The new virus news emerging from China in December 2018, risk-averse financial markets were alert to its potential for disruption. Yet they could never have predicted the total economic collapse that would follow Covid-19’s wake, as stock markets fell faster and harder than at any time since 1929, currencies across the world plunged, investors panicked…
At least one person has died as tree fell over his home in Ascension Parish, in the Baton Rouge area. Ida is testing flood defences strengthened after Hurricane Katrina killed 1, 800 people in 2005, on the 16th anniversary of Katrina a category three storm. Over 1 million loses power in New Orleans as Hurricane…
On Sunday as the Taliban took over Kabul, the capital, the US state department announced that all US embassy staff had been evacuated to Hamid Karzal International Airport which was under US military control. People are scared and think things could go wrong at any moment. The face-covering was mandatory for all women under Taliban…
In cities, we stand silent in buses and train carriages, ignoring each other. Online, we retreat into silos and carefully create who we interact with. In politics, we are increasingly consumed by a fear of people we’ve never met. But imagine what if strangers, long believed to be the cause of our problems, were actually…
The Darkest hour of Pandemic arrived on September 21, 2020 for Jeremy Farrar, a global expert in infectious disease control, one of the UK’s leading scientists, head of the Wellcome Trust, and a member of the SAGE emergency committee, describes how it feels as one of the key scientists at the sharp end of a…
Competition authorities in the UK gave green light in Astra Zeneca’s $39bn takeover deal of US giant Alexion Pharmaceuticals delivering the British pharma a lucrative portfolio of immunology and a towering presence in rare diseases. Astra Zeneca on Wednesday announced the completion of its Alexion acquisition, a week after securing a pivotal nod from UK’s…
StHumans rely on plants to change consciousness to stimulate calm, or completely after the qualities of our mental experience. Michael Pollen explores three very different drugs – Opium, caffeine and mescaline and throws the fundamental strangeness of our thinking about them into sharp relief, exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around…
Johnson & Johnson announced voluntary recall of five aerosol sunscreens due to low levels of Benzene, which can cause cancer with repeated exposure. The company issued a statement announcing a voluntary recall and urged customers to discard the products if they had already purchased them. The Neutrogena aerosol sunscreens that have been recalled are…
Philip Morris International, one of world’s biggest tobacco companies who sells 50 billion cigarettes a year under Marlboro, Chesterfield and L&H, lodged a bid for Vectira, a UK inhaler maker, whose 200-strong scientists based in Cambridge and Chippenham devise inhalers for respiratory drugs. Vectra’s board led by chairman Bruno Angelici, a former international president of…
Dr Seuj Kumar Senapati, a junior doctor and his second day at work at a Covid care centre in Hojai district in India’s north-eastern state of Assam, checked a patient who had been admitted that morning found unresponsive. The furious patient’s family started hurling chairs, breaking windows and abusing staff when they learned their relative…