This morning I read an article, in which Francis Munthali, one of my senior friends from our high school days, explains how he almost died of Covid-19. This Covid-19 is very dangerous! Francis is now out of danger and has made a public call for people to help Mzuzu Central Hospital with financial contributions in order to acquire oxygen as a matter of urgency.

With the 2020 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence already gone, the only major conference in Computational Intelligence remaining on this year’s calendar is the 2020 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (IEEE SSCI).

The Malawi social media has been awash with debates on fake PhDs for the past week or so. Some highly inquisitive fellows have been taking some time off their work to check and verify the authenticity of some PhD degrees held by some prominent people in our country.

On 20 April, 2020, Andry Rajoelina, Madagascar’s President launched Covid Organics (CVO), a herbal medicine that, he believes, can prevent and cure patients suffering from COVID-19.

Yesterday, I wrote about the Alpha DaRT technology that dissolves solid tumors in a number of days. Alpha DaRT was developed at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Today, I have stumbled on another exciting anti-cancer development from the same Tel Aviv University.

Alpha Tau Medical Ltd, an Israeli biotech company, conducts R&D and commercialisation of the Alpha DaRT™ (Diffusing Alpha-emitters Radiation Therapy), a novel cancer treatment that destroys aggressive tumors while sparing healthy tissue. The Alpha DaRT technology was initially developed in 2003 by Tel Aviv University researchers Prof. Itzhak Kelson and Prof. Yona Keisari.

When I stayed in South Africa for the first time between 2004 and 2007, I experienced only one case of power failure and it lasted less than 30 minutes. When I came for a one week visit in Pretoria in 2015, the situation was completely different. Rolling blackouts were the order of the day.

Daily Telegraph has posted an interesting Sky News Australia video on their website, in which they talk about the creation of a cowpox-like virus that can kill every known type of cancer. This development has also been reported by other online news websites such as Mailonline, Newshub and news.com.au.

Congratulations to South Africa’s National Rugby team, the Springboks, for winning their third Rugby World Cup in Yokohama, Japan! They beat England’s Roses with a final score of 32-12.

Our paper entitled “Binary Search Based PSO for Master Node Enumeration and Placement in a Smart Water Metering Network” has been accepted for the Africomm 2019 conference, which will take place in Porto Novo in Benin from 3 to 5 December, 2019. Africomm 2019 is the 11th European Alliance for Innovation (EAI) International Conference on e‐Infrastructure and e‐Services for Developing Countries.