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A couple of months ago, there was much fury about the demise of the late Speaker of Uganda’s Parliament, Jacob Oulanyah. It began when it was discovered that he was flown to Seattle, Washington, USA, for treatment. Some people demonstrated against him for wasting government money instead of spending it on improving the national health services. And when he died, some people celebrated his demise because they accused him of being one of the enablers of the autocratic rule. They attribute the regular violation of human rights: extrajudicial killings, disappearance of government critics, torture, etc. in Uganda when he presided over the amendment that removed the age limit which allows President Museveni to rule indefinitely. Some of the most vulgar poems were even written in celebration of the Speaker’s demise.

In 2017 the office of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) released a report which for the first time explicitly named US military forces in the field and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives in secret prisons as possible war crimes culprits for their alleged use of torture and rape. Because the American soldiers were based in Afghanistan, which is an ICC member, the ICC in theory has broad jurisdiction over crimes committed by combatants on Afghan soil. 

Propaganda is a double-edged sword. With propaganda, there is a risk that you go on believing your own message. Though wishful thinking about the New World Order is on both sides of the ongoing war in Ukraine, one wonders if the western world media can wish away the Russians from the face of the earth? Let's start with the roughest example of all time: Adolf Hitler. Before the war against the Soviet Union in 1941, he promised: “We just need to kick in the door and the whole rotten building will collapse”.

The year 2022 marks the 100th birthday of Nobel Prize winning chemist Har Gobind Khorana–or so we think. The exact date of his birth is not known because Khorana was born in poverty in a British Indian class that rarely recorded such dates. As a child, he had to beg a neighbor for a glowing ember so his mother could light their daily cooking fire. He was 6 before he owned his first pencil. Khorana emerged from this background to receive a Nobel Prize in 1968 for deciphering the genetic code that translates DNA sequences into the protein molecules that carry out the functions of living cells.