When news broke that scientists had developed an effective vaccine against Covid, Emile Hendricks was living in a deprived suburb of Cape Town and studying for a degree in biotechnology. He thought he and his community would not have access to such a vaccine, or at the very least would be at the back of the queue. He was right. By mid-April 2021, more than 32 million people in the UK had received a first dose of a Covid vaccine, compared with just 300,000 in South Africa, where the rollout was plagued by problems. “The vaccine wasn’t accessible to me or to anyone I knew,” Hendricks says. “It was something that was given to [people in the west] but not to the rest of us. I pushed it out of my mind, thinking we in Africa will have to find our own solution.” Two years later, Hendricks is a research technologist at Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, a Cape Town pharmaceutical company, and part of a team that has successfully reproduced small quantities of Moderna’s mRNA Covid vaccine as part of a plan backed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to develop vaccines in the global south. Scientists at the University of the Witwatersrand worked with Afrigen to deconstruct the sequence of the Moderna vaccine and build it from scratch. Such reverse engineering is legal in South African law, which contains a provision for carrying out research and development regardless of patent protection. Its freedom to operate is also under threat. Moderna has filed several patents in South Africa and has refused to cooperate and share technology with the hub in Africa, likening the replica vaccine to a “copy of a Louis Vuitton handbag”. In addition, Moderna is suing fellow mRNA vaccine manufacturers Pfizer and BioNTech, which has raised fears that it could enforce patents against the hub regarding any future vaccines it may develop for illnesses other than Covid.

Students need more exposure to the way everyday things work and are made. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the teaching of math, where we persist in a rigid approach that rewards those who “get it” and leaves the rest—including those with the very kinds of minds our economy and our future most desperately need—with a sense of profound failure.

The world-famous cipher has been a must-see object for two centuries - but Egypt wants it back.

The private email accounts of two New York University law students have been subpoenaed by an NYU Law trustee over the circulation of a letter critical of him, DNAinfo is reporting. Second-year Luke Herrine and first-year Leo Gertner aided in the promotion and distribution of this letter that singles out school trustee Daniel Straus, owner of Care One Management, which is currently embroiled in a labor dispute and stands accused of numerous violations from the National Labor Relations Board. From the letter: The National Labor Relations Board has charged his companies, CareOne and HealthBridge Management, with violating federal labor law no fewer than 38 times. U.S. District Court Judge Robert Chatigny has held HealthBridge in contempt of court for failing to comply with an order to return 600 striking nursing home workers to work at their pre-strike level of compensation. Mr. Straus has manipulated bankruptcy and RICO law to punish workers for exercising their clearly established rights to engage in collective action. He has hired thugs to harass workers and NYU students who were protesting his actions.

The NYPD is on its way to becoming an all-SUV fleet. Announcing the news at the end of September, deputy commissioner Robert Martinez called the transition one of necessity and strategy: Ford — which has an $11.5 million, five-year contract with the department — has stopped making the “interceptor” sedans NYPD has used for years. Their replacement, a hybrid Ford Explorer SUV, will act as a placeholder until the city can take the 6,300-vehicle fleet fully electric with the Ford Mustang Mach-E — a small SUV that’s more like a station wagon. (The city bought 185 Mach-Es last December, but has been buying hundreds of Explorers every year.) The Explorer, technically the Ford Police Interceptor Utility Hybrid, with its larger profile and considerable height, is better suited to the job than the traditional sedan, Martinez told the New York Daily News. It “meets the mission,” he said, and is “safe for everybody.” New York isn’t alone in the SUV-ification of its police fleet. Since 2017, more than half of all police vehicles sold in the U.S. are cop-customized Explorers. The country’s next-largest department, Chicago, has jumped on the oversize bandwagon, with Ford relocating the factory to the city to build the police Explorers right there at home. Across the U.S., police departments large and small are retiring their last Crown Victorias in favor of new, often gargantuan, SUVs. An annual report by the Michigan State Police Precision Driving Unit, which tests new-model law-enforcement vehicles, tracks the trend: In 2010, two out of eight vehicles tested were SUVs, while in 2022, nine out of eleven vehicles tested were SUVs. Ford, which has contracts for more than half of the police vehicles in the country, doesn’t even make sedans anymore, meaning departments across the U.S. are all, at some point, destined for the same thing: bigger, faster cars. Over the last ten years, as SUVs and trucks came to make up 80 percent of total new car sales in the country, pedestrian fatalities have increased dramatically, hitting the highest level in four decades. Nationwide, police car chases now kill more people than tornadoes, lightning, and hurricanes combined. As those trends converge in the form of larger police vehicles — which are legally allowed to exceed the speed limit and perform other vehicular stunts civilians can’t — it presents a unique danger, says Alex Vitale, sociology professor at Brooklyn College and author of The End of Policing. “The research shows high-speed chases and maneuvering into vehicles endangers police officers, endangers people who are only wanted for traffic violations, and endangers random members of the public, especially in New York City where the density of pedestrians is so high.”

How a long-awaited Garbage Pail Kids NES game is finally coming to life.

Judy Tenuta has died. A veteran stand-up comic who came to national prominence in the 1980s with a combination of an eye-catching stage presence—accordion included—and brutal, hilarious takes on love, romance, religion, and more, the self-styled “Love Goddess” was a Grammy nominee, a beloved author, and a generally wonderful and weird presence in the world of comedy. According to The Seattle Times, Tenuta’s death was confirmed today by her manager. She was 72. Tenuta grew up outside of Chicago, coming up in the city’s comedy scene, where she quickly distinguished herself with a comedic style that could veer, at a moment’s notice, from aggressive insult comedy to surrealist asides, all delivered with a mixture of oddball vocal deliveries, semi-affectionate flirtations with the audience, and the sounds of her ever-present accordion. (Fellow accordion devotee Weird Al Yankovic would be a long-time collaborator, including Tenuta in many of his film and TV projects.)

The oldest plant ever to be regenerated has beaten the previous recordholder by some 30,000 years, a new study says.

It is disturbing that the supreme court used its increasingly diminished credibility with the public to take on a case that has no real purpose other than what I am describing in this column. In the United States, our highest court only rules on approximately 70 cases a year out of the 7,000 petitions for review that are presented. It is a relatively lazy court. In contrast, the supreme court of Brazil rules on approximately 100,000 cases a year. If the US court agreed to accept the Moore case for review, it almost certainly plans to endorse this rogue ISL theory, that could blow up elections and democracy in the United States as we know it.

The justice department filed criminal charges against Sullivan in 2020. At the time, prosecutors alleged he arranged to pay the hackers $100,000 (£87,964) in bitcoin and had them sign nondisclosure agreements that falsely stated they had not stolen data.

At a July school board meeting in Livingston Parish, Louisiana, middle school librarian Amanda Jones spoke out against book censorship. Conservatives in a neighboring town had been successful in taking away some resources for school libraries, and Jones didn’t want to see the same happen in her district. By the next day, conservatives had decided that her quest to keep books with LGBTQ themes in the library meant that she was trying to provide sexually explicit materials to children. Michael Lunsford, the executive director of right-wing nonprofit Citizens for a New Louisiana, and Ryan Thames, who runs a politically conservative Facebook page called Bayou State of Mind, each spoke out against Jones on Facebook. They claimed in a series of posts that Jones was advocating for libraries to contain pornography and books that teach kids how to perform sexual acts, according to court documents. Like many other librarians across the country, Jones also received an explicit death threat via email, and her friends and family have received harassing messages as well. The email, which was sent by a man in Texas about a month after the school board meeting, accused her of indoctrinating children and being a pedophile, and it stated that the writer knew where Jones lived and worked. Jones said it ended with words meant to imitate a gun: “Click, click see you soon.” Police are trying to extradite the person who wrote the email. In August, Jones filed a lawsuit against Lunsford and Thames, seeking damages and asking a judge to bar them from posting about her on Facebook. “Nobody stands up to these people,” she told NBC News at the time. “They just say what they want and there are no repercussions and they ruin people’s reputations and there’s no consequences.” But last week, Judge Erika Sledge dismissed the lawsuit, saying that Jones was a limited public figure and that the bar to meet the definition of defamation was higher. Sledge also ruled that Lunsford and Thames were merely stating their opinion. “It’s a dangerous ruling,” Jones’ lawyer, Ellyn Clevenger, told Louisiana newspaper The Advocate. “It sets a dangerous precedent.”

At least 35 people have been killed in a mass shooting in Thailand after a gunman opened fire in a children’s daycare centre in the town of Nongbua Lamphu on Thursday. Police said that the victims included 24 children, with toddlers as young as two among the dead. The other 11 victims, all adults, include at least two childcare staff and one district official. Photographs showed bodies of what appeared to be children on the floor of the centre covered in white sheets.

Exploring 20 years of hits, surprises, and DOOM stories with the elusive producer.

Whether you’re new to the Hellraiser-verse or just need a refresher, we’re here to prepare you for the latest installment in the franchise

Let me introduce you to the post-hurricane TikTok drama taking over my feed.

Tomlinson and his wife have fallen prey to a yearslong mass harassment campaign, including “swatting” attempts and death threats—all because he wrote an innocuous hot take.

The new Showtime docuseries “The Lincoln Project” follows the anti-Trump group of Republican operatives as they battle grooming and grifting allegations, among other things.

Herschel Walker has claimed he has no idea who this woman could be. Here’s why that’s surprising.

No greater challenge faces humanity than reducing emissions without backsliding into preindustrial poverty. One tiny country is leading the way.

Contrary to a prevailing theory that has been recently called into question, new research from the University of Cincinnati (UC) bolsters a hypothesis that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by a decline in levels of a specific protein.