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In light of Friday's attacks on Paris, Facebook activated a feature allowing people to super-impose the French flag over their profile picture.

Some railed against this idea since the feature was not provided after an attack by ISIS on Lebanon just one day earlier.

One site called LunaPics began offering users the option to convert their profile picture into a show of support for Lebanese victims instead.  Now a website called the "All Flags Profile Photo Converter" cropped up.

Pope Francis prayed Sunday for the victims of a brutal attack that killed 16 people at a home for the elderly in Yemen founded by Mother Teresa.

The attack at the facility run by Catholic missionaries in the port city of Aden left four nuns dead, the Vatican reported.

The nuns were part of a group founded by soon-to-be-sainted Mother Teresa. Two were from Rwanda, one was from India and the fourth one was from Kenya. Read More

It was a skeleton of a young boy, discovered at Lake Turkana in the deserts of northern Kenya. He died when he was about eight years old and his bones sank into the sediments of the lake, where they were preserved for 1.5 million years. He was, and is, the most complete early-human fossil ever discovered

Together they span four million years of human evolution.

1.9 million-year-old Homo rudolfensis, known as "skull 1470".

"I'll tell you why: because Islam is the new fascism. Just like Nazism started with Hitler's vision, the Islamic vision is a caliphate - a society ruled by Sharia law - in which women who have sex before marriage are stoned to death, homosexuals are beaten, and apostates like me are killed.

Sharia law is as inimical to liberal democracy as Nazism. Young Muslims need to be persuaded that the vision of the Prophet Mohammed is a bad one, and you aren't going to get that in Islamic faith schools."

"Islam is the new fascism." But is that really born out by the evidence? Can what Ali experienced in Kenya seriously be extrapolated to Malaysia? To Turkey? To Bangladesh?

Study after study shows cash improves the lives of the poorest with next to no negative side effects.

A recent review of 19 separate studies shows that, despite early fears, cash transfers very seldom increase spending on temptation goods like alcohol or gambling. Nor do they induce people to work fewer hours.

The mechanisms through which cash achieves these results aren’t clear, but one study in Kenya finds important reductions in the stress hormone cortisol in some groups who receive cash transfers. These are accompanied by large improvements in self-reported psychological well-being, with larger transfers associated with bigger effects.

Crowded camps, depleted clinics and scarce soap and water make social distancing and even hand-washing impossible for millions of refugees.

In an embattled enclave in Syria, doctors have seen patients die from what looks like the coronavirus but are unable to treat them because they lack beds, protective gear and medical professionals. A refugee camp in Bangladesh is so cramped that its population density is nearly four times that of New York City, making social distancing impossible. Clinics in a refugee camp in Kenya struggle in normal times with only eight doctors for nearly 200,000 people.

As wealthy countries like the United States and Italy struggle with mass outbreaks of the coronavirus, international health experts and aid workers are increasingly worried that the virus could ravage the world’s most vulnerable people: the tens of millions forced from their homes by violent conflict.

Germany Calls for 10 Billion Euro Permanent U.N. Crisis Fund

BERLIN (Reuters) - German Development Minister Gerd Mueller, citing hunger crises in eastern Africa, said the United Nations should create a permanent 10 billion euro ($11.19 billion) crisis fund, with contributions to be based on a country's financial strength. "The catastrophe is already upon us," Mueller said in an interview with the German newspaper Passauer Neue Presse, published on Saturday. He pointed to dire conditions in countries such as Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan and Ethiopia. Mueller said the United Nations estimated the financial needs in eastern Africa alone amounted to $4 billion to $5 billion. Creating a fund that would be continually restocked would make it easier to respond to recurring humanitarian crises, he said. "We need to accomplish this as a world community," he said.

a huge section of the city, previously considered relatively safe, now lies in ruins.

Ghastly as al-Shabaab is, negotiating with the group may be the only road to peace.

Within Somalia, al-Shabaab continued to control much of the countryside and has proved all but impossible to dislodge.

The global scientific consensus is clear: Emissions of planet-warming gases must be cut by nearly half by 2030 if the world is to have a good shot at averting the worst climate catastrophes.The global political response has been underwhelming so far.

The head of the United Nations climate agency, Patricia Espinosa, said the figures compiled by her office showed that “current levels of climate ambition are very far from putting us on a pathway that will meet our Paris Agreement goals.”

Still missing from the ledger is the United States, which has produced more greenhouse gas emissions than any other country in history.

In the fall of 2019, just before global borders closed, an international journalists’ association decided to canvass its members about a subject that kept coming up in informal conversations: What is China doing?

What it found was astonishing in its scope. Journalists from countries as tiny as Guinea-Bissau had been invited to sign agreements with their Chinese counterparts. The Chinese government was distributing versions of its propaganda newspaper China Daily in English — and also Serbian. A Filipino journalist estimated that more than half of the stories on a Philippines newswire came from the Chinese state agency Xinhua. A Kenyan media group raised money from Chinese investors, then fired a columnist who wrote about China’s suppression of its Uyghur minority. Journalists in Peru faced intense social media criticism from combative Chinese government officials.

What is China planning to do with this new power?

So in preparation for this episode, I have spent the last few weeks very deep in the mind of Barack Obama. I read the first volume of his presidential memoirs, “A Promised Land.”

It’s almost pathological how much he tries, in his memoirs, to grant the points of his critics and even the really unfair points of some of his attackers, how much he doubts his own motivations and righteousness.

He saw, also, avoiding the issues, and sometimes even the truths that would awaken their suspicions, as just part of the job. And so you can see in the book that he’s not just trying to convince them to vote for him as he is.

Donald Trump named more of his political allies to serve as ambassadors than any president in modern history. Now the pressure is on Joe Biden to reverse that trend — and set a new standard.

“Our diplomats expect Biden to build diplomacy back better. That’s what he promised on the campaign trail,” said Brett Bruen, a former Foreign Service officer who now does consulting work.

The Biden presidency is no different, according to interviews with five donors, but after the perception of corruption around nominees grew during the Trump years, Biden is being pressed to appoint more career diplomats.

Experts' concerns currently focus on a small number of new variants of coronavirus:A UK variant that has become dominant in much of Britain and has spread to more than 50 other countriesA South Africa variant that has also been found in at least 20 other countries, including the UKA variant from BrazilIt's not unexpected that new variants have developed - all viruses mutate as they make new copies of themselves to spread and thrive.

Most of these differences are inconsequential. A few can even be harmful to the virus's survival.

It's suspected that the UK, South Africa and Brazil variants could be much more contagious or easy to catch than earlier versions. All three have undergone changes to their spike protein - this is the part of the virus which attaches to human cells.

While the richest countries in the world are grappling with shortages of Covid-19 vaccines, some of the poorest worry about getting vaccines at all. Yet a solution to both problems may be hiding in plain sight: vaccines from China and Russia, and soon, perhaps, India.

Chinese and Russian vaccines were initially dismissed in Western and other global media, partly because of a perception that they were inferior to the vaccines produced by Moderna, Pfizer-BioNtech or AstraZeneca. And that perception seemed to stem partly from the fact that China and Russia are authoritarian states.

There is suspicion of the Russian vaccine in Iran, of the Chinese vaccines in Pakistan, and of both in Kenya and South Africa.

one thing, at least, has gotten better. More than 1 billion people have escaped extreme poverty—so many, so fast, that the world might be able to declare, within a decade, the end of this most miserable form of deprivation. “The global poverty rate is now lower than it has ever been in recorded history,” Jim Yong Kim, a former president of the World Bank, recently argued. “This is one of the greatest human achievements of our time.”

Or perhaps not. In an acidic rebuke to world leaders, the outgoing United Nations special rapporteur on poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, argues that the effort to end global poverty has failed. More people live in deprivation now than two decades ago. “We squandered a decade in the fight against poverty, with misplaced triumphalism blocking the very reforms that could have prevented the worst impacts of the pandemic,” Alston wrote in his last report.

The pessimistic argument is a hard one to make when looking at the raw, headline numbers. The global extreme-poverty rate fell from 36 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2015; the number of poor people dropped from 2 billion to 700 million. But Alston believes that by focusing only on those numbers, the world is deluding itself.

But so far only one, a jab called RTS,S, made by GlaxoSmithKline, has proved effective in the final stages of clinical trials. On October 6th the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended RTS,S for use in childhood vaccination in places with transmission of Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest of the five parasites that cause malaria, and the most common in Africa.

The WHO reached its decision after reviewing results from Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, where more than 800,000 infants were vaccinated with a four-dose regimen.

RTS,S was included among the routine childhood vaccines distributed by primary health-care centres. This implementation programme, in which RTS,S reduced by 30% the number of cases of severe malaria which led to hospital admissions, therefore measured what kind of efficacy can be expected if the vaccine is rolled out widely across Africa.

A new report by a human rights group has found more than 600 Taiwanese arrested overseas have been deported to China in recent years.

Safeguard Defenders says the practice was being "used as a tool to undermine Taiwan's sovereignty".Taiwan, which considers itself an independent nation, has long insisted that Taiwanese arrested abroad should be sent back to the island.But Beijing sees Taiwan as a breakaway province that is a part of China.

It argues several nations are breaching international human rights laws in following extradition treaties with Beijing, and singled out Spain and Kenya for extraditing the most number of Taiwanese people to China.China in the past argued that the Taiwanese suspects in some cases should be extradited to China as their victims included mainland Chinese.

Some Games, such as the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Berlin, saw countries (including the U.S. and the U.K.) threaten to pull out, before deciding to participate. World Wars I and II forced the cancellation of three Olympic Games—in 1916, 1940 and 1944. And other countries have been banned for a variety of reasons: Germany and Japan in 1948 because of their roles in WWII, South Africa during the era of apartheid and Russia in 2020, due to a doping scandal (although individual athletes were ultimately allowed to compete.)

The Details: Australia’s first hosting stint also marked the first Olympic boycott, with numerous countries withdrawing for a variety of political reasons. Less than a month before the opening ceremony, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to stop the Hungarian Revolution against the Communist regime; in protest, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland all refused to participate. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China also withdrew—and would not return until the 1980 Winter Games—because Taiwan, which it considers a breakaway province, was allowed to participate as a separate country. And, finally, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon boycotted the 1956 Olympics due to the Suez Canal Crisis following the British-Israel-French invasion of Egypt to control the waterway.

‘Blood in the Water’: Despite other countries’ boycott against the Soviets, Hungary competed in the Olympics, and its athletes received support from fans, while Soviet athletes faced boos. A violent water polo match between the two teams left one Hungarian player bleeding from the head and led to a fight among spectators and athletes. Hungary, up 4-0 at the start of the brawl, was named the winner and the team eventually won the gold medal. The Soviets, for their part, went on to win the most medals for the first time. Of Note: In a show of peace, the Olympic athletes, for the first time, marched into the closing ceremony mixed together, rather than as separate nations—a tradition that continues today.

It was local virologists and epidemiologists who had honed their skills studying another virus, HIV, who discovered the new Omicron variant of covid

When cases spiked unexpectedly, they studied samples, determined that it was a new and worrying variant and—most importantly—shared their findings immediately.

Britain shut its airports to flights from South Africa and several other southern African countries. America and the European Union soon followed suit, banning flights and closing their borders to travellers from the region.