Six In The Morning Tuesday 14 December 2021

 

Inside the Botswana lab that discovered Omicron

Travel bans to African countries feel like a punishment for scientific transparency, say researchers who found variant.

By Zoe Flood

Published On 14 Dec 202114 Dec 2021

The day that Dr Sikhulile Moyo ruefully calls “Omicron Day” started like any normal day, or as normal as one can be for a medical virologist in the middle of a global coronavirus pandemic.

That Friday morning, November 19, the 48-year-old Zimbabwean prayed as usual with his wife and children, wolfed down some cereal and then raced to beat the traffic in Botswana’s capital Gaborone.

On the way to work, the gregarious laboratory director sometimes played his own gospel recordings, but that morning, he listened to a Ghanaian pastor and motivational speaker.

Inspiration, not charity: how refugees from Bhutan thrived in Blacktown

by James Button; Photography by Carly Earl

When I meet Om Dhungel in a cafe near his home, he tells me about Merryn Howell. “She is my godmother,” he says, his eyes shining. “Every day I remember her.”

Howell (then Jones) was a skilled migrant placement officer. Dhungel was a refugee of Nepalese ancestry from the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, where he had been an engineer and a senior public servant at the Department of Telecommunications.

In 2001, after three years in Australia, Dhungel completed an MBA. But over the next six months, he applied for 52 jobs in engineering and business administration, and received 52 rejections.

‘Revenge’: Husband of Belarus opposition leader jailed for 18 years

Syarhei Tsikhanouski will serve his sentence in a ‘maximum security colony’

Amanda Coakley

The husband of Belarus’s prominent opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has been sentenced to 18 years in a “maximum security colony” for organising mass unrest and inciting social hatred, a move widely seen as a retaliatory step by the country’s president Alexander Lukashenko.

Syarhei Tsikhanouski, a YouTuber who attempted to run against Lukashenko in last year’s elections before being jailed as his popularity grew, heard his fate at the Gomel regional court in the country’s southeast. He denied the charges.

His wife, who lives in exile in neighbouring Lithuania with the couple’s two children, said the verdict was “revenge” on Lukashenko’s “strongest opponents” and pledged to keep going in her mission to unseat the 67-year-old, who has ruled Belarus since 1994, Europe’s longest-serving president.

More than techno: A history of electronic music

From early sound experiments to dub, Krautrock and techno, electronic music has a long musical lineage that is now being celebrated in one of the genre's birthplaces, Düsseldorf.

Electronic music is sometimes labeled robotic and one-dimensional, music that can only be enjoyed with the help of alcohol in a dark nightclub. This cliché extends to the idea that the genre originated in the 1980s when synthesizers and drum machines became integral to pop music.

But electronic music has had a long and diverse influence on the modern musical canon, a topic explored by the exhibition "Electro. From Kraftwerk to Techno."

French troops quit key base in Timbuktu, marking turning point in Mali mission

French troops on Tuesday were leaving a key military base in the northern Malian city of Timbuktu in a symbolic departure more than eight years after Paris first intervened in the conflict-torn Sahel state.

More than eight years after then French president, François Hollande, formally declared the start of France's military intervention to root out jihadist insurgents from northern Mali, French troops were handing over a key base in Timbuktu to the Malian military.

Reporting from the Malian capital, Bamako, FRANCE 24's Cyril Payen said it marked the begining of the end of a nearly decade-long French military mission in the West African nation. 

US warns hundreds of millions of devices at risk from newly revealed software vulnerability

By Sean Lyngaas, CNN

Updated 0117 GMT (0917 HKT) December 14, 2021

Hundreds of millions of devices around the world could be exposed to a newly revealed software vulnerability, as a senior Biden administration cyber official warned executives from major US industries Monday that they need to take action to address "one of the most serious" flaws she has seen in her career.

As major tech firms struggle to contain the fallout, US officials held a call with industry executives warning that hackers are actively exploiting the vulnerability.

For now, cybersecurity analysts told CNN, the pressure is on tech companies to clean up their software code and on big businesses to figure out if they are affected by the flaw. But because the vulnerability is so widespread, and likely present in things like popular apps and websites, consumers could also feel the fallout if those services get hacked.