A year into Taliban rule academic life has become unbearable for Afghan female scholars and students
Life is growing increasingly unbearable for academics in Afghanistan, almost a year into the Taliban’s rule. It has become particularly tough for female scholars and students. Since the Taliban seized power last August, the country has descended into a humanitarian crisis. Many Afghans are not getting enough food; there is...
New study reveals intermittent fasting can slow diabetic kidney disease with reduced albumin in urine
In 2021, researchers published the findings of a ground-breaking study looking into the effects of intermittent diet on type 2 diabetes care. They concluded that a fasting-like diet might help reduce the amount of albumin in the urine, which could have a positive effect on the kidneys. Intermittent fasting is...
Displaced residents of Ethiopian border town of Abala narrate horrors visited on their businesses by Tigrayan rebels
Mubarak Nur, an Afar teenager who stuck out the rebel occupation in Abala in northern Ethiopia, recalls the looting and killings his home town witnessed. Nur recalls, “ did what you can see. They looted everything when they entered: blankets, food, wheat, vehicles. They also killed some people...
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...
