The few clues to what caused it point to a problem from within | DAVID TUFFLEY | Suddenly and inexplicably, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus services were gone. And it was no local disturbance. In a blog post, Downdetector.com, a major monitoring service for online outages, called it the …

‘It’s time to pursue them,’ says offshore tax expert Prof. Ronen Palan, a specialist in offshore tax havens and senior advisor to the Tax Justice Network Many of the world’s richest and most powerful people are in the spotlight once more for using secretive tax havens and corporate structures to …

Abdulrazak Gurnah is the first Black African writer to receive the Nobel prize in literature since Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka in 1986. | THE INDEPENDENT | The 2021 Nobel prize in Literature has been awarded to Zanzibar-born novelist, Abdulrazak Gurnah. He is the first writer from the semi-autonomous island in …

Expert reveals how it shaped 2021 election Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | There is a growing trend of domestic political actors deploying targeted disinformation schemes in several African countries; Uganda inclusive, according to Tessa Knight, a South Africa-based researcher with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab). Knight …

Could vitamin A help? Researchers at the University of East Anglia and James Paget University Hospital are launching a new project to see whether Vitamin A could help people regain their sense of smell after viral infections including COVID-19. Smell loss is a common symptom of COVID-19, but even before …

What’s better tool for healthier gums? |THE INDEPENDENT | Do probiotics prevent gum disease? Is flossing necessary? Many patients are unable to confidently answer these questions and more due to the abundance of conflicting medical information. However, new research published in the October issue of the Journal of the International …

The two firms control nearly 90% of the market | THE INDEPENDENT | The looming dominance of MTN and Airtel in the country’s telecom industry following the planned exit of Africell Uganda could expose customers to poor quality of services and price exploitation, experts say. Paul Lakuma, an economist and …

People and organisations in developing countries know what is best for them, so why are they regularly pushed to the sidelines by Western development aid?  | SIBILLA BONDOLFI | When he was 13, Bwaita Aggrey met Jacob and Frida from Sweden while walking around Jinja, a town in southeast Uganda …

What’s gone wrong in the fight against vaccine nationalism and hoarding of vaccines by rich countries? | RORY HORNER | The latest supply forecast for Covax – the programme for sharing COVID-19 vaccines around the world – suggests that accelerating vaccination in low-income countries looks unlikely. Covax estimates it will …

The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened global inequities. The world’s poor have borne the brunt of national lockdowns and will struggle to recover and poorer countries have been unable to rollout comprehensive vaccination campaigns because of a grossly unequal distribution of vaccines. On top of this COVID-19 has also derailed progress …