Mr Doto James, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Finance and Planning, and H.E. Roeland van de Geer, Head of the European Union Delegation to Tanzania and the East African Community, today have signed the Financing Agreement for a new budget support programme worth EUR 205 million (equivalent to TZS 486.9 billion). This is part of € 626 million grant [equivalent to TZS 1.5 trillion] that EU has allocated to Tanzania under the 11th EDF for the period 2014 – 2020 to support government budget as well as energy and sustainable agriculture sectors.

The "Tanzania Economic and Fiscal Governance Programme" will contribute to the effective implementation of the Second Five Year Development Plan (FYDP-II) of the United Republic of Tanzania (2016/2017-2020/2021), by providing direct financial support to the budget and ensuring that the necessary fiscal policies (i.e. policies in Domestic Revenue Mobilization, Public Expenditure Management and Accountability of public funds) are adopted and followed-through. Read more

The web's creator has attacked any UK plans to weaken encryption and promised to battle any moves by the Trump administration to weaken net neutrality. Sir Tim Berners-Lee was speaking to the BBC following the news that he has been given the Turing Award. It is sometimes known as the Nobel Prize of computing. Sir Tim said moves to undermine encryption would be a "bad idea" and represent a massive security breach. Home Secretary Amber Rudd has said there should be no safe space for terrorists to be able to communicate online. But Sir Tim said giving the authorities a key to unlock coded messages would have serious consequences. "Now I know that if you're trying to catch terrorists it's really tempting to demand to be able to break all that encryption but if you break that encryption then guess what - so could other people and guess what - they may end up getting better at it than you are," he said. Read more

The types of bacteria in your mouth may be linked to your risk of certain cancers. By studying the links between bacteria and cancer, scientists one day hope to be able to tell a person what his or her cancer risk is based on the bacteria present in his or her body, said Jiyoung Ahn, an associate professor of epidemiology at the New York University School of Medicine. Perhaps more important, Ahn said, these bacteria and microbes, collectively called the microbiome, could give people information about what they can do to lower their risk. Read more

NASA has launched a new website that will allow the public search and download out-of-this-world images, videos and audio files by keyword and metadata searches from NASA.gov. The NASA Image and Video Library website consolidates imagery spread across more than 60 collections into one searchable location. https://images.nasa.gov

NASA Image and Video Library allows users to search, discover and download a treasure trove of more than 140,000 NASA images, videos and audio files from across the agency’s many missions in aeronautics, astrophysics, Earth science, human spaceflight, and more. Users now can embed content in their own sites and choose from multiple resolutions to download. The website also displays the metadata associated with images. Read more

The world's first deep-sea mining operation will kick off in early 2019 when a Canadian firm, Nautilus Minerals Inc., lowers a trio of massive remote-controlled mining robots to the floor of the Bismarck Sea off the coast of Papua New Guinea in pursuit of rich copper and gold reserves. The machines, each the size of a small house, are equipped with rock-crushing teeth resembling the large incisors of a dinosaur. The robots will lumber across the ocean floor on mammoth treads, grinding and chewing the encrusted seabed, sending plumes of sediment into the surrounding waters and killing marine life that gets in their way. The smallest of the robots weighs 200 tons. "A lot of people don't realize that there are more mineral resources on the seafloor than on land," said Michael Johnston, CEO of Nautilus, by phone from the company's field office in Brisbane, Australia. "Technology has allowed us to go there". Read more

The vaccine consists of strands of genetic material known as messenger RNA, which are packaged into a nanoparticle that delivers the RNA into cells. Once inside cells, the RNA is translated into proteins that provoke an immune response from the host, but the RNA does not integrate itself into the host genome, making it potentially safer than a DNA vaccine or vaccinating with the virus itself. “It functions almost like a synthetic virus, except it’s not pathogenic and it doesn’t spread,” says Omar Khan, a postdoc at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and an author of the new study. “We can control how long it’s expressed, and it’s RNA so it will never integrate into the host genome.” This research also yielded a new benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of other Zika vaccine candidates, which could help others who are working toward the same goal. Read more

Scientists have long believed that the central amygdala, a structure located deep within the brain, is linked with fear and responses to unpleasant events. However, a team of MIT neuroscientists has now discovered a circuit in this structure that responds to rewarding events. In a study of mice, activating this circuit with certain stimuli made the animals seek those stimuli further. The researchers also found a circuit that controls responses to fearful events, but most of the neurons in the central amygdala are involved in the reward circuit, they report. “It’s surprising that positive-behavior-promoting subsets are so abundant, which is contrary to what many people in the field have been thinking,” says Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience and director of the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Read more

MAURITIUS based investors Alteo International plans to boost sugar production in Tanzania by increasing sugar estates under its subsidiary, TPC Limited and diversify investments to tourism. The Chief Executive Officer, Mr Patrick de Labauve, told Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa who visited the company in Mauritius yesterday that they planned to increase sugar production by establishing more sugar cane estates and venture into tourism to tap into its great potential.

According to a statement from Prime Minister’s Office, the Mauritius investors have asked the government to avail them with opportunity to invest in tourism sector in Kilimanjaro Region which has many tourists attractions including Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. Read more