“If personal meaning, in this cheer leader society, lies in success, then failure must threaten identity itself.”

I’m tired to the death. The flute has faded away. He sits on the bed beside her, a little numb. I couldn’t make it. I just couldn’t make it, Linda.

Counterintuitively, The Trump Vladislav Surkov Talking Points which of course always feature George Soros are strangely ineffective and a little like a receding tide.

When Alexei Navalny’s two-hour video about a palace he alleged was Vladimir Putin’s hit 100m views on YouTube, you could see that the Russian president was rattled.

A little more than a week later, oligarch Arkady Rotenberg was wheeled out to take the flak, saying it was his home — the imperial eagles, nautical exclusion zone and security service presence seem to tell another story, though.

Protests, despite widespread arrests, are continuing. The eagles appear to be a copy of those on the Winter Palace in St Petersburg: and look what happened to that.

History suggests that leaders have a blind spot for quite how such opulent vanity projects can irk. 

Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu demolished a swath of Bucharest to build his extravagant Palace of the Parliament but was executed before it was decorated.

Saddam Hussein was alleged to have 100 palaces in Iraq. The scale of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich’s place was given away by the zoo and replica naval galleon.

Former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe’s palace in Harare was built to resemble the White House but, of course, bigger and with a bigger pool. 

Former Kazakh ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev’s Ak Orda palace also mimics the US president’s pad, but bigger and with a dome and mirror glass. 

President Erdogan’s 1,000-room Ak Saray Palace in Ankara is bigger than Versailles.

Much is usually made of the contents of these palaces: the garish furnishings and gold toilets, the crystal balustrades, the huge portraits of the dear leaders on white stallions. 

But style is personal. There is no reason we should mock dictators for their taste (albeit it’s odd that they all seem to have the same taste).

Instead, we might look to why they seek to build these behemoths in the first place. In their almost invariably neoclassical style, slightly Frenchified, always looking to Versailles (without, somehow, recalling how that ended) — they are a response to uncertainty and anxiety, to a lack of being rooted in legitimacy.

Their scale exerts a presence on the landscape, an image of power extending into infinity, an attempt to inscribe their status into time and space. They tend to resemble hotels, which are grander than even the biggest houses.

The games rooms and aqua-discos, the casinos, theatres, strip clubs and ice-hockey rinks (which all appear in Putin’s alleged palace) are conjured up to fill the empty space. 

But there are few friends with whom to play poker or watch a pole dancer with because dictators live an isolated existence, paranoid and lonely.

For dictators, there is no separation between home and work, everything is work and that work is the creation of an image and intimidation. 

Former President Trump’s property branding is an extension of this neediness. His impeccable dictator-chic taste has often been noted: the pseudo-Versailles fittings and so on. His anti-democratic inclinations were foretold in his interiors.

If the exteriors are French classical, the interiors are catalogues of kitsch; a cornucopia of inlaid side tables and ornate sofas, exotic animal sculptures, the huge TVs and chandeliers and acres of marble (Ceausescu’s palace had, allegedly, 1m sq ft of marble and 3,500 tons of crystal). 

The palace becomes a feat of consumption, sometimes overwhelming the nation’s finances.

To fill the rooms takes dozens of flunkies scrolling the web to find appropriate fittings. The project becomes one of sheer accumulation. 

Approbation tends to fall on the gilded and monogrammed furniture, the pools and the menageries, but sometimes it is the most banal fittings that reveal the most: protesters brandishing gold-sprayed toilet brushes (referring to the €700 models Navalny picked out in his video) in the streets hit where it hurts — the average Russian wage is just over €500 a month.

Viruses change all the time. As they copy themselves and jump from host to host, they make mistakes in this copying process, called mutations. 

Sometimes those mutations give the virus important advantages that help it dominate other forms of the virus.

This new flavor, or variant, of the coronavirus found in Manaus — called P.1 — had 17 key changes, compared to the original.

One of these, the N501Y mutation, is also present in the variant first identified in the U.K., which has made the virus more contagious and caused another surge in cases there. It seems to help the virus bind more easily to doors on our cells called ACE2 receptors.

The other big change was the E484K mutation, which swaps a negatively charged amino acid for a positively charged one. That change makes it more difficult for our antibodies — which tend to prefer negatively charged targets — to latch on, like changing the polarization of a magnet.

"It effectively destroys the binding site," says John Moore, the Weill Cornell Medical College professor.

"This is likely to make it difficult for antibodies elicited by the old variant to bind to the new variant," says Penny Moore, PhD, who studies virus-host dynamics at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa.

Antibodies are y-shaped proteins that are created by the immune system to find and hunt down foreign invaders. They are custom-built in response to each specific threat the body encounters.

When a person makes antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, either because they’ve been vaccinated or have already caught the virus, the body makes an army of these soldiers. 

After the invader is driven off, some of these antibodies, and the body’s memory of how to make them, remain so they can quickly be re-created if they are ever needed again.

E484K is called an escape mutation because it helps the virus escape this standing army. With this mutation, the virus can slip past our immune defenses and make us sick.

RaTG13, identified in 2016 and the most likely contender identified thus far, is a bat coronavirus which shares 96% of its genome with SARS-CoV-2 [2,3]. 

Two primary factors, however, have led the scientific community to conclude that humans were initially infected by a virus that circulates in a second intermediate host species.

First, estimated mutation rates deduced from observations in humans suggests RaTG13 shared a common ancestor with SARS-CoV-2 between 25 and 65 years ago [2]. 

This timeline is incongruent with SARS-CoV-2’s emergence approximately 1 year ago and low genetic diversity observed across the initial viral sequences obtained from humans [2].

The use of chimeras is significant given that Bayesian phylogenetic and phylodynamic data integration would require the common ancestor of the entire virus population to have existed earlier than the MRCA of the virus sample in order for timing estimates to be accurately made [4]. 

This point is underscored by the fact that RNA viruses with narrow host ranges, including SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13, evolve quickly after blind serial passage in vitro and in vivo, a process relied upon to promote adaptation to new host species and also required for the development of animal models

If we are to re-evaluate our assumptions in modeling the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2, we must also consider single nucleotide variants (SNVs) and their impact on presumed rates of evolution. 

SNVs are acquired in RNA viruses, including coronaviruses, at a rate 103–107-times greater per nucleotide copied than DNA viruses [10,11]. 

During replication SNVs are purged or retained resulting in the formation of quasi-species with greater fitness than that of the parent or ‘master’ sequence [11]. 

This increase in fitness is accounted for by the acquisition of mutations across SNVs, which result in selection, competition and genetic drift acting upon the entire viral ‘swarm’ [11]. 

Frequently present in recombinant coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13, quasi-species allow for either the evolution of the ‘master’ consensus sequence or the entirety of its mutant spectrum [10,11,15]. 

The optional duality of these simultaneous processes and corresponding outcomes allows for either stasis or rapid evolution in the observed consensus sequence (10-4 substitutions per site per year versus 10-1–10-2 substitutions per site per year) [10,11]. 

It follows, therefore, that the calculation of the nonsynonymous to synonymous (dN/dS) substitution rate ratio of RNA in the phylogenetic analysis should account for these factors, where appropriate [15]. 

Moreover, SNVs serve as a reminder that observed stasis does not necessarily equal a mutation rate lower than the RNA genome replication rate, nor does rapid evolution imply higher-than-average mutation rates [10,11]. 

The interplay of the phenomena discussed thus far, namely the effect of environmental and host factors in combination with the cellular and subcellular processes taking place dependent on the virus being studied, are best illustrated in MA15, a mouse-adapted strain of SARS-CoV. 

On initial infection with SARS-CoV-1, wild-type mice were found not to express the same SARS-CoV infection phenotypes seen in humans [12–14]. 

Following 15 passages of SARS-CoV in the respiratory tract of young BALB/c mice, the mice developed disease phenotypes similar to humans [12]. 

The development of the MA15 mouse model, therefore, demonstrates both the results of immune senescence and the amplification of pathogen phenotype in the process of developing relevant animal models.

In summary, to fully understand the origins of SARS-CoV-2 we must adjust our operating assumptions. 

First and foremost, the scope of hosts must include those where serial passage has taken place or is likely to occur, even if they are not naturally occurring as is the case of knockout mice with human ACE2 receptors. 

Second, we must explore the effect of both host types on the corresponding processes occurring at cellular and subcellular levels in viruses and environmental factors including population size and fitness of the animal hosts themselves.

Uganda’s 2021 presidential election yielded more confusion than clarity following a violent runup, an internet shutdown, and a host of voting irregularities. 

What is clear is that popular support for the long-ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) has diminished dramatically.

Officially, Uganda’s Electoral Commission (EC) declared President Yoweri Museveni the winner of the January 14 election with 53 percent of the first-round vote. 

This outcome would extend Museveni’s 35-year rule for a sixth term.

The song has taken on a life of its own on social media with the #DemLootChallenge, with Zimbabweans videoing themselves dancing to the song or making their own versions.

“It’s the power of music as a tool and medium to deliver messages that relate to people and livelihood,” said music critic Benjamin Nyandoro, explaining the song’s impact.

Just 12% of Japanese told pollsters they thought their lives would improve over the following 15 years, compared with 78% of Kenyans. Nigerians and Senegalese were even more upbeat.

The pandemic has made it harder to be sunny. When covid-19 first struck, a lot of pundits thought Africans might be spared the worst, because so many are young or work on the land (and would thus be little affected by lockdowns). 

Yet it now looks as if the virus will leave more lasting scars in Africa than elsewhere. 

Whereas rich countries can hope for a rapid economic rebound as they vaccinate their people, Africa is years away from jabbing enough to achieve general immunity. 

The imf predicts it will be the slowest-growing large region this year. 

Repeated waves of infection will also disrupt the schooling of millions, putting at risk the educational and demographic trends that are among Africa’s best reasons to be hopeful.

Optimism about Africa began before the pandemic, with a long commodities boom in the years to 2014, which fuelled rapid economic growth. 

Confirmed: 3 656 793 (+ 13742)

Actives: 394 919 (-1693)

Deaths: 94 743 (+ 527)

Recoveries: 3 164 653 (+ 14908)

Officially, Tanzania is the only country in the world that has no active cases of Covid-19. 

Even in New Zealand, the tiny, remote island nation which has set the gold standard for how to respond to the pandemic, there were nine new infections this week.

But Tanzania has not recorded a single new case of the virus since May 2020.

The virus “cannot survive in the body of Christ,” he said.

Tanzania’s caseload remains frozen on 509 cases and 21 deaths in its 58-million population, as it was on May 9 last year. 

Meanwhile neighbouring Kenya, population 52-million, is on 101,000 cases and 1,769 deaths.

Over the course of three days this week, The Continent visited four of the biggest hospitals in the city. 

All were trying to take the basic precautions necessary to prevent the spread of the virus – hand-washing booths have been set up, face masks are mandatory, and hand-shaking is forbidden – although compliance from visiting families is low.

And there are many visiting families, because beds in the intensive care units are full of patients on oxygen.

This includes diagnoses. Doctors are forbidden from writing Covid-19 on patient records or death certificates.

Instead, they write “acute pneumonia”.

The downturn in economic activity is expected to cost the continent at least $115bn in output losses and to push 40m people into poverty, reversing at least five years of progress in that regard.

Kenya’s restaurant and accommodation sector shrank 83.2% in Q2 and 57.9% in Q3 while the education sector dipped 56% in Q2 and 42% in Q3.

Aly-Khan Satchu, CEO of Nairobi-based investment advisory firm Rich Management, says that agriculture has been a “silver bullet” for Kenya’s economy, saving it from an “asymmetric downside spiral”.

The agricultural sector grew by 1.3% more than in 2019, backed by increases in tea production and exports of fruit and sugar.

Satchu, however, believes that the estimated growth of 6.9% by the World Bank in 2021 is “seriously wide of the mark” due to a tourism sector that will not recover even with the vaccine.

Kenya’s debt to GDP ratio, which rose from 61.9% at the end of 2019 to 69.2% in August 2020, is also expected to put the brakes on economic recovery.

Rest of east African countries demonstrate resilience

Meanwhile, economies of other countries in the region – Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania – have remained resilient amidst coronavirus pandemic.

Latest statistics from the finance ministry shows that Uganda’s economy grew by 2.9 % in FY 2019/20, which is lower than 6.8 % recorded in FY 2018/19.

It is also projected that in the FY 2020/21 economic growth will be in the range of 2% to 3% and is expected to improve further to between 4 % and 5 % in FY 2021/22.

Rwanda’s economy is projected to contract 0.2% this year but will recover next year to grow 5.7%, the International Monetary Fund.  The east African nation’s economy grew 9.4% in the previous year.