I had gone to the bank to get cash when a sudden explosion shook the building. Windows shattered and people fell to the ground. Officials shouted for everyone to leave. Outside, the streets were shrouded in thick black smoke. The bomb had landed two hundred metres away, destroying a police station, which collapsed on a bus filled with passengers. Pedestrians on the pavement were killed instantly. Among the abandoned cars, broken glass and concrete I could see dead bodies. There must have been fifty of them. Blood was everywhere. The soldiers at the scene ordered me to leave.
The first vaccines a two-month-old child gets in England offer protection against three species of virus and five bacteria. Since 2015, they have included Neisseria meningitidis group B, the bacterium involved in the recent meningitis outbreak in Kent in which two people have died. The first vaccine against bacteria was created by Louis Pasteur in 1879. It was a live attenuated vaccine for chicken cholera, meaning it involved weakened forms of the bacteria that didn’t cause serious disease. While that approach is still often used for viruses, modern vaccine development for bacteria has largely moved away from live attenuated forms. Ensuring that a bacterium is reliably weakened is a difficult problem because bacteria are complicated: SARS-CoV-2 has only eleven genes; N. meningitidis has about two thousand.
Putting out the fire at Forsyth House (Ewan McNicol)
As fast as the flames flew up, the news of the fire spread not just through the city but among Glaswegians in other parts of the world – another round of ‘it’s no’ called Tinderbox City for nothing.’
On 5 June 1975, four carabinieri officers, in one car, drove up a winding road to an isolated farmhouse above Acqui Terme in northern Italy. We still don’t know if it was a routine search or if they had received a tip-off. While the driver was parking the car, the other three walked towards the main building. There were two cars parked outside. The carabinieri knocked on the door, a man opened it and a woman appeared at a window above. Moments later, the man at the door threw a hand grenade. One of the carabinieri, Umberto Rocca, lost an eye and an arm. What happened next has been the subject of controversy ever since.
Thucydides is having another moment. Donald Trump’s foreign policy has provoked a rash of allusions to a line from the Melian Dialogue: ‘The strong do what they want, the weak suffer what they must.’ The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, referred to it at Davos in January in his lament for the fading of a rules-based order. But a Thucydidean world is not something to be welcomed.
Berta Cáceres speaking outside the Soto Cano US Air Base in Honduras in 2011 (Roger Harris)
Ten years ago Berta Cáceres, a campaigner against dams and mining projects that were displacing rural communities in Honduras, said that death threats had forced her to lead a ‘fugitive existence’. Most of the threats came from a company, Desarrollos Energeticos SA (DESA), that was planning a hydroelectric project on the Gualcarque River, sacred to Cáceres’s Indigenous Lenca community.
Kawhi Leonard scoring for the LA Clippers in January 2021 (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)
Professional leagues are sprawling multinational corporations grossing tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue, employing tens of thousands of workers and serving hundreds of millions of consumers. But the sports media shrink professional sport, in all its material totality, to a mere game.