With no intensive care available in remote areas, many patients died on their way to city hospitals. Now rural medics are using tele-ICU systems to save lives • Photographs by Elke Scholiers for the Guardian Whenever an ambulance arrived with a critically ill patient, Dr R Mubarak’s heart would sink. His small country hospital in Bagepalli, like most rural government hospitals in India, had no intensive-care unit. Families had to take the patient, who was perhaps on the brink of death, on a two-hour drive to the general hospital in Bengaluru. “Often the patient came back in the same ambulance, dead. They never made it,” says Mubarak. “I knew I could be signing their death warrant by sending them but I had no choice.” Continue reading...

Government denies new cybersecurity measures responsible for up to 40% drop in internet speeds across the country For the free online tech skill classes advertised, there were hundreds of Facebook “likes” and in the end 1,500 people signed up. But on the first day last week, only a handful of those registered managed to log in to the live session. The internet was working at a snail’s speed. “We received hundreds of complaints,” says the course tutor, Wardah Noor, founder of the IT training firm XWave, based in Layyah, in the Pakistani province of Punjab. Continue reading...