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John Daley and Colorado Public Radio, Tribune News ServiceIn response to abrupt and politicised changes to federal vaccine policy, concerned Coloradans have taken several steps to shore up support for vaccine science. A bill passed
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Someone rightly said that “love is blind,” and this saying perfectly reflects the craze many fans have for their favourite celebrities and sports icons (“Giant Messi statue in India to be removed over safety concerns,”
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Your independence should be your utmost priority. You should never settle for anything less than your own privacy and your own autonomy. You should never be beholden to anyone. Not your mother, not your sibling
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Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is complicating efforts to rein in a deadly Ebola outbreak, the World Health Organization (WHO) chief warned yesterday, while Uganda announced it was shutting its border. The WHO has recorded 10 confirmed and 223 suspected Ebola deaths in the DRC since the outbreak was declared in mid-May, out of more than 1,000 confirmed and suspected cases. Its chief fears insecurity in the eastern DRC, which has been plagued for three decades by conflict involving a litany of armed groups, is making it extremely difficult to contain the outbreak. “Eastern DRC now faces a catastrophic collision of disease and conflict with the Ebola outbreak in Ituri province outpacing the response,” the UN agency’s chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X. Neighbouring Uganda, which has recorded seven cases of the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola responsible for the outbreak, announced it was shutting its border with the DRC with immediate effect. It also said it was imposing a 21-day quarantine on anyone arriving from the DRC, under the supervision of the Ministry of Health and district surveillance teams. No vaccine or treatment exists for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which is behind the DRC’s 17th recorded outbreak of the disease. The WHO said the case fatality rate was under 25 percent — much lower than in other recent outbreaks. But it has also said the true spread of the virus was probably much wider than confirmed numbers suggest, with the strain likely circulating for some time before it was detected. State services in rural areas of Ituri province have been largely absent for decades. Tedros lamented that clashes were “driving mass displacement, pushing exposed contacts into overcrowded camps and severing critical containment corridors”. “Frontline workers are risking everything, while attacks on health facilities make tracking cases and their contacts nearly impossible,” he warned. “We cannot build community trust or isolate the sick while bombs are falling,” Tedros said, urging “all warring parties to agree to an immediate ceasefire to contain this outbreak”. The United States plans to open a quarantine centre in Kenya, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, primarily intended for Americans who need to leave the DRC quickly and quarantine.
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The regional order that served the GCC for half a century is buckling. What comes next depends on choices that can no longer be deferred. There is an old Bedouin saying that the desert teaches patience but punishes hesitation. For the six monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council, the present moment demands both at once. Whatever the final shape of the conflict that Netanyahu’s government has imposed on the Middle East, life along the Gulf littoral will continue. The question is not whether the region survives the turbulence, but whether it emerges with the architecture to convert its formidable assets into durable civilisational achievement. For five decades, GCC governance rested on a sturdy if unspoken compact. The first pillar was tribal continuity — hereditary structures providing social cohesion without coercive bureaucracy. The second was petrodollar abundance: oil revenues funding a developmental sprint without precedent. A protective dome completed the structure. The dependence of Western economies on Gulf energy — the region accounts for roughly a quarter of global crude exports and holds nearly a third of proven reserves — secured diplomatic recognition and security guarantees in exchange for supply reliability and petrodollar recycling into Western markets. Within that enclosure, the results were extraordinary. In 1970, per capita income across much of the Arabian Peninsula barely exceeded $1,000 in today’s terms. By 2024, Qatar’s GDP per capita stood at around $75,000 and the UAE’s at around $50,000. Riyadh, Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi grew from trading towns into skylines that draw more visitors than many European capitals. Saudi Arabia alone has committed hundreds of billions to infrastructure since 2000. The GCC collectively graduates more than 400,000 university students annually. By its velocity it rivals the Chinese miracle — achieved by a combined population one-thousandth the size. Yet the candid observer must note what the dome obscured. Annual GCC summits, for all their ceremonial weight, gathered leaders pursuing parallel rather than converging agendas. Coordination on defence, industrial policy, water security and education remained largely aspirational. The GCC Secretariat’s archives in Riyadh hold decades of joint proposals — on monetary union, a common electricity grid, unified visa regimes — drafted with diligence and shelved with equal thoroughness. The distances between city-states encouraged individualistic instincts; so did deference to a broader Arab world whose more ancient and populous societies long served as the Gulf’s imported expertise base. The intermediary stage — the final two decades of the twentieth century — showed what disciplined oil wealth could accomplish: functional states emerged where nomadic polities had existed within living memory. But the new century arrived with complications the dome could not absorb. The September 2001 attacks plunged the GCC into a storm not of its making. Western military adventurism in Afghanistan and Iraq destabilised the neighbourhood without producing order. Iran’s ambitions, uncontained by the hollowed-out Arab state system, filled the vacuum. And now Netanyahu, exploiting a rupture in the Palestinian question that he spent three decades engineering, has taken the initiative with American acquiescence and an appetite for reordering that serves Israeli interests far more than Gulf ones. This is the sobering ledger. But pessimism is a luxury the Gulf cannot afford — and the empirical case for optimism is stronger than crisis commentary suggests. The GCC’s sovereign wealth funds alone manage approximately $5tn in assets, around 40% of the global total, making it among the most financially capitalised regions for its size. Saudi Arabia’s median age is under 30 — a demographic dividend that ageing Western economies would pay handsomely to possess. Vision 2030, the UAE’s Net Zero by 2050 commitment and Qatar’s post-tournament diversification strategy show that the will for structural transformation is genuine and has moved well beyond rhetorical aspiration. What, then, must be done? Four imperatives stand out. First, defence consolidation: the GCC must move from parallel procurement toward interoperable architectures, rationalising a collective annual defence spend of around $120 billion into systems that communicate. Individual orders with Western suppliers have created a patchwork that benefits contractors more than coherence. The region’s combined firepower, properly coordinated, would constitute a formidable deterrent. At present it constitutes an expensive catalogue. Second, educational reinvention for the AI era. The coming decade will see AI reshape every knowledge-intensive profession. GCC institutions must be rebuilt around computational literacy, critical reasoning and adaptive learning — not the credentialling models inherited from twentieth-century Egyptian and Lebanese universities. Here Gulf capital, properly directed, can leapfrog the incremental reform that constrains older economies. The window will not stay open indefinitely. Third, a Gulf-led Arab stabilisation fund. The overflow risk from collapsed Arab states — Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza — is existential for Gulf social stability. A coordinated architecture, modelled loosely on the Marshall Plan, would cost a fraction of what military responses would demand. At around $60bn over a decade, it is affordable. What has been missing is political will and institutional design. Fourth, and most foundational: the Arab League must be resurrected as a functioning multilateral body capable of shouldering these burdens. The alternative — each Gulf state managing regional dysfunction bilaterally — is neither efficient nor sustainable. The League was never designed for irrelevance; it has been allowed to drift there by the very states that stand to gain most from its revival. Pooling GCC think-tank capacity to draft a reform agenda would be a sensible first step. The fathers of today’s Gulf leaders made a momentous wager: that disciplined use of transient resource wealth could build permanent civilisational capacity. They were right. The wager for this generation is larger still, and the clock less forgiving. Before the oil age closes and AI reshapes the global economy beyond recognition, they must architect a framework worthy of the societies they have inherited. Climate change will not wait for consensus. AI will not pause for committees. And the Gulf’s young populations deserve leaders who understand that honouring tradition means doing what their fathers did: opening new departures when the old roads run out. The desert teaches patience. It also punishes those who wait for the storm to pass before deciding how to move. The writer is a Lebanese writer and former editor of Al-Hayat in London and The Daily Star in Beirut.
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India’s drive to blend more ethanol into petrol and shield itself from global energy price shocks has increased the amount of farmland tied to fuel production more than eight-fold in four years, according to new research. India depends on imports for some 85% of its oil, so using more ethanol, made from crops such as sugarcane, rice and maize, is central to its plans to boost its energy security and reduce planet-heating emissions. State-run oil companies currently mix 20% ethanol in each litre of petrol before it reaches the pumps. The area of land linked to ethanol feedstocks, especially maize and rice, has risen from 0.7mn hectares in 2020-21, to 5.7mn hectares in 2024-25, reflecting a rapid expansion in grain-based ethanol production, data presented by Delhi-based research organisation Arcus Policy Research this month showed. While India’s ethanol programme was initially driven by surplus sugar supplies, by 2024-25 only 32% of ethanol supplied to public fuel retailers came from sugarcane, while grain-based ethanol accounted for 68%, according to Arcus Policy Research. The shift is reshaping crop choices, increasing maize use for fuel and relying heavily on government rice stocks to meet blending targets, said researchers and industry executives at a policy discussion this month where the data was presented. In just over a decade, India increased the amount of ethanol blended into petrol more than 13-fold, from 1.5% in 2014 to 20% in 2025, reaching its E20 target five years ahead of schedule despite a backlash from some drivers over reduced fuel efficiency and concerns about engine wear. The government says the shift to biofuel saved Rs1.06tn ($12bn) in crude oil imports and avoided 54.4mn tonnes of carbon emissions in a decade, equivalent to emissions from 12mn petrol cars a year. It also describes the reduction in fuel efficiency as marginal. The gains, however, come with trade-offs. The diversion of food crops toward fuel has raised concerns over grain availability, as well as land and water use. Scientists continue to debate whether crop-based ethanol significantly lowers emissions once the land and water needed to grow the crops are factored into the equation. “The rapid expansion reflects a major shift in India’s ethanol programme away from sugarcane and toward grains such as maize and rice,” said Shweta Saini, CEO of Arcus Policy Research. Nearly 29% of India’s maize production was diverted toward ethanol in 2024-25, while maize cultivation expanded from 9.9mn hectares in 2020-21, to 13.7mn hectares, the data showed. Researchers said the shift was beginning to ripple through agricultural supply chains, affecting feed markets, crop choices and land use patterns. Saini said the market for soybeans, a major ingredient of animal feed in India, had already been hit by farmers growing maize for ethanol production, which generates a byproduct that is also used to feed livestock.Researchers and former policymakers also raised concerns over the growing diversion of government rice stocks toward ethanol production. Former agriculture secretary Siraj Hussain said much of the broken rice being supplied for ethanol was still suitable for human consumption and would previously have entered India’s subsidised public food distribution system. India allocated a record 5.2mn metric tonnes of rice from state stockpiles for ethanol production in 2024-25, according to Reuters. Saini said the issue reflected wider contradictions in Indian agriculture policy, where governments continue incentivising paddy cultivation despite repeated calls to diversify toward pulses and less water-intensive crops. She warned that while food grain supplies may remain stable, shifting more land and incentives toward fuel-linked crops could increasingly affect India’s “nutrition security”, especially as the country remains heavily dependent on imports of edible oils and pulses. The concerns come as PM Narendra Modi has urged citizens to reduce edible oil consumption as part of austerity measures announced after rising energy prices linked to the ME conflict increased pressure on India’s foreign exchange reserves.
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A faithful arrives to attend prayers marking the holiday of Eid al-Adha, as authorities intensify efforts to contain a new Ebola outbreak caused by the Bundibugyo virus strain, at the Central Mosque in Bunia town,
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Africa's next generation of power projects is increasingly being built around solar and wind power and battery storage, as governments and investors shift away from coal and large hydropower dams in search of cheaper, faster
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STOCKHOLM: Ukrainian drones have strayed into Baltic countries' airspace in recent weeks, sowing confusion and raising tensions with Russia at a time when US commitment to NATO's collective security is in question. The airspace incursions
