The government said 61,637 people have disappeared since 1964, the vast majority since 2006, when then-president Felipe Calderón began cracking down on drug cartels.
Children were deprived of clean water and basic healthcare in armed conflicts, leading to preventable deaths, a study showed. Conflicts accounted for seven percent of all child deaths in Africa.
Across Earth’s history, our planet has been home to an estimated 109 billion human beings. And according to another oft-repeated factoid, half of all the people who have ever existed were killed by malaria, the worst mosquito-borne illness. Mosquitoes aren’t merely annoyances, they are mass murderers.
But is this actually true?
There’s little doubt that these hellacious insects are prodigious killers of humankind. The bloodsuckers spread all sorts of diseases – West Nile Virus, various kinds of Encephalitis, Dengue Fever, Yellow Fever, and Zika Virus, for example. However, the damage wrought by all of these diseases is piddling in comparison to malaria. Causing fever, tiredness, vomiting, headaches, and seizures, it struck 216 million people in 2016 alone, resulting in between 445,000 to 731,000 deaths. Believe it or not, that’s an improvement over past years. In 2000, there were 262 million cases, resulting in at least 839,000 deaths.
A power play by the popular interior minister, Matteo Salvini, imploded the coalition. But for now, the election he wants remains just out of reach.
Malaria is one of the world’s deadliest and most stubborn diseases. Now babies in three African nations are getting the first vaccine for malaria in an unusual pilot program.
A new look at 2017 test data reveals an explosion 16 times as powerful than the one that leveled Hiroshima.
Scientists looking anew at a 2017 North Korean nuclear test discovered that the explosion was likely about two-thirds more powerful than U.S. officials previously thought.
Earlier data put the yield somewhere between 30 and 300 kilotons; the U.S. intelligence community said 140 kilotons. That was already the most powerful device tested by North Korea, topping a 2016 test by about an order of magnitude. But a new look at seismological data suggests that the blast was between 148 and 328 kilotons, and probably around 250 kilotons.
Circa 2019
Their heroism prevented the submarine fire from being a broader disaster, a likely reference to their actions to prevent a nuclear reactor meltdown.
Like millions of movie-mad children around the world, Gim Gyu Min dreamed of being a film star when he grew up. But when he huddled in the darkness of the cinema in the 1980s and ’90s, he was forced to watch propaganda praising the North Korean regime.
Now, after a harrowing escape from his country in 1999, he is a filmmaker dedicated to making movies that expose the human-rights abuses there. “I want to let the world know that more and more people are dying under the Kim family dictatorship,” he said.
His movies are based on events that he witnessed during the North Korean famine in the late 1990s, when, among other horrors, he watched a woman being arrested for cannibalism after she resorted to eating her own son. Her child’s head had been found in a cauldron.
Instead of building a 100-kilowatt weapon, the Army now plans to leap straight to 250 or even 300 kW — which could shoot down much tougher targets.
Circa 2014
Star Wars is science fiction, but deflector shields like the ones in the films might be possible with today’s technology. There are still a few kinks to work out, but a group of physics students have figured out the basics.
