Stranded African migrants draw world attention to rising xenophobia in Tunisia after president’s incendiary speech
Six weeks after an incendiary speech by Tunisian President Kais Saied triggered a surge in racist violence against sub-Saharan migrants, hundreds of its victims are still camped on a cobblestone lane outside the headquarters of the UN’s migration agency, IOM, asking for emergency evacuation. “Our lives are under threat,” said...
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...
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...
Why health experts in US want physical exercise dropped from long Covid recovery regimen
Patients and patient advocates are calling on the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to reconsider its decision to include exercise trials in its RECOVER initiative, which aims to study and find treatments for long Covid. They argue that a large proportion of people with long Covid have reported experiencing...
Questions raised over UK’s new refugee policy after it granted two Sri Lankans ‘third country’ asylum
Two Sri Lankan asylum seekers who were transferred to Rwanda earlier this month after attempting suicide on the Indian Ocean Island of Diego Garcia were approved by UK authorities on Thursday last week to receive asylum in a third country. Documents notifying the man and woman of the decision, which...
How criminal gangs weaponised arson to terrorise Rohingya in Myanmar, who are stateless and without citizenship rights
One week after a fire broke out in a Cox’s Bazar refugee camp earlier this month, Bangladesh government investigators ruled it a “planned act of sabotage” – just the latest among scores of such arson incidents in recent years. The sprawling Kutupalong-Balukhali refugee camps house more than 630,000 Rohingya refugees...
While UN rights body advocates for compensation for sexual violence, UN’s own rules prohibit reparations
Even when sex abuse and rape cases are referred to local authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where they occurred, it’s often an uphill battle when it comes to allegations involving UN personnel. Take the alleged 2017 rape of a 16-year-old Congolese girl by a British man working...
