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The situation in Ethiopia continues to escalate. Government forces are still locked in battle with troops loyal to the Tigrayan government while Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, has vowed to remove the region’s leadership. There are reports that hundreds of soldiers have been killed and that many people have fled to Sudan.
Francesca Baldwin and Heike I Schmidt weigh up the chances of all-out civil war while Yohannes Gedamu explains the serious challenges Ahmed’s government has faced from the start. The major one
is ethnic tensions, for which the government has not yet designed a strategy.
The news that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine had shown signs of being 90% effective has set stock markets alive, and raised a great deal of optimism. But caution is required because there’s a lot we still don’t know about the vaccine’s effectiveness (we’ll have more on what these preliminary results suggest over the coming days). Nevertheless, the figure is much higher than many commentators had hoped for.
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A man enters a polling station for Tigray’s regional elections, which Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed deemed illegal.
EDUARDO SOTERAS/AFP via Getty Images
Francesca Baldwin, University of Reading; Heike I Schmidt, University of Reading
Crisis grips Ethiopia as political divisions spill over into armed conflict and potential civil war looms.
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University of Maryland School of Medicine/AP/AAP
Harry Al-Wassiti, Monash University; Colin Pouton, Monash University; Kylie Quinn, RMIT University
Early analysis suggests this vaccine has an efficacy of over 90%. So if you took ten people who were going to get sick from COVID-19 and vaccinated them, only one would get sick.
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Health + Medicine
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Lynne A Barker, Sheffield Hallam University; Caroline Jordan, Sheffield Hallam University
Our gut microbes play a key role in sending and receiving signals that influence the brain.
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Lucy van Dorp, UCL
Denmark orders the cull of all farmed mink after a mutated strain of coronavirus was found in some animals.
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Politics + Society
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Mara Oliva, University of Reading
How Donald Trump changed US foreign policy.
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Olga Löblová, University of Cambridge
Lauded as a success story during the first wave, the country is now struggling with an explosion of cases.
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