Author: Steven Sahiounie

“The US sanctions against Zimbabwe have been piled on since 2001, following a government decision to repossess land from minority white farmers for redistribution to landless indigenous Zimbabweans,” Dr. Mamdouh G. Salameh, an international oil economist and global energy expert, told Sputnik. “The sanction-induced economic mire has inflicted a myriad of real challenges on Zimbabweans, especially amid an unprecedented global pandemic.””Though the Zimbabwean government said the land reform would promote democracy and the economy, Western countries launched repeated sanctions with little regard for the average person’s suffering,” the economist continued.The issue of Western restrictions slapped on Zimbabweans was raised by…

With the significant decline in the exchange rate of the Egyptian pound, Egypt as a tourist destination has become very much in demand as an inexpensive trip. This was reflected in the rise in tourist numbers to Egypt, which have grown by 30 percent this year, Egypt’s Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, Ahmed Issa, announced in a press interview on the sidelines of the World Travel Market in London. Egypt is seeking to incentivize tourist arrivals, with the aim of receiving 30 million tourists annually. The Egyptian minister explained that access to this figure is related to numbers, and the…

When Yale University neuroscientist Nenad Sestan used a brew of nutrients, proteins, and drugs to resuscitate a pig’s brain hours after its death, he discovered the line between life and death wasn’t as clear as he’d once thought. His goal hadn’t been to reanimate the brain but rather to study its wiring. As soon as he published the sensational results in 2019, interest in his lab’s activities flooded in from around the world.“A lot of colleagues at Yale and elsewhere came knocking on our door, saying, ‘We need to try this in kidneys, we need to try that,’” Sestan says.…

A child plays in a fountain in the warm weather in London, Friday, June 17, 2022 as a blanket of hot air stretching from the Mediterranean to the North Sea is giving much of Western Europe its first heat wave of the summer. (AP photo)At least 15,000 people have died in Europe because of hot weather in 2022 so far, the World Health Organization said Monday, with Spain and Germany among the worst-affected countries.The three months from June-August were the hottest in Europe since records began, and the exceptionally high temperatures led to the worst drought the continent has witnessed…

Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMS) announced today that the general consumer price index for the entire country reached (137.2) points in October 2022, representing a (2.5 percent) increase over September 2022.The main reasons for this increase are price hikes in the vegetable category (7.6%), dairy, cheese, and eggs (5.7%), meat and poultry (3.4%), cereals and bread (1.6%), ready-made clothing (2%), the goods and services used in home maintenance (1.9%), outpatient services (2.8%), newspapers, books, and stationery (30.5%), and higher education (15.1%). Moreover, the annual inflation rate was 16.3% in October, up from 7.3% compared to the…

A federal judge in the state of Texas has blocked United States President Joe Biden’s hallmark plan to forgive thousands of dollars in student debt. The Thursday ruling from District Court Judge Mark Pittman, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, comes as the programme was already on hold pending a separate federal lawsuit brought by six Republican-led states: Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina. “In this country, we are not ruled by an all-powerful executive with a pen and a phone. Instead, we are ruled by a Constitution that provides for three distinct and independent branches of government,” Pittman wrote in…

The United Kingdom’s economy shrank in the three months to September at the start of what is likely to be a lengthy recession, underscoring the challenge for finance minister Jeremy Hunt as he prepares to raise taxes and cut spending next week. Economic output shrank by 0.2 percent in the third quarter, Friday’s official data showed.But it was the first fall in the gross domestic product (GDP) since the start of 2021, when the UK was still under tight coronavirus restrictions, as households and businesses struggle with a severe cost-of-living crisis. The UK’s economy is now further below its pre-pandemic…

Scientists at the S.P. Korolev Samara National Research University have proposed a new, highly efficient approach to spacecraft control. According to them, they found a physical mechanism for trajectory self-correction during complex maneuvers that helps avoid undesirable course changes and unnecessary fuel consumption.Any object in zero gravity in its natural state orbits around the nearest celestial body, simultaneously rotating around its own center of mass. In order to travel in space, it is necessary to construct a trajectory for the vehicle so that it is composed of motions in different orbits within a star system, specialists explained.The calculation of the…

NASA has already sent a few robots to Mars, but so far the payloads have been limited to around 1.5 tons, roughly the weight of a small car. For a mission involving humans, a much larger payload would be required, around 20 tons.NASA has launched an inflatable saucer that acts as a heat shield, potentially allowing far larger payloads to be landed on Mars and other space objects with a significant atmosphere.When objects land on a planet or moon with an atmosphere, the speed of the object and the friction of the atmosphere create a massive amount of heat. That…

The first “carbon neutral” World Cup was built from scratch by what one expert calls “a big oil company dressed up as a country.” It will bring a million fans via airplane to a petrostate that emits more carbon per capita than any other nation on Earth. Qatar, in preparing the 2022 World Cup, has genuinely impressed some climate scientists and activists with eco-friendly innovations. But its grand proclamations of sustainability and climate neutrality have been dogged by criticism of its carbon accounting and, most of all, by these inherent contradictions. The tournament itself, organizers say, will have a net-zero impact on the environment — “though quite…