MANY questions are swirling around the Rafale fighter aircraft deal especially in these politically charged times with various state elections already held or around the corner. There are even dark hints about skeletons in the cupboards. It is not the purpose of this column, and indeed beyond its capability with the information presently available in the public domain, to comment on possible skullduggery.

A GROUP of experts assembled by the Chilean judge investigating Pablo Neruda’s possible assassination gave its verdict. The cause of death given in the death certificate is certainly wrong; he definitely did not die of prostate cancer. The international forensic team found an unexplained and a virulent strain of golden staph bacteria in his exhumed body as a probable cause. Neruda was certainly murdered by the Pinochet regime in the Santa Maria Clinic in Santiago, though more forensic work is required to determine the actual cause of death.

THE appointment of Dr Soumya Swaminathan, director general of the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), as a deputy director general (DDG) of the World Health Organisation is a welcome development. She joins Jane Ellison of the UK as one of the two newly appointed DDGs and will be in overall charge of programmes, while Jane Ellison will be in charge of ‘corporate affairs’. The WHO elected Tedros Adhanom of Ethiopia as the new director general (DG) at the World Health Assembly in May 2017, to replace the outgoing incumbent, Dr Margaret Chan.

THE Bakhshali Manuscripts, a collection of 70 odd leaves of birch bark, containing a wealth of mathematical methods, have finally been dated. The oldest of the three samples tested was written as early as the 3rd-4th century, placing it almost five centuries earlier than where most scholars had placed the manuscripts. This makes the Bakhshali Manuscripts the oldest recorded use of a large dot, the precursor of our current form of zero. The other two fragments were dated as late 8th, and 10th century compositions, a gap of five to six centuries between the earliest one.