Shakespeare lived his entire life in the shadow of bubonic plague. On April 26, 1564, in the parish register of Holy Trinity Church, in Stratford-upon-Avon, the vicar, John Bretchgirdle, recorded the baptism of one “Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere.” 

A few months later, in the same register, the vicar noted the death of Oliver Gunne, an apprentice weaver, and in the margins next to that entry scribbled the words “hic incipit pestis” (here begins the plague). 

On that occasion, the epidemic took the lives of around a fifth of the town’s population. 

By good fortune, it spared the life of the infant William Shakespeare and his family.

Such outbreaks did not rage on forever. With the help of strict quarantines and a change in the weather, the epidemic would slowly wane, as it did in Stratford, and life would resume its normal course. 

But, after an interval of a few years, in cities and towns throughout the realm, the plague would return. It generally appeared on the scene with little or no warning, and it was terrifyingly contagious. 

Victims would awaken with fever and chills. A feeling of extreme weakness or exhaustion would give way to diarrhea, vomiting, bleeding from the mouth, nose, or rectum, and telltale buboes, or swollen lymph nodes, in the groin or armpit. 

Death, often in great agony, would almost inevitably follow.

"People need to be realistic about the activity," Dutton said. 

"There is militarisation of bases across the region. Obviously, there is a significant amount of activity and there is an animosity between Taiwan and China."

On Friday, Taiwan's top military brass gathered in secure rooms within the fortified walls of the sprawling ministry of defence to prepare for war with China.

Computer screens in front of them likely displayed the island nation's F-16 fighter jets taking to the skies, precision-guided cruise missiles blasting China’s west coast ports, and its Tuo Chiang-class corvettes, dubbed “aircraft carrier killers,” deployed to pick off high value targets in the Taiwan Strait. 

But outside the gated compound all was quiet. Welcome to Taiwan's virtual war room, where decorated generals and officers this week are being tested against the most chilling scenarios – from a full-scale invasion to cyberattacks and blockades of critical infrastructure.  

The highly classified annual “Han Kuang” military drills come under the shadow of very real threats from Taiwan's hostile superpower neighbour. 

Recent months have seen an uptick in warmongering rhetoric from Beijing matched by intensifying air force and naval activity around the island 110 miles off the Chinese coast.

China’s Air Force has made sorties into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone on a near daily basis since last September, hitting a record high of 25 fighters, including nuclear capable bombers, on April 12.

But Rupert Hammond-Chambers, president of the US-Taiwan business council, said he did not foresee an impending “D-Day-style” invasion.

Kitsch Liao, a Taiwan defence analyst, said this week’s drills – which pit joint staff members against a hypothetical enemy “red team” of advisers and retired officers - will be key to training wartime decision-makers and predicting the pressures of battle.

But despite its military dominance, China’s forces in recent memory have rarely been put to the test on the battlefield. 

“The main factor that imposes caution on the Chinese is that they don’t know how well they are going to perform,” said Ms Mastro.

First, “Survival is the primary need of civilization.” 

Second, “Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.” 

Third, “chains of suspicion” and the risk of a “technological explosion” in another civilization mean that in space there can only be the law of the jungle. 

In the words of the book’s hero, Luo Ji:

The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost ... trying to tread without sound ... 

The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — 

there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people ... any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out.

Kissinger is often thought of (in my view, wrongly) as the supreme American exponent of Realpolitik. But this is something much harsher than realism. This is intergalactic Darwinism.

Blofeld: Kronsteen, you are sure this plan is foolproof?

Kronsteen: Yes it is, because I have anticipated every possible variation of counter-move.

Politics therefore suffers from a surfeit of narcissists.

The Virus remains an exogenous uncertainty that is still not resolved though all the virologists who have metastasized into vaccinologists will have you believe its all sunlit uplands from here. 

Glorious sunrise at the Borana conservancy @nickdimbleby @JamboMagazine

Why do we need to correctly count all covid deaths?

To spread doom and gloom for the sake of it? No.

Coz it's an important tool for epidemiologists? Not only that.

To deal with a problem we must first understand how bad it is..

And because it's vital for our collective memory.

“It can be said with pride, India . . . defeated Covid-19 under the able, sensible, committed and visionary leadership of Prime Minister Modi . . . The party unequivocally hails its leadership for introducing India to the world as a proud and victorious nation in the fight against Covid.” 

Those were the words of a resolution passed by India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party, just a few weeks ago in February.

But now India is reeling from a surge in cases. Hospitals are running out of oxygen and acute-care beds. 

Mass cremations are taking place in makeshift facilities. 

Heart-rending pictures of suffering are being broadcast around the world. 

Surveys of mortuaries suggest that the number of Covid-19 deaths may be two to five times higher than the official figure of around 2,000 a day.

The pandemic punishes hubris. Narendra Modi is not the first world leader to have paid the price for acting too slowly — or declaring victory too early.

In China, where the virus originated, Xi Jinping government’s first disastrous reaction was to suppress bad news coming out of Wuhan. 

In the US, Donald Trump, then president, repeatedly predicted that the virus would miraculously disappear. 

In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro addressed rallies of anti-lockdown protesters. 

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson locked down the country too late. 

The EU messed up the purchase of vaccines.

But the Modi government has made some distinctive and disastrous errors. Having called the end of the crisis too early, the Indian government opened up too fast. 

Driven by a desire to win the crucial state of West Bengal, the BJP staged mass election rallies. 

Modi declared himself “elated” by a large crowd that turned out to hear him speak a few days ago, even as Covid-19 cases soared. 

The Kumbh Mela, a religious festival that allows millions of pilgrims to converge on a single town, was allowed to go ahead and even promoted by the Hindu nationalist BJP.

The Indian government failed to use the decline in infection after the first wave to prepare properly for a second wave. 

Emergency oxygen supplies were clearly too low. Despite the fact that India is the world’s largest producer of vaccines of all sorts, the government was woefully slow to place orders from local manufacturers. 

It also slowed the approval of proven foreign vaccines for Covid-19, such as the BioNTech/Pfizer jab, while promoting a more experimental Indian-designed vaccine.

National pride played a part in India’s willingness to keep exporting vaccines, even as domestic supply lagged behind. 

The Indian government has promoted the idea that the country is the “pharmacy to the world”. 

Geopolitical rivalry with China, which is using vaccine diplomacy to win global influence, was a background factor. 

Delhi’s willingness to export vaccines to the world also contrasted favourably with the lack of exports from the US and UK. 

But the Indian government has now banned vaccine exports. It is also speeding up the approval of foreign vaccines.

Modi went into this crisis with sky-high poll ratings, but is clearly vulnerable to a backlash. 

Having centralised power for many years, he now seems to be shifting the burden of responsibility for dealing with Covid-19 on to state governments.

India’s plight has worldwide implications. There is still a tendency in the west to treat the pandemic as a series of national crises in which countries compete to see who can deal with the virus better. 

But this is an interconnected global crisis. 

As Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization puts it, Covid-19 is an international fire and, “if you hose only one part of it, the rest will keep burning”. 

Eventually, the fire is likely to spread once again, reigniting in places where it was thought to be extinguished.

There is already cause for concern that the UK was too slow to introduce stringent quarantine measures for passengers arriving from India. 

That is particularly dangerous, given the emergence of new variants of the virus in India that may be more transmissible and vaccine resistant.

Getting medical help to India is now both a humanitarian and a pragmatic necessity for the outside world, which is beginning to respond. 

For the US, it may also be a geopolitical necessity, given that America regards India as a crucial ally in its growing rivalry with China. 

The Biden administration’s refusal, so far, to allow the emergency export of vaccines to India is feeding anti-American sentiment in the country, which may not be offset by airlifts of ventilators and other equipment.

The outside world should also guard against the kind of complacency that was prevalent in India until recently. 

The fact that case numbers are falling and vaccination rates are rising in Britain could easily create a dangerous relaxation, similar to the one that India went through a couple of months ago. 

A recent article in The Times proclaimed that “Britain could feel like paradise this summer.”

The lesson of India is to guard against premature celebration or hubris. 

Any improvement in the coronavirus situation should be used as an opportunity to prepare for future waves and to help the international fight against the pandemic. 

India will not be the last country to witness a tragic resurgence of Covid-19.

Ibn Khaldun explained the intrinsic relationship between political leadership and the management of pandemics in the pre-colonial period in his book Muqaddimah 

Historically, such pandemics had the capacity to overtake “the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration” and, in the process, challenged their “power and curtailed their [rulers’] influence...” 

Rulers who are only concerned with the well-being of their “inner circle and their parties” are an incurable “disease”. 

States with such rulers can get “seized by senility and the chronic disease from which [they] can hardly ever rid [themselves], for which [they] can find no cure”

―They fancied themselves free, wrote Camus, ―and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.

―In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences.

A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.

But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they have taken no precautions

Euro 1.2070

Dollar Index 90.972

Japan Yen 108.31

Swiss Franc 0.91569

Pound 1.3882

Aussie 0.7786

India Rupee 74.5935

South Korea Won 1111.10

Brazil Real 5.4368

Egypt Pound 15.6991

South Africa Rand 14.3056

Erdogan remains a limit short trading position.

He said, “Don’t get high on your ambitions. You won’t be able make money on the back of this nation. You won’t be able to make this nation kneel.” 

And then ‘’Even if they got dollars, we got ‘our people, our God’’’ [In the markets that is called a ‘’Hail Mary’’ pass]

We are getting closer and closer to the Virilian Tipping Point

“The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street''

Political leadership in most cases completely gerontocratic will use violence to cling onto Power but any Early Warning System would be warning a Tsunami is coming

To understand the roots of the insurgency in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province, one has to look at how Maputo, in pursuit of coal and gas wealth, has dispossessed communities, banished them from their home ecosystems and stripped them of their economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, as well as human dignity.

Tomás Vieira Mário, a well-known veteran Mozambican journalist and civil society leader, likens the root causes of the brutal conflict in Cabo Delgado province to fields of straw. 

His point is that abysmal governance had drained Mozambique’s central and northern regions dry as hay, making them prone to fires (conflict). 

Mário’s allegory begs the questions: how were these regions transformed into fields of straw? What are the material conditions that constitute the straw? And how did they come into being?

The Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (Mistra) has published Land in South Africa: Contested Meanings and Nation Formation, a book about connections between land governance and economic, social, and political conditions in southern Africa. 

In the book, 13 authors sound the alarm about how various aspects of land governance transform southern Africa into dangerous fields of straw.

My chapter, titled “Land, Rights and Dignity”, documents this process in Mozambique, where the current regime of land governance encourages the scramble for resources in the name of economic development — often without human rights due diligence, just compensation, and free, prior and informed consent — a prolific production of fields of straw.

Structural conditions

The transformation of large parts of Mozambique into fields of straw occurs within structural conditions of possibility, which negate the Frelimo-led government’s legitimacy. 

These structural conditions operate as centrifugal forces with the real possibility of throwing the parasitic Maputo-based political class off-balance.

Part of the colonial legacy, the referred structural conditions, include: 

the vast majority of the population (78.4%) is concentrated in the central and northern regions; 

poverty is overwhelmingly concentrated in rural areas; the central and northern regions are overwhelmingly rural; 

mineral resources are by far concentrated in the central and northern regions; 

two thirds (66.6%) of the population lives in rural areas; 

the central and northern regions are strongholds of the opposition; 

the asymmetric regional economic, social and political (im)balance favours the southern region at the expense of central and northern regions; 

and the extraction of resources from central and northern ecosystems benefits a small political elite tucked away 2,500km down south.

From Frelimo’s standpoint, governance entails balancing these centrifugal forces on a tightrope. 

In Maputo, governance is understood as ensuring the economic, social, cultural, and political docility of the central and northern populations while amassing personal wealth and practising grotesque conspicuous consumption enabled through the exploitation of resources from the central and northern ecosystems.

Ecosystems governance

To better appreciate the central and northern regions’ transformation into fields of straw, which are prone to tensions, conflict and violence, let us substitute ecosystems governance for land governance. 

The UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment describes ecosystems as dynamic complexes of plants, animals, microorganisms and inanimate material and elements interacting with one another, forming a functional unit.

Ecosystems can be comprehensively transformed and systematically managed landscapes (for example, through agricultural land and urbanisation activities); they can be relatively intact (for example, untouched natural forests or wetlands). 

Ecosystems give and preserve life through (a) food, water, timber, medicinal plants, and fibre supply; (b) floods, disease, waste, water and air quality regulation; (c) recreational, aesthetic, identity, and spiritual benefits; and (d) soil formation, photosynthesis and nutrient cycling support.

Self-preservation depends on the flows of ecosystem services.

Due to economic and social exclusion, communities in the central and northern ecosystems are barely buffered against environmental changes through technology and public services. 

During the four decades of independence, the central and northern regions experienced weak and ineffective governance, little investment in public services and infrastructure including education, health, housing, water and sanitation systems, roads and bridges, and internet and telecommunications networks.

The effects of this neglect include poor performance in all the three-dimensional human development indicators: health (child mortality, nutrition), education (years of schooling, enrolment), and living standards (water, sanitation, electricity, cooking fuel, floor, assets), and unemployment (notably of youth). 

Such an economic and social vacuum ensured that communities relied on their home ecosystems for their economic, social, cultural and environmental necessities.

The discovery of mineral resources changed this time-honoured dynamic — the central and northern ecosystems rapidly attracted both the government and mining, oil and gas companies. 

Communities became a nuisance that stood in the way of economic progress. They had to be evicted from their home ecosystems through misinformation, manipulation, deception, intimidation and threats.

Tete and Cabo Delgado

To illustrate these regions’ transformation into fields of straw, let us consider the expulsion of communities from their home ecosystems in Tete and Cabo Delgado provinces.

Tete province has a little over 2.6-million people, most of whom depend on their home ecosystems services for survival. 

Yet, as the map of coal mining projects shows, the government licenced 61% of Tete to mining companies. 

To do this, the government dispossessed communities, banishing them from their home ecosystems, stripping them of their economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights, as well as their human dignity.

Contrary to the grandiose promises, dispossession and mining aggravated impoverishment in the province. 

Tete is a mind-boggling irony — it is the energy capital of southern Africa as it supplies power to Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and coal to the international markets.

 Yet, of Tete’s nearly 500,000 households, only 11% are connected to the national power grid for lighting — the majority live in darkness and shocking poverty.

In Palma, the northernmost district of Cabo Delgado province, lies the Afungi ecosystem, home to farming and fishing communities for centuries. 

Here, Anadarko (now Total) has been building infrastructure for the logistics of gas, people and machines. 

The offshore gas pumping would require a network of underwater pipelines to transport the gas into the liquefaction plant on land.

Such an undertaking would also entail traffic of ships travelling between the offshore gas wells and the liquefaction plant on land. 

Afungi and Mocimboa da Praia’s coastal ecosystems, vital for local communities’ survival for centuries, would now be off-limits.

Palma residents tell the tale of how eviction from the Afungi ecosystem took place through misinformation, deception, intimidation, threats and aggression. 

Without free, prior, and informed consent, illiterate peasants were conned into signing the forfeiture of their home ecosystem, only to learn much later what they had signed.

Working with and on behalf of gas companies, government officials corner a village leader and ask him, isn’t it a good idea that the government bring economic development such as foreign investments, jobs, roads, hospitals, and schools to Palma? 

When the village leader agreed it was a good idea, the officials would order him on the spot to sign a document he could not read. 

With such contempt for core human decency, Palma communities lost their most valuable economic, social, cultural and environmental assets (their ecosystems) to foreign investors.

On 24 March, the armed group locally known as “al-Shabaab” attacked the town of Palma, and for the first time, killed white expatriates, sending shockwaves across the globe. 

What is conveniently forgotten is that years before the alleged foreign radical preacher came to town with his matchbox, the Maputo-based political elite had completed all the necessary groundwork for the preacher’s convenience: the transformation of Cabo Delgado into fields of straw.

All it would take was a few sparks of the preacher’s deviant religious ideology to ignite the fire in a grotesque distortion of Islam. DM

I said "Mozambique could be the next Qatar." as we stuffed ourselves with wonderfully flavour some tiger prawns.

Then I noticed that Credit Suisse and VTB sold some ‘’Tuna’’ Bonds on behalf of Mozambique. The story around these bonds was opaque.

Ematum’s results pointed to the fleet catching just $450,000 of tuna a year, compared with sales of $18-million forecast at that stage of its life in a 2013 feasibility study circulated by the government.

Further loans were uncovered spanning not only Empresa Moçambicana de Atum (Ematum), but other companies Proindicus and Mozambique Asset Management (MAM). The Total is around $2 billion.

Africa Confidential reported that Chancellor Angela Merkel asked President Nyusi when he met her in Berlin on 19 April 2016, ‘Where is the money?’ and also, ‘Are you in charge?’

If you are mortgaging the future, you need to make sure can first afford the mortgage payments and second that the investments you are making are going to provide a meaningful return on your investment

Total’s termination of contracts suggests that resuming LNG projects in the area is unlikely, at least within the next year. 

Despite the government declaring a 25km-radius special security zone around the project, insurgents were still able to carry out multiple attacks well within the area. 

In the most recent Palma attacks, they were evidently better prepared and better coordinated than before, so going ahead with operations now faces new challenges which need to be taken into careful consideration. 

The global focus on the alleged IS involvement, rather than on the local root causes of the jihadist movement (poverty, lack of socio-economic development) in Cabo Delgado, makes it easier for the government to ignore the policy failings and the corruption that drive the insurgency. 

Additionally, its refusal to accept international intervention suggests that it is still trying to hide the realities of the security situation in the area, which has caused embarrassment in the past. 

Mozambique’s goal was to become a gas exporter by 2024, but LNG projects, such as those planned by Total and Exxon Mobil, will fail to launch in such an environment. 

As such, the government’s response to the insurgency needs to go beyond military intervention and also include socio-economic development. 

Accordingly, security risks in Cabo Delgado will remain elevated over the foreseeable future.

Then, last week, on the 27th of August, Aboud Rogo Mohammed was shot on the always busy Bamburi Road, not far from Pirates. This proved the spark that ignited a tinderbox

My concern remains that what appear like uncorrelated spikes and paroxysms of violence conflate, become more broad based and amplify.

South Africa's MTN has submitted one of the bids, while the other came from a consortium of Kenya's Safaricom (SCOM.NR), Vodafone (VOD.L) and Vodacom (VODJ.J), Brook Taye, the senior advisor, told Reuters.

The United Kingdom's CDC Group and Japan's Sumitomo Corporation are also part of the consortium, the ministry of finance said in a tweet.

Brook told Reuters that it should not take more than a week for the winners of the licences to be announced.