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What scientists are calling a "game changer" for society has been discovered deep in Tanzania's Rift Valley: a massive helium gas field with enough of the precious commodity to fill more than 1.2 million MRI scanners, Phys.org reports. Besides the sheer amount of gas, the discovery is notable because it appears to be the first time that stores of helium have been purposely found (they're usually stumbled upon during oil and gas drilling). And the find, which will be presented Tuesday by Durham University PhD student Diveena Danabalan at a Japanese geochemistry conference, could help restock nearly depleted stockpiles. Researchers...

Scientists in Germany and Rwanda have genetically linked a 100-year-old skull to a male living today. The deceased individual was a high-ranking advisor to Mangi Meli, the king of the Chagga people in the late-1800s who was executed by the German colonial government in 1900 after leading an uprising. The scientists also identified living “likely descendants” of two other skulls. At the beginning of the 20th century, the invading German empire took thousands of skulls from its colonies for since-discredited research into racial classification. In 2011, Berlin's Museums Authority (SPK) acquired about 7,700 skulls in poor condition from the Charité...

Days after authorities in Zanzibar said men are banned from braiding their hair on the island, Minister of Information, Youth, Culture, and Sports Tabia Maulid Mwita, apologised for the confusion caused by the statement. Mwita said the 2015 law being enforced is meant only for Zanzibar men, not those from outside the isles. Men face a fine of more than U.S.$400, six months in jail, or both, if they break the law. "We find it dangerous to our future generations. This is one form of immorality in Zanzibar, it is a culture which is adopted from outside Zanzibar," executive secretary...

High fever is a common symptom of the deadly Ebola-like virus, often followed by bleeding and organ failure. Tanzania's health minister Ummy Mwalimu said the disease had been contained and she was confident it would not spread further. Three people are being treated in hospital and authorities are tracing 161 contacts, Ms Mwalimu added. The Marburg virus is a cousin of the equally deadly Ebola virus - part of the filovirus family - and it kills on average half of those infected, the WHO says. It is a severe, often fatal illness with symptoms including headache, fever, muscle pains, vomiting...

If you thought that the story of Sam Brinton, the Biden official who allegedly likes to swipe luggage, was weird, it gets weirder.Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy, Sam Brinton was fired after the “non-binary” Biden official faced two felonies for luggage swiping in at least two separate incidents. Just the kind of person you want to deal with our nuclear energy.Brinton appeared in court last week on one of the charges.Non-binary former Biden admin official Sam Brinton arrives to appear in court today in Minneapolis for stealing a woman's luggage...

The country’s Prime Minister, Kassim Majaliwa, said officials believe all bodies have been recovered from the airplane. “We’re starting to pull out the luggage and personal items from the aircraft. A team of doctors and security agencies have started the process of identifying the dead and notifying the families,” Majaliwa said. The airline confirmed the death toll and amended the number of survivors down to 24 in an updated statement on Sunday evening. Earlier, the carrier as well as local officials had said that 26 of the 43 people on board had been rescued. “Precision Air extends its deepest sympathies...

Uganda and Tanzania are set to begin work on a massive crude oil pipeline a year after the International Energy Agency warned that the world risked not meeting its climate goals if new fossil fuel projects were not stopped. The two East African countries say their priority is economic development...Eighty percent of the 1,440km- (895 mile) pipeline, whose construction will begin in a few months, will be in Tanzania including a terminal-storage facility in Chongoleani.French energy giant Total Energies and Chinese energy firm CNOOC International also have a stake in the $5bn (£4bn) venture.Because of the waxy nature of Lake...

A UAE-led heritage project is shedding new light on the origins of Zanzibar’s Stone Town.Archaeologists have discovered evidence of an original settlement at the Unesco World Heritage site in Tanzania that dates back to the 11th century.It proves the town — previously thought to be an 18th century Omani Arab town — was actually established much earlier by local Swahili people, archaeologists believe.During a major dig this summer, they unearthed traces of homes, cooking pits and significant amounts of pottery from this era.They were then able to pinpoint the settlement’s transition to stone buildings by the 14th century...Stone Town became...

The United States killed al Qaeda boss Ayman al-Zawahiri in a drone strike Saturday, following a more than 20-year effort to assassinate the terrorist. Labeled by US officials as Osama bin Laden’s number-two, al-Zawahiri, 71, was a key plotter of the September 11 terrorist attacks and took over as the leader of the notorious terror group following bin Laden’s death in 2011. The strike was carried out early Sunday at an Afghanistan safe house the elderly terrorist had be holed up in, at 6:18 am local time and 9:48 pm Saturday in the US. The early morning attack saw al-Zawahiri...

In 2018, archaeologists made a staggering discovery in Swaga Swaga Game Reserve in central Tanzania: 52 previously undocumented rock shelters, deliberately painted with rock art. Weathering had mostly destroyed all but a handful; but of those that were preserved, one was an absolute enigma.The site, named Amak'hee 4, was elaborately painted with a frieze of figurative art – including three mysterious, anthropomorphic figures with extremely oversized heads...The Amak'hee 4 panel is difficult to date, but in 2021 Grzelczyk was able to gauge that it's at least a few hundred years old. It's painted almost entirely in red pigment, except for...

One Coin, Two Sides <>P> By Greg Buete Published 01/03/2003 Deep in South America two terror fronts are colliding. While fundamentally dangerous apart together they are capable of producing terror attacks against the West in both greater magnitude and frequency than ever before. The region is called the Triple Border. It is a lawless region between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil that supports a community of 30,000 Muslims, many of them radical expatriates of the Lebanese civil war and aligned with Hezbollah. As Jeffery Goldberg of the New Yorker discovered, Hezbollah, an Iranian backed Lebanese terrorist group responsible for over 300...

“Those Cuban-CIA men (Bay of Pigs vets) were as tough, dedicated and impetuous a group of soldiers as I’ve ever had the honor of commanding,” wrote legendary anti-communist mercenary “Mad Mike” Hoare, commander of the “Wild Geese,” in his book Congo Mercenary. ''This is the history of a failure,'' said the oddly frank opening lines of Che Guevara’s Congo Dairies. “I stood above Che Guevara, my boots near his head, just as Che had once stood over my dear friend and fellow 2506 Brigade member, Nestor Pino. ‘We're going to kill you all," Che said to Pino.’ Now, the situation...

The term ‘hysteria’ derives from the Greek word ‘hystera’ meaning ‘uterus,’ and is generally attributed to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. In the 15th century, another outbreak of mass hysteria occurred in Germany when a nun in a convent started biting the other sisters. Before long, the behavior spread throughout the convent and, as news spread further afield, so too did the phenomenon, resulting in biting outbreaks in convents across Germany, the Netherlands and Italy. After a few examples of nuns being punished, the behavior quickly subsided. In the 1844 book ‘Epidemics of the Middle Ages’...an account is given of...

Tourists from several destinations are returning to Zanzibar after a prolonged period due to Covid19. Travel disruptions will soon be a thing of the past following the introduction of EDE technology by the local government. This is a new scanning method that can detect Covid 19 virus in the body, the first in Africa. "When it comes to conducting Covid tests, there have always been a lot of problems, and you know all these tests were really invasive, but this is the first non-invasive test but also the first test of its kind in Africa. So for us, it's a...

JOHANNESBURG — Some South Africa hospital wards are jammed with patients infected with the omicron coronavirus variant as President Cyril Ramaphosa urged South Africans on Monday to get vaccinated. In the past week, cases have reached more than 16,000, up dramatically from 2,300 last Monday, according to South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases. The NICD says the increase in cases in such a short period of time is “unprecedented” in the trajectory of the pandemic, now in its fourth phase in the country. “Unfortunately, we’re seeing a more than doubling of hospital admissions each day,” said Ian Sanne, an...

Interview with Col. (Ret.) Dr. Jacques Neriah, former deputy head of assesment, Israel Military Intelligence.Iran is trying to avenge the November 2020 assassination of scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.Israel's Mossad - intelligence agency - foiled several Iranian terrorist attacks against Israeli targets in Africa, Channel 12 reported.The terrorists, from the Iranian Quds Force, have reportedly been trying for months to target Israeli businessmen in Senegal and Ghana, as well as in Tanzania, where Israelis are used to going on safari.

An al Qaeda operative at Fort Bragg By JOHN SULLIVAN and JOSEPH NEFF Raleigh News & Observer November 13, 2001 FORT BRAGG, N.C. - A former sergeant at Fort Bragg who became a close adviser to Osama bin Laden obtained sensitive documents describing how U.S. special operations units function. Ali A. Mohamed, a trusted trainer in bin Laden's al Qaeda network, walked the halls of the U.S. military's top warfare planning center at Fort Bragg for more than two years as an Army sergeant. From 1987 to 1989, he acquired sensitive documents describing how special operations units work and a...

Peter Lance's new book, Triple Cross, (the complete title is: Triple Cross, How Bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI -- And Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him) is out in bookstores on 11/21/2006. This is a link to the Able Danger Blog's review of the book. Here is the text of the Harper Collins' press release for the book: TRIPLE CROSS How Bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI -- And Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him By Peter Lance In TRIPLE CROSS, five-time Emmy-award...

Tanzania’s President Dr John Pombe Magufuli has died at the age of 61, the Vice President Samia Suluhu Hassan has announced. In a televised speech on TBC , the Vice President announced that the President died of a heart condition on March 17, 2021, at about 6pm at Mzena Hospital in Dar es Salaam where he was admitted on March 14. The Vice President said Magufuli was first briefly admitted to the Jakaya Kikwete Cardiac Institute on March 6, but was subsequently discharged. But he was rushed to hospital again on March 14 after feeling unwell. She announced that the...

CONTROVERSIAL Tanzania president John Pombe Magufuli is now partially paralyzed and on life support, the country’s exiled opposition leader has alleged. Tundu Lissu was reportedly told by the country’s Intelligence and Security Service, TISS, that the Covid-19 denier ‘s condition was worsening. “VP Samia suggested today that the Dictator is sick somewhere. My own sources in TISS say he’s on life support with COVID and paralyzed on one side and from the waist down after a stroke. Tell the people the truth!” Lissu wrote in a tweet posted today, March 15. Magufuli has not been seen since late February and...