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      45 dead as bus plunges from bridge into ravine in South Africa

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 20:01


    Only survivor after vehicle falls and catches fire is eight-year-old taken to hospital with serious injuries

    An eight-year old child was the sole survivor after a bus carrying 46 people plunged off a bridge in South Africa , fell into a ravine and caught fire.

    The child, who has not been named, was taken to hospital with serious injuries, the transport ministry said in a statement late on Thursday.

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      Ireland backs bid to include blocking aid in definition of genocide

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 21:27

    Dublin joins South Africa’s case in the international court of justice that stopping essentials may constitute ‘genocidal intent’

    Ireland is to seek to widen the definition of genocide to include blocking humanitarian aid in a landmark international court of justice (ICJ) case against Israel .

    The Irish government will intervene in the case taken by South Africa and argue that restricting food and other essentials in Gaza may constitute genocidal intent, the foreign minister Micheál Martin said on Wednesday.

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      Scary 22% vaccine efficacy in South Africa comes with heaps of caveats

      Beth Mole · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 8 February, 2021 - 23:21

    Vials in front of the AstraZeneca British biopharmaceutical company logo are seen in this creative photo taken on 18 November 2020.

    Enlarge / Vials in front of the AstraZeneca British biopharmaceutical company logo are seen in this creative photo taken on 18 November 2020. (credit: Getty| NurPhoto )

    Dismal preliminary data on AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine in South Africa—where the B.1.351/ 501Y.V2 coronavirus variant is spreading widely—lead the government there to rethink its vaccination rollout and raised further international concern about the variant .

    But the small study has so many limitations and caveats, experts caution that drawing any conclusions from it is difficult.

    The study, which has not been published or peer-reviewed but presented in a press conference Sunday , began in June and enrolled only around 2,000 participants, about half of which received a placebo. Early in the study—before B.1.351 emerged—the vaccine appeared over 70 percent effective at preventing mild-to-moderate cases of COVID-19. That is largely in line with the conclusion of an international Phase III trial released by AstraZeneca and vaccine co-developer Oxford University, which showed mixed results for the replication-deficient adenovirus-based vaccine but an overall efficacy of around 70 percent .

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      People slept on comfy grass beds 200,000 years ago

      Kiona N. Smith · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 14 August, 2020 - 14:56 · 1 minute

    People slept on comfy grass beds 200,000 years ago

    Enlarge

    Fragments of glassy petrified grass and microscopic traces of plant material, dating to around 200,000 years ago, are all that’s left of a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer’s bed in the back of Border Cave. In the same part of the rock shelter, archaeologists found layers of ash with more recent (as in only around 43,000 years old) and better-preserved leaves of dried grass laid on top, as if people had burned their old, dirty bedding and then laid fresh, clean sheaves of grass over the ashes—the rock shelter version of changing the sheets.

    The finds shed light on an aspect of early human life that we rarely get to consider. Most of the artifacts that survive from more than a few thousand years ago are made of stone and bone; even wooden tools are rare. That means we tend to think of the Paleolithic in terms of hard, sharp stone tools and the bones of butchered animals. Through that lens, life looks very harsh—perhaps even harsher than it really was. Most of the human experience is missing from the archaeological record, including creature comforts like soft, clean beds.

    Beds were burning

    Until now, the oldest bedding archaeologists had ever found came from another South African site called Sibudu, where people 77,000 years ago had piled up layers of grasslike wetland plants called sedge, mixed with assorted medicinal plants, and occasionally burned the old layers. Some modern people in parts of Africa also use plants as bedding in similar ways. The Border Cave find shows that people have been making comfy sleeping pallets out of grass for at least 200,000 years—nearly as long as there have been Homo sapiens in the world.

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