislation to curb climate change is anything but a fluke. Like other retrograde measures enacted in Republican-controlled states, those bills are based on “model legislation” drafted for legislators by an outfit called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). One of...
New UN report highlights how greenhouse gas emissions rose from 2010 and marred economies
scientists of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued their first report in 1990. Only recently, they put out their sixth and latest assessment, a “final warning” on the state of the planet – and the news was anything but good. Yes, some progress had been made...
Republicans jittery about Trump’s felonies, as California court orders porn star Stormy Daniels’ lawyers his $122,000
The judge overseeing former President Trump’s criminal case in New York City has set the next in-person hearing for December 4, roughly two months before the official start of the 2024 Republican presidential primary calendar. Trump was arraigned in Manhattan in front of Judge Juan Merchan on Tuesday, where he...
Ex-US President Trump scoffs at 34 felony counts of tax evasion, skirt lifting and hush-money payments
Former President Donald Trump was charged on Tuesday with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a historic case over allegations he orchestrated hush-money payments to two women before the 2016 US election to suppress publication of their sexual encounters with him. Prosecutors in Manhattan accused Trump, the first...
Discovering planets is now routine: From 1992, over 5200 have been found and 9,000 pending confirmation
Over 300 years ago, the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued that ours was the best of all possible worlds. The word “world” comes from Old English, originally meaning Earth, and later extending to the physical world in the broadest sense, or the universe. Leibniz was trying to address the...
Financing violent extremism: How terror groups in Africa prey on local businesses to deliver brutal justice
Moustapha was running out of hope. The Nigerien man had a family to feed but little means to do so. Like scores of people around the continent, he was persuaded to join and fight for a violent extremist organisation. “I joined because I felt frustrated with the conditions of everyday...
