Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.

Cameroon launches routine malaria shots in global milestone

Summary: Yesterday, Cameroon launched the world’s first-ever routine vaccination program for malaria, kicking-off an effort that’s expected to save the lives of tens of thousands of children across Africa each year.

Context: This is the culmination of a forty-year effort that includes the distribution of bed nets and the application of a malaria vaccine that has been approved by the World Health Organization, and which has proved successful in recent trials; another 19 countries across the continent are planning to roll out similar programs in 2024, and they aim to vaccinate about 6.6 million children across the involved nations through 2025; about half a million children under the age of five die of malaria each year in Africa, and insecticide resistance in local mosquito populations are amplifying the problem—so this program is arriving just in time, and the approval of a second vaccine that will become available later this year has eased concerns about potential vaccine supply squeezes.

—Reuters

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NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars

Summary: After an unexpected communications outage over the weekend, the tiny Mars-based helicopter Ingenuity reestablished contact with its car-sized rover home-base, Perseverance, in turn reconnecting with its NASA handlers on Earth.

Context: Ingenuity was initially intended to serve as a test-vehicle, allowing NASA engineers to experiment with expanding their exploration capabilities using flight in the less-dense-than-on-Earth Martian atmosphere; the helicopter, which is about 1.6 feet or half a meter tall, was built to survive five flights, but this outage occurred on flight 72, as it has followed in the footsteps of NASA’s Mars rovers in massively outliving its anticipated expiration date, having covered more than 10 miles or about 17 kilometers of the Martian surface since it arrived in 2021.

—Phys.org

Ahead of New Hampshire primary, underdog Nikki Haley gets one-on-one race with Donald Trump

Summary: Over the weekend, Republican presidential primary contender and governor of Florida Ron DeSantis withdrew from the race, leaving former South Carolina governor and former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley to face off with Trump in today’s New Hampshire primary.

Context: DeSantis’ pullout wasn’t a huge surprise, as his platform was almost a carbon-copy of Trump’s, so there wasn’t a hugely compelling reason for most Republican voters to choose him over the former president who retains the lion’s share of his party’s support; Haley, in contrast, has carved-out a more traditional conservative platform, a bit like the one Republican candidates favored before Trump upended things in 2016, and though she’s still not expected to win this primary or the Republican nomination, there’s a chance she could outperform expectations in this and the South Carolina primary in February, doing well enough that she can then justify continuing to oppose Trump in the lead-up to the election in November.

—The Wall Street Journal

The daily death toll in the Gaza Strip has been cut in half over the past month—a grim hint of progress in a conflict that has reportedly led to the deaths of more than 25,000 Gaza residents at the hands of Israeli troops and airstrikes, the majority of those killed civilians.

—The New York Times

36,571.80

Share average achieved by Japan’s Nikkei Index on Monday—a level not seen since February 1990—before dropping slightly by the end of the day.

Japan’s stock market has been on a tear, of late, despite all sorts of issues with the larger Asian market and long-term stagnation across much of Japan’s economy that relatively recently has been showing signs of renewed vigor.

—Reuters

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