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  The 2020 Valencia Marathon winners Peres Jepchirchir and Vincent Kipchumba have been included in Kenya’s marathon team for the Tokyo Olympic Games. Making the announcement Tuesday, Athletics Kenya senior vice president, Paul Mutwii, disclosed that Kenya will be represented by four athletes each in the men and women’s categories. Jepchirchir, the World Half Marathon champion and Half Marathon World record holder, now joins World Marathon champion, Ruth Chepngétich, Marathon World record holder, Brigid Kosgei and multiple World champion and 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic 5,000m gold medalist and 10,000m silver medalist, Vivian Cheruiyot. Kipchumba will team up with Olympic Marathon champion, Eliud Kipchoge, World Marathon bronze medallist, Amos Kipruto and 2019 Boston Marathon winner Lawrence Cherono. Four athletes, who were named as reserves in the original team that was named in January last year before the Tokyo Olympics were postponed owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, have b

Juja MP Francis Munyua has passed on, his family has confirmed. The lawmaker has battled brain cancer for more than three years. In September 2017, Munyua, who is fondly known as Wakapee was diagnosed with Stage 2 Brain Cancer. The diagnosis was accidental as he had shown no signs of illness. In a previous interview, the lawmaker said he was encouraged by his mother (who had battled brain cancer for 10 months) to undergo screening. The lawmaker spent seven weeks undergoing treatment in India in 2017. He spent most of last year battling the disease.  Wakapee lost his sister Cecelia Wambui, to Liver cancer in 2016. The father of four is the third lawmaker to die in the past week following the demise of Garissa Senator Yusuf Haji and Bonchari MP John Oroo on Monday last week. The Kenyan Parliament also lost Machakos Senator Boniface Mutinda Kabaka and MPs: Justus Murunga (Matungu) and James Mukwe (Kabuchai). The three by-elections are yet to be held.

  Kenya’s wildlife agency says two giraffes were electrocuted on Sunday when they walked into low-lying electric power transmission lines that pass through the Soysambu Conservancy in western Kenya. Trizer Mwakinya, head of communications at the Kenya Wildlife Service, said Monday that workers from the Kenya Power and Lighting Company “were on site” to rectify the problem. But conservationist Paula Kahumbu in tweets addressed to the power company and the wildlife agency said the power lines have been killing giraffes, vultures and flamingos. “Advice from experts was ignored. RIAs( Regulatory Impact Assessment) are notoriously poor on many development projects. Sad that it takes these kinds of deaths to wake some people up!” she said in a tweet. In an earlier tweet with a picture of two dead giraffes under an electric pole, Kahumbu said the two were of the Rothschild's giraffe species. The Kenya Wildlife Service says there are only 609 Rothschild's giraffes in th

  World Health Organisation (WHO) scientists tasked to investigate the origin of coronavirus in China have discovered that the virus outbreak was wider in Wuhan city in December 2019 than it was thought earlier. During their fact-finding mission in China, they established that dozen strains of the virus existed in Wuhan, sparking global debate over a new Covid-19 SARS-CoV-2 variant recently discovered in the UK, Brazil and South Africa. Health experts have warned that these viruses mutate and are known to be more contagious and transmissible. There are no studies that have proved the variants have any impact on vaccines efficacy. Remarkable progress has been made by global pharmaceutical giants towards developing Covid-19 vaccines. Last year, two leading vaccines Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have been approved and already administered across the world. This week on Monday, WHO approved AstraZeneca PLC’s vaccine for emergency use, paving way for vaccines shipments to the world’s poorest

  The Kenya-Uganda milk wars are back. Kenya is blocking imports of the milk to protect its local producers, who were being seriously undercut by the cheaper Ugandan imports. This milk thing is about something else. For that, we have to go back to Comrade Omwony Ojwok. At the time of his death on November 11, 2007, Omwony was State minister for Economic Monitoring, a job he held between 2001 and 2007, having been minister for Northern Rehabilitation between 1999 and 2001.  Before that, he headed the Uganda Aids Commission. And if you go even further back, Omwony was better known as one of the “Gang of Four” group of politicians (which included Dani Nabudere, Edward Rugumayo, and Yash Tandon) during the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF), the government that took over after the ouster of Idi Amin. Omwony fled back into exile after the UNLF was overthrown by its Military Council in August 1980 when Godfrey Binaisa was president. Paulo Muwanga was chairman of the Military Council, an

  Mars is the place to be this month. Two spacecraft have already entered orbit around the red planet: China's Tianwen-1 got there on Feb. 10 and, a day earlier, the United Arab Emirates made history, sliding the Al Amal spacecraft into Martian orbit and becoming just the fifth country to reach Earth's dusty, barren neighbor.  The first Arab interplanetary mission has snapped a couple of images of Mars during its journey so far, but nothing quite like what it delivered Sunday. From a distance of around 15,500 miles (25,000 kilometers), the probe's camera -- officially known as the Emirates eXploration Imager (EXI) -- captured a picturesque view of Mars as a yellowed semicircle against the black curtain of space. Some of Mars most famous features are visible in the image. Olympus Mons, the biggest volcano in the solar system peeks out at the terminator, where the sunlight wanes, while the three volcanoes of the Tharsis Montes dazzle under a mostly  dust-free  sky.