Guns may be silent, but Ethiopia’s once bustling Abala town remans home to stray dogs and scavenging baboons
here’s almost no one left in Abala, a once-bustling town on the border of Ethiopia’s northern Tigray and Afar regions. Its streets are empty, given over to stray dogs and troops of baboons that scavenge undisturbed among the abandoned houses. Last week, we became the first international media outlet to...
Star Wars: When white cinema fans turn to social media to hurl racist slurs at black movie screen queens and kings
Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Jedi, a member of an old order of beings known for their stoicism. Suffice it to say, if you’ve upset one of them, you’ve made a grievous error. Yet here is Ewan McGregor, the man inside Kenobi’s robes, looking directly at the camera – and he...
How drought and food shortages are wreaking havoc on Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, South Sudan…by numbers
Six million people or 40 per cent of the population in Somalia is “acutely food insecure”, according to data captured by United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The number includes 81,000 people already at a “catastrophe” level of hunger, with a real risk of famine in...
Four seasons without rain puts 17 million people in Horn of Africa at risk of famine, made worse by war in Ukraine
Hammered by four droughts in a row, as many as 17 million people are going hungry in three countries in the Horn of Africa, with aid agencies warning that the hardest-hit areas are threatened by famine. In the arid pastoralist regions of southern Ethiopia, northern Kenya, and much of Somalia,...
Patience with South Sudan government’s sluggish action on peace deal waning at home and abroad
Civil society leaders, religious leaders and the international community are becoming exasperated at the listless peace deal and the increase in violence in South Sudan. “These agreements have been deliberately undermined, and the way they’re being implemented – particularly the current one – not taking the country anywhere...
South Sudan planning for elections against backdrop of crippling conflict that’s killing scores, displacing hundreds
South Sudan’s transitional government is due to wrap up in less than 10 months. Yet the country’s future looks as bleak as it did in 2018 when rival parties signed a deal to end a crippling civil war that killed nearly 400,000 people. The peace agreement was supposed to end...
Molecular messengers sent out by brain’s immune cells during infections can initiate ‘sickness behaviours’
In 2021, Jonathan Kipnis, a neuroimmunologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and his colleagues reported that there is a local source of immune cells in the brain: the bone marrow of the skull. When they explored how the bone marrow mobilises these cells, Kipnis and his colleagues demonstrated...
Brain immunity: For long a time scientists thought the brain is cut off from the chaos of the rest of the body
The brain is the body’s sovereign, and receives protection in keeping with its high status. Its cells are long-lived and shelter inside a fearsome fortification called the blood-brain barrier. For a long time, scientists thought that the brain was completely cut off from the chaos of the rest of the...
How suspicion of espionage and sabotage have reduced scientific research collaborations between US and China
The number of scholars who declare affiliations in both China and the United States on research papers has dropped by more than 20 per cent over the past three years, an analysis has found. That slump seems to be part of a pattern of waning US-China collaboration that is starting...
Scientists keen on understanding if there’s a genetic basis for monkeypox’s unprecedented spread outside Africa
It’s been three weeks since public-health authorities confirmed a case of monkeypox in the United Kingdom. Since then, more than 400 confirmed or suspected cases have emerged in at least 20 non-African nations, including Canada, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom – the largest outbreak ever outside of Africa. The...
