Antony Blinken, President Biden’s nominee to lead the state department, said last week that the U.S. will keep its embassy in Israel located in Jerusalem, which he called the capital of Israel, AntiWar.com reported. Blinken was asked by Texas Senator Ted Cruz during a confirmation hearing about the policy put into place during the Trump administration in...
Last Tuesday, in violation of international law, the Israeli government approved 2,600 housing units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem during the final hours of Donald Trump’s presidency – a sign that Tel Aviv senses a new direction in U.S. policy during President Biden’s administration. The Associated Press, citing the anti-settlement/non-government organization “Peace Now,”...
Bobbi Wine, the top opposition candidate in Uganda’s presidential election, has been an outspoken critic of the country’s election while under armed house arrest. The Wall Street Journal reported that Wine called the 14 January election a “coup” and a “mockery of democracy.” Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni reportedly won the election by securing 58 percent of...
Tensions are simmering between Ethiopia and Sudan over territory along their border, which threatens to engulf Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, into another major conflict as it fights with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Deutsche Welle, the German paper, reported last week that the tension over the land goes back to when the border was...
Technologists and ethicists have long pondered the consequences of the moment when technological development is wrested from human control and taken over by technology itself, with computers writing their own programs and designing their own descendants. Engineers at Cornell University have made it more interesting to think about that now. The researchers gave an artificial...
Cancer can outwit the human immune system and resist treatments – including chemotherapy, which can wreak damage of its own on organs and tissues. Now a team of German and Swedish bioscientists is testing a way to kill cancer cells by denying them energy. Until recently, cancer was thought to grow without needing mitochondria, the...
Tim Berners-Lee, who wrote the computer codes 30 years ago that made the Internet possible, has become disenchanted with his creation… so, he’s designing an alternative. Unhappy about the hordes of personal data, as well as the power and control, amassed by giant corporations such as Amazon and Google, Berners-Lee has created Solid, which he...
As the Wall Street Journal headline declared last Friday: This Season, Flu is All but Wiped Out January normally is a time when the common flu wreaks havoc on populations around the globe. The WHO estimates between 500 million and one billion get infected every year, which causes three to five million serious cases. The...
In timing that seemed quintessentially “quid-pro Joe,” the WHO suddenly updated its vaccine test guidelines just as the new American president signed an executive order to rejoin the organization that former president Donald Trump abandoned. The WHO’s new directives advised laboratories that a positive PCR test will no longer be considered by itself enough to...
With concern over new coronavirus variants, governments across the European Union announced last week new travel restrictions in hopes to limit the increase of new cases. Belgium Prime Minister Alexander De Croo announced his country would ban all nonessential travel until at least 1 March. He said, “When people travel, the virus travels with them.”...