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A new COVID-19 variant of "serious concern" has been detected in South Africa, scientists said at a press conference on Thursday. “Here is a mutation variant of serious concern,” South African Health Minister Joe Phaahla said at the media briefing, Bloomberg reported. “We were hopeful that we might have a longer break in between waves — possibly that it would hold off to late December or even next year January.”

British experts have sounded the alarm over a new Covid variant believed to have emerged in Botswana that is the most mutated version of the virus yet.

British experts have sounded the alarm over a new Covid variant believed to have emerged in Botswana that is the most mutated version of the virus yet. Only 10 cases of the strain, which could be named 'Nu', have been detected so far. But it has already been spotted in three countries, suggesting the variant is more widespread. It carries 32 mutations, many of which suggest it is highly transmissible and vaccine-resistant, and has more alterations to its spike protein than any other variant. Professor Francois Balloux, a geneticist at University College London, said it likely emerged in a lingering...

Sometime between 7-6 million years ago, our primate ancestors stood up and began to walk on two legs. A defining moment along the winding evolutionary roads to becoming human, this is the feature researchers use to distinguish hominins from other apes. Although why it occurred remains an intriguing mystery. By about 2 million years ago, we became fully bipedal, but there were many steps along the path to get us there. Some of these steps still elude our fossil records, but a new study analyzing the remains of a female Australopithecus that researchers nicknamed Issa, has found another. "Issa walked...

A prominent doctor credited with advancing the development of early treatments for COVID-19 has stated that, in his judgment, the purpose of the pandemic and vaccine campaigns, is to “control and kill off a large proportion of our population without anyone suspecting that we were poisoned.” Dr. Shankara Chetty, a family doctor in South Africa who, according to his website, has “treated 7000 Covid-19 patients without a single hospitalization or death,” combined insights from his medical knowledge along with his observations of government dictates and media censorship to support his conclusions. While participating in a Zoom meeting of people who...

Source: Eli Kay/FacebookOn Sunday morning, a terrorist attack took place in Jerusalem leaving one Israeli dead and three injured. Attacks like this are always sad and cause a range of emotions, from anger to despair, that no matter what, Palestinian Arabs are always trying to kill us, just because we are Jews living in the Land. The man who was murdered was Eliyahu (Eli) Kay, 26. Eliyahu was a new immigrant from South Africa. He came to Israel to serve in the IDF as a lone soldier, joining the elite paratroopers. When I saw his picture in uniform with the...

So asks Newsweek's cover, which features a full-length photo of the prime minister his people voted the greatest Briton of them all. Quite a tribute, when one realizes Churchill's career coincides with the collapse of the British empire and the fall of his nation from world pre-eminence to third-rate power. That the Newsweek cover was sparked by my book "Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War" seems apparent, as one of the three essays, by Christopher Hitchens, was a scathing review. Though in places complimentary, Hitchens charmingly concludes: This book "stinks." Understandable. No Brit can easily concede my central thesis: The...

Saddam's Shadow Africa Energy & Mining June 18, 1997 Copyright 1997 Indigo Publications Africa Energy & Mining June 18, 1997 SECTION: MINING; DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO; N. 207 LENGTH: 787 words HEADLINE: Saddam's Shadow BODY: It's not only diamonds and base metals that interest big mining companies and the latter are not alone in being interested in Katanga. In the delegation that the United States sent to Kinshasa on June 2 under its ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, the state department's African affairs department was represented by Marc Baas, director for Central Africa. (Susan Rice, director for African...

On December 12, Israel’s southern Red Sea resort and port city, Eilat, will host the 2021 Miss Universe pageant. The contestants have not yet arrived, but the news is not all happy smiles. If you didn’t have a reason to pay attention to the annual beauty pageant you probably might not ever know about it. But recently, the ugly face of one of the contestants’ countries has cast an antisemitic cloud on it. South Africa will be represented by Lalela Mswane, sort of. While she holds the Miss South Africa title, after announcing that the pageant will be held in...

Longtime field laborers in the Mississippi Delta said in a lawsuit that they were asked to train white guest workers from South Africa before losing their jobs to them. For more than a quarter-century, Richard Strong worked the fertile farmland of the Mississippi Delta, just as his father and his grandfather did, a family lineage of punishing labor and meager earnings that stretched back to his enslaved ancestors brought from Africa. He tilled the soil, fertilized crops and irrigated the fields, nurturing an annual bounty of cotton, soybeans and corn for a prominent farming family. “I’ve been around farming all...

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — F.W. de Klerk, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela and as South Africa’s last apartheid president oversaw the end of the country’s white minority rule, has died at the age of 85. De Klerk died after a battle against cancer at his home in the Fresnaye area of Cape Town, a spokesman for the F.W. de Klerk Foundation confirmed on Thursday.

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — F.W. de Klerk, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela and as South Africa’s last apartheid president oversaw the end of the country’s white minority rule, has died at the age of 85. De Klerk died after a battle against cancer at his home in the Fresnaye area of Cape Town, a spokesman for the F.W. de Klerk Foundation confirmed on Thursday. De Klerk was a controversial figure in South Africa where many blamed him for violence against Black South Africans and anti-apartheid activists during his time in power, while some whites saw his efforts...

Entombed in a limestone shelf of South Africa’s Rising Star Cave, the fragmented skull of a Homo naledi child has suggested that the prehistoric species may have been more similar to modern humans than previously thought. Two new studies, published this week in the journal PaleoAnthropology, have revealed new details about the mysterious Homo naledi people, based on a set of fossils first discovered in 2017, which are believed to be that of a young Homo naledi of 4- to 6-years-old. An international team of researchers has estimated the child would have lived between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago, before...

The remains were found in a remote part of the cave that suggests the body had been placed there on purpose, said Professor Guy Berger. JOHANNESBURG — The fossil remains of an early hominid child who died almost 250,000 years ago have been discovered in a cave in South Africa by a team of international and South African researchers. The team announced the discovery of a partial skull and teeth of a Homo naledi child who died when it was approximately four to six years old. The remains were found in a remote part of the cave that suggests the...

Fans of the television series The Great British Bake Off have long marveled at the skill contestants show during the dreaded "technical challenge" — for which they are given a basket with all the ingredients needed to make a highly unusual dish but a set of instructions that are often as vague as, "Bake until ready." Now a team of scientists at a pharmaceutical startup in South Africa is essentially confronting the same type of test — except the stakes are life and death. The World Health Organization has hired the company, called Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, as part of...

The first nurse who got vaccinated at Karl Bremer hospital in Western Cape in Soth Africa Nurse Iris Adam died because of the complications that she has faced due to Covid-19, she has died at the age of 64, she received the vaccine at the hospital, she has died on Saturday dating to 18th September 2021.She had been an assistant nursing manager since 1997 and she was also the first person to receive the vaccine in February this year. Adams obituary has been announced on social media but her friends and family, she was due to retire this month after...

Cybersecurity experts who held lucrative Pentagon and homeland security contracts and high-level security clearances are under investigation for potentially abusing their government privileges to aid a 2016 Clinton campaign plot to falsely link Donald Trump to Russia and trigger an FBI investigation of him and his campaign, according to several sources familiar with the work of Special Counsel John Durham. Durham is investigating whether they were involved in a scheme to misuse sensitive, nonpublic Internet data, which they had access to through their government contracts, to dredge up derogatory information on Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign in 2016...

A San Francisco federal court decided Monday that Tesla must pay a former worker, Owen Diaz, about $137 million after he endured a hostile work environment and racist abuse working there as an elevator operator.According to his attorneys, the case was only able to move forward because Diaz had not signed one of Tesla’s mandatory arbitration agreements which the company uses to force employees to resolve disputes without a public trial.A shareholder activist, Nia Impact Capital, has asked Tesla’s board to study the effects of mandatory arbitration agreements on the company, voicing concern that they enable harassment and other problems.

It only took seven months after my family and I moved to Baltimore in January for us to move out. We’re hardly the only ones leaving — in 2020, Baltimore lost more residents than did any other major U.S. city. At one point, my Brazilian husband remarked, “I thought America was a developed country.”His observation is particularly telling because, before coming to Baltimore, we spent five years living abroad in two of the most dangerous places in the world – Brazil and South Africa. In many ways, life in those countries was easier than life in Charm City.The residents of...

A swarm of bees killed more than 60 penguins on a beach near Cape Town, South Africa, officials said Saturday. South Africa National Parks said in a Facebook post that 63 African penguins were found dead at Boulders Beach, noting the deaths “occurred suddenly some time between Thursday afternoon and Friday morning.” The penguins were transported to the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) to conduct post mortems, which found that all of the penguins had “multiple bee stings.” Officials also found numerous dead bees at the site of the incident. Officials will continue to monitor...