SCIENCE & DEVELOPMENT

Boeing Troubles… In Space and Elsewhere

WHEN Boeing’s Starliner CST-100 spacecraft was successfully launched on June 5 earlier this year to the International Space Station (ISS), Boeing and NASA heaved a sigh of great relief. The launch was the first crewed flight test of Starliner, carrying two very experienced test-pilots and, one could say, veteran astronauts, Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore. Starliner was originally scheduled to launch its first crewed mission in 2017, but a long series of glitches and problems had seen multiple postponements, so the relief in early June was palpable.

Mpox Resurgence: Need for Global Coordination and Vaccine Equity

MPOX, formerly known as monkeypox until the WHO renamed it in November 2022 to avoid stigma, is resurging, particularly in Africa. On August 14, 2024, WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) due to a sharp rise in cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and neighbouring countries, including Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda. This is the second time in history (the first being in 2022 also for mpox) that a PHEIC has been declared for a DNA virus outbreak, highlighting the urgent need for coordinated global efforts to control the virus.

The Bloody Rise of the West – Part 2

THE impact of the West’s encounter with the Americas was devastating for its people. The population of the Americas before Europe’s “discovery” has been estimated to be anything between 2 to 100 million people. The figures of genocide also depend not only on different estimates of the Indigenous population of the Americas but also on what numbers should be excluded in the counting of victims of genocide. Do we include those who died of diseases as their societies and the productive basis of their societies were destroyed?

The Bloody Rise of the West – Part I

ON Independence Day – August 15th – we generally take stock of the path we have travelled since 1947. Today, I will take a different tack and focus on how or why a handful of European countries end up controlling major parts of the world.Before the rise of colonial empires, India and China were the biggest economies in the world. That is not surprising, as probably 90 per cent of the world's economy was in agriculture.

Wars Fuel Epidemics and Pandemics

WARS often create conditions ripe for the spread of epidemics and pandemics. These conflicts benefit the arms industry and uphold power structures in capitalist economies. But they also cause immense collateral damage to civilian populations, extending suffering beyond the battlefield. The relationship between warfare and the spread of infectious diseases is complex and historically significant, with many conflicts facilitating disease transmission and leading to widespread health crises.

What We Can Learn from the Global Microsoft Outage?

A GLOBAL IT outage on July 19th, 2024, affected more than 8.5 Million Microsoft computers worldwide, disrupting airlines, hospitals, banks, train services, and even government agencies. The outage was caused by a faulty update from the cybersecurity provider, CrowdStrike, which caused Microsoft Windows machines to crash and get stuck in the infamous “blue screen of death” booting loop.

The Importance of Being Julian Assange

ON June 25th, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange walked out of Belmarsh high-security prison in London, where he had spent the last five years fighting extradition to the US on charges under the Espionage Act which if convicted could have sent him to prison for more than 170 years. Before that, he was confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012 where he had taken asylum.The hounding of Assange had started even before that. He was first arrested in London in 2010 based on an arrest warrant issued by Swedish police for rape allegations by two women.

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