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Can slums contain the pandemic?

The first line of defence recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO) against COVID-19 is social distancing and frequent handwashing. However, the aim to “flatten the curve” through these precautions can be extremely difficult to put into practice in heavily populated, informal urban settlements, where overcrowding makes the ... from Opinions News https://ift.tt/2xxn97P

Privatisation and state-owned enterprises

Industrialisation is the key to the development of any economy and while small and medium enterprises play an important role in providing jobs, technological intensive heavy industries, such as shipping, auto manufacturing, electronics, aviation, are essential for the industrial and economic progress of any country. However, these industries are ... from Opinions News https://ift.tt/2RHhC5m

Dayspring for the common good

Let us pray for the rich and powerful because they knew not what they were doing. It is now the week after Easter, the end of the Christian time of fasting, and a week before the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, which will end with the celebration of Eid-ul-Fitr. This year, the corona pandemic has stopped the ... from Opinions News https://ift.tt/3cjCOX5

Past in Perspective

“The truth is that neither British nor American imperialism was or is idealistic. It has always been driven by economic or strategic interests.” –Charley Reese   Smokes rises from ISIS positions after US air strikes in 2017.   On June 28, 2004, the US transferred sovereignty of Iraq back to Iraq ending 15 months of US ... from Opinions News https://ift.tt/3etLJau

Genius, Interrupted

Lee Holloway was a brilliant coder, co-founder, and master architect of Cloudflare. He was “the resident genius, the guy who could focus for hours, code pouring from his fingertips while death metal blasted in his headphones.” But over time he became withdrawn, sleeping for days at a time, unable to engage with his family or friends. And his affect, when he did speak, was strangely flat. As Sandra Upson reports in this exceptional piece at Wired , no one knew a degenerative disease — frontotemporal dementia — lurked inside his brain, slowly killing off cells in his frontal and temporal lobes, irrevocably altering his personality in startling ways . He was the master architect whose vision had guided what began as a literal sketch on a napkin into a tech giant with some 1,200 employees and 83,000 paying customers. He laid the groundwork for a system that now handles more than 10 percent of all internet requests and blocks billions of cyberthreats per day. Much of the architecture he ...

Online learning woes during lockdown

Ever since countries all over the world have gone into lockdowns due to COVID-19, educational institutes have been no exception. Students and teachers have come across the perennial struggles of having access to uninterrupted and seamless quality of internet connection. To this universal problem, Pakistan has been no exception. Students and ... from Opinions News https://ift.tt/2Kb73TT

The COVID-19 challenge

Today everyone, everywhere is talking about coronavirus (COVID-19). There’s an information overload and yet nobody really knows what to do about it generally, or when diagnosed with it. Social distancing is the silver bullet that health experts have come up with. It is not a cure but a prevention measure to impede its exponential spread. The ... from Opinions News https://ift.tt/3egTvUZ