Society catergory

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | AFP | Saudi sports authorities shut down a female fitness centre in Riyadh Friday over a contentious promotional video that appeared to show a woman in figure-hugging workout attire. “We are not going to tolerate this,” Saudi sports authority chief Turki al-Sheikh tweeted as he ordered …

Harare, Zimbabwe | AFP | Scores of Zimbabwe nurses on Friday protested in Harare’s central city park after the government dismissed them for striking over low salaries and poor working conditions. The nurses, who wore their white uniforms, demanded the government reverse its decision to fire the majority of the …

Kampala, Uganda | MOTORING GURU | Say it isn’t so! Mercedes-AMG expected to adopt hybrid turbo V8 as its flagship engine As the march of technology continues and emissions regulations begin to bite, automotive juggernauts will fall by the wayside. Case in point, the Mercedes-AMG M279 engine, known outside Benz nerd …

Today, some 800 million people spend at least 10% of their household budgets on health payments COMMENT | SANIA NISHTAR | Half of the planet cannot access essential health services. For many people, paying to see a doctor, obtaining medications, seeking family-planning advice, or even getting immunised against common illnesses is …

Harare, Zimbabwe | AFP | Zimbabwe has fired all nurses who went on strike to demand higher salaries, in a hardline response by the country’s new leadership to growing labour arrest. Several thousand nurses were sacked in a terse statement issued on Tuesday evening by Vice President Constantino Chiwenga, who …

Tokyo, Japan | AFP | A Japanese firm is poised to carry out what it hailed as the world’s first experiment to test for cancer using urine samples, which would greatly facilitate screening for the deadly disease. Engineering and IT conglomerate Hitachi developed the basic technology to detect breast or …

Zurich, Switzerland | AFP | Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis on Tuesday announced $100 million of funding over the next five years for research into new treatments for malaria, a mosquito-borne disease with a devastating impact that killed 445,000 people in 2016. There were some 216 million cases of malaria worldwide in …

Delete Facebook, study suggests Kampala, Uganda | ANA SANDOIU | If Cambridge Analytica didn’t put you off Facebook forever, this might: a new study says that quitting the social media network can drastically lower your stress levels. The Cambridge Analytica scandal — also known as the largest data leak in Facebook …

Niamey, Niger | AFP | More than five million children were vaccinated against polio in Niger last month, the UN said Tuesday, adding that the number was higher than the target. The drive was broadened to include children in refugee camps whose parents had fled the Boko Haram insurgency in …

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | More taxes imposed on tobacco products could reduce smoking in Uganda. That is the suggestion presented in the latest study by the Kampala-based think tank, the Economic Policy Research Centre-EPRC. The study led by Dr Ibrahim Kasirye, a Principal Research Fellow at the Economic Policy …