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Morning
Africa
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Register and its all Free.
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Salt and micro-organisms create the perfect canvas for a flock of flamingos. Lake Magadi, Kenya. © Jie Fischer @africageo
Africa
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''You felt the land taking you back to what was there a hundred years ago, to what had been there always.”
Africa
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Sunrise over the Mara from a balloon. Maasai Mara, Kenya. © Sridaran Karthik @africageo
Africa
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“Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw....” Oglala Lakota Nation @WangCecillia
Misc.
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When in Wyoming:
“Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw....”
— Nicholas Black Elk of the Oglala Lakota Nation
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Superstition, murder and the mystery of Hong Kong’s ‘haunted’ houses @FT @TomHale_
Misc.
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The building is still recognisably a house, but no one could call it a home.
Through its narrow windows and across its deserted garden, there are few signs of life.
Its driveway is covered in leaves, although it is not autumn, and the roof is slowly shedding orange tiles. Unusually for Hong Kong, it has a chimney.
From this high up the Victoria Peak, the view takes in almost the entire territory.
In the distance, the skyscrapers of Kowloon shimmer eastward beneath a horizon of mountains.
From the west, the sea winds around neighbouring islands into the harbour, where the boats are so small that they look like toys.
Dragon Lodge, as the house is known, occupies some of the most valuable real estate on earth.
In 1997, the year that Britain handed Hong Kong over to China, it traded hands for HK$118m (about $15.3m at the time). But one day its last inhabitants moved out, and it has remained derelict ever since.
Confronted with this mystery, the internet has designated it one of the city’s most haunted houses. One rumour claims that construction workers refused to finish work on the site.
Other blogs are more gruesome, stating that Japanese soldiers occupied it during the second world war and decapitated several nuns there.
The current owners, faced with an onslaught of urban explorers, sealed off the premises with barbed wire.
But Lugard Road is a difficult place to ward off unwanted attention.
As well as a prime property location — the Chinese conglomerate HNA sold a site there in 2019 for HK$550m — it is also one of Hong Kong’s most picturesque walking trails.
As they pass, two hikers remark how “curious” it is that the house should be abandoned rather than let out.
This curiosity arises because, in Hong Kong, you would expect every inch of space to be occupied.
Despite the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and the waves of anti-government protests that started in 2019 — hundreds of thousands of British National Overseas (BNO) passport holders are expected to emigrate to the UK in the next few years — the real estate market is the most expensive in the world; and prices are increasing again.
Per square foot, the average cost of the territory’s luxury apartments rose 3.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2021 to HK$36,256, according to estate agency Savills.
There are, however, other factors at play.
Jia, a jogger from mainland China, says that there might be a few “ghost stories” about the house.
She lives on the Peak too and discussed it with her neighbour. He warned her of bad omens. “Whoever lived there,” he told her, “didn’t prosper.”
Superstition affects house prices
When one of Utpal Bhattacharya’s academic colleagues mentioned they were afraid to get out at certain subway stops in Hong Kong, he naturally assumed it was because of crime.
He did not assume it was because of haunted houses. “I said, ‘What? You really take this seriously?’” he recalls.
A US professor of finance at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Bhattacharya, originally from India, set about researching the impact such perceptions might have on real estate prices.
The result of that study, which tracked unnatural deaths, showed a striking effect. Not only do prices for “haunted” units in apartment blocks drop by about 20 per cent, but those nearby can be affected too: units on the same floor drop by 10 per cent, and those in the same block by 7 per cent.
In Hong Kong, many “haunted” sites are well-known and have developed their own urban legends, such as Dragon Lodge and Nam Koo Terrace, which is also reputed to have been occupied by the Japanese during the war.
But the city’s fascination with the subject is so strong that, when it comes to tragic incidents, legal precedents have been set.
A court case in 2001 found against an estate agent who had failed to inform a prospective buyer about the death of a four-year-old boy after he fell from the apartment balcony a year earlier.
Banks in Hong Kong take such incidents into account when valuing properties for mortgage lending. Local estate agents keep lists of them too, for those either avoiding or seeking them out.
“It’s a phenomenal opportunity,” says Asif Ghafoor, chief executive of Spacious, a property listing site.
His website’s haunted house filter gets more than 10,000 views a month.
The legal risk is significant because of potential reputational damage to the property — in the past, people have tried to bring down prices by starting rumours — so every incident on there can be linked back to newspaper articles.
“We’re not claiming we are a source of truth,” he says.
As with the coroners’ reports that Bhattacharya drew on, the list mainly consists of suicides and accidents. Agents tend to disclose such incidents.
Joyce, 30, from Hong Kong, went to view an apartment several years ago in the city’s mid-levels, halfway up the Peak, that seemed cheaper than neighbouring options.
The agent told her an apartment on the floor above her was haunted, as the result of a suspected suicide. “I just felt like, nah, I don’t want to live here,” she says.
For the undeterred buyer, reselling a “haunted” property could be difficult, Bhattacharya says, as the stigma isn’t erased by the change in ownership.
Foreigners are often seen as less susceptible to such superstitions, given their distance from traditional Chinese culture, but Bhattacharya also found anecdotal evidence of a 25 per cent hit to prices in the US, UK and Australia on homes that have been connected with murder and suicide in newspaper articles.
Ghafoor says he’s not aware of any formalised system of recording such incidents, like his, anywhere in the west, and suggests they are about “a form of residual trauma”.
He remembers a colleague who died in his early twenties; he wouldn’t want to live in his flat, he says, because “I’d be thinking of him”.
What happened at Dragon Lodge?
Gerard Blitz, born in 1951 and now living in the Philippines, remembers many things from his childhood at Dragon Lodge.
He remembers playing in the old Japanese war tunnels. He remembers Typhoon Wanda in 1962, which swept away the family’s bamboo greenhouse.
He remembers a policeman showing him the revolver he fired at the Kowloon riots of 1967, when the British put down an uprising.
But he does not remember a single ghost story about the house, and neither do his siblings, Francis and Julia.
Their mother was South African and their father was Dutch; he had been captured by the Japanese in Java during the war.
Later, he worked in the diamond trade and rented Dragon Lodge from someone Gerard remembers as a Chinese man called “Uncle Tom”.
The 1948 phone book for Hong Kong lists a Tom ML as a resident there.
The house, the lot for which appears to date from 1921 and was last bought in 2004 by a company called East Team International Development (Nominee) for HK$76m, is not on the Spacious database and — while clearly abandoned, with the interior covered in graffiti — it is unclear why.
The closest thing to an “incident” that Blitz can recall involves a young lawyer by the name of Wimbush, who lived in the flat beneath the garden in the 1960s.
In the 1980s, he was embroiled in the Carrian affair, a famous corporate scandal, and was found dead at the bottom of his swimming pool, at a different house, also on the Peak. It was ruled a suicide.
So why has it become thought of as haunted? One possibility is that ghost stories naturally attach themselves to empty homes.
And in Hong Kong, there is a surprising number of abandoned buildings — so many that Facebook groups have been set up devoted to them.
While abandonments are often associated with money laundering from the Chinese mainland, tradition may play an important role too.
One local expert in restoration, who asked to remain anonymous, says Chinese families often hang on to their parents’ flats after inheriting them, preferring to leave them empty out of ancestral respect rather than selling them.
Once a unit is abandoned, the person went on, the stories follow naturally.
A representative for the company that owns Dragon Lodge says there is, to his knowledge, no evidence for the execution of nuns during the war, and that the company plans to preserve the house rather than lease, rebuild or sell it.
They say it was built by a General Lung Wan, whose name contains the Chinese character for dragon.
Hong Kong heritage officials recently said they are reviewing a list of buildings for possible preservation, including Dragon Lodge.
Recent restorations include the Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts, formerly a police station, which the British built in the heart of the city.
But the impulse to preserve can conflict with private ownership. The government tried and failed to save Ho Tung Gardens, which was demolished in 2013.
Built in 1927 by Robert Hotung, who became the richest man in Hong Kong, it was the first building where a Chinese person had lived on the Peak after British colonial law restricted it to Europeans in 1904.
Restoration is part of the city’s understanding of its identity, the expert says, which was important because “we still don’t know who we are”.
In a city obsessed with its future under the Chinese government, hauntings are a way of clinging to the past.
Remnants of a moribund empire
There is little concrete evidence of what — if anything — happened at Dragon Lodge during the war, and it is difficult to ascertain the prosperity of its previous owners, most of which are listed as companies.
But Peter van der Voort, 72, a retired museum curator in Australia, grew up in the house next door to Dragon Lodge, and has a theory about how the ghost stories started.
Like his neighbour Gerard Blitz, van der Voort used to run amok in their corner of the Peak.
He would “play Tarzan” in the jungle or go to the rifle range. But in the decade after the war, there was danger everywhere. Once, his friends found an unexploded grenade.
Another time, he got trapped in a cave and couldn’t move forwards or backwards — he still dreams about it.
As well as his Dutch and American parents, who met in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Shanghai, van der Voort was brought up by his amahs, Cantonese-speaking servants who lived in the house, “sort of like the governess”, he says.
He remembers them as superstitious. Once he heard a shriek when he came home: someone had left a Clarks shoebox on the table.
There was an abandoned house nearby — not Dragon Lodge, but another one — that he thinks had been shelled by the Japanese.
It was his amah, he remembers, who told him the house was haunted, because that was the only way to stop him playing there. It worked.
And he thinks the rumour caught on, but it was attributed to the wrong house.
That was a long time ago, before the end of British colonial rule; he did not know he was growing up in “the throes of a moribund empire”.
There is another, much more recent explanation for its reputation. The representative for the owner says that, between 2008 and 2013, an investor based in the British Virgin Islands tried to buy the house.
He suspects the investor spread the rumours, because they were “widely circulated” after the offer was refused, and another one was later made.
The representative added that the reason the house is not lived in is because there are so many hikers on the narrow road on Sundays and public holidays.
An explanation based on the lengths 21st-century investors might go to secure valuable property appeals to the rational mind, especially in the cold light of day.
But after the sun has set on Dragon Lodge, and the joggers have all gone home, it is harder to overlook the residual presence of the past.
Behind the house, the black lampposts along Lugard Road look like they have been airlifted in from Victorian London. Amid the jungle and the roar of the cicadas, they suddenly seem lost.
Their light is almost spectral as it illuminates the land, as though each night, they too must stake a claim to it.
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Dragon Lodge: could Hong Kong’s hauntings be a way of hanging on to the past in view of its uncertain future? @FT
Misc.
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A black hole appears to expand. (Fujiwara's illusion) @AkiyoshiKitaoka
Asia
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WATCH: Drone footage shows lava flowing out of a volcano on the Reykjanes Peninsula @Reuters
Misc.
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A decade of "semiotic arousal" when everything, it seemed, was a sign, a harbinger of some future radical disjuncture or cataclysmic upheaval.
Misc.
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The international airport in DR Congo's Goma reopened Saturday, two weeks after a devastating volcanic eruption near the eastern city, with the arrival of a plane carrying the prime minister @AFP
Africa
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Jeet Thayil wrote in his buzzy Bombay based book Narcopolis: “The world is on fire; time is a bomb. Ten thousand years are not enough when so much remains to be done.”
Misc.
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Don DeLillo wrote "Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live." The Way we live now #COVID19
Misc.
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The Machine Stops The neurologist on steam engines, smartphones, and fearing the future @NewYorker By Oliver Sacks
Misc.
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My favorite aunt, Auntie Len, when she was in her eighties, told me that she had not had too much difficulty adjusting to all the things that were new in her lifetime—jet planes, space travel, plastics, and so on—but that she could not accustom herself to the disappearance of the old.
“Where have all the horses gone?” she would sometimes say. Born in 1892, she had grown up in a London full of carriages and horses.
I have similar feelings myself. A few years ago, I was walking with my niece Liz down Mill Lane, a road near the house in London where I grew up.
I stopped at a railway bridge where I had loved leaning over the railings as a child. I watched various electric and diesel trains go by, and after a few minutes Liz, growing impatient, asked, “What are you waiting for?” I said that I was waiting for a steam train. Liz looked at me as if I were crazy.
“Uncle Oliver,” she said. “There haven’t been steam trains for more than forty years.”
I have not adjusted as well as my aunt did to some aspects of the new—perhaps because the rate of social change associated with technological advances has been so rapid and so profound.
I cannot get used to seeing myriads of people in the street peering into little boxes or holding them in front of their faces, walking blithely in the path of moving traffic, totally out of touch with their surroundings.
I am most alarmed by such distraction and inattention when I see young parents staring at their cell phones and ignoring their own babies as they walk or wheel them along.
Such children, unable to attract their parents’ attention, must feel neglected, and they will surely show the effects of this in the years to come.
In his novel “Exit Ghost,” from 2007, Philip Roth speaks of how radically changed New York City appears to a reclusive writer who has been away from it for a decade.
He is forced to overhear cell-phone conversations all around him, and he wonders,
“What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say—so much so pressing that it couldn’t wait to be said? . . . I did not see how anyone could believe he was continuing to live a human existence by walking about talking into a phone for half his waking life.”
These gadgets, already ominous in 2007, have now immersed us in a virtual reality far denser, more absorbing, and even more dehumanizing.
I am confronted every day with the complete disappearance of the old civilities.
Social life, street life, and attention to people and things around one have largely disappeared, at least in big cities, where a majority of the population is now glued almost without pause to phones or other devices—jabbering, texting, playing games, turning more and more to virtual reality of every sort.
Everything is public now, potentially: one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s movements, one’s purchases.
There is no privacy and apparently little desire for it in a world devoted to non-stop use of social media.
Every minute, every second, has to be spent with one’s device clutched in one’s hand. Those trapped in this virtual world are never alone, never able to concentrate and appreciate in their own way, silently.
They have given up, to a great extent, the amenities and achievements of civilization: solitude and leisure, the sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed, whether in contemplating a work of art, a scientific theory, a sunset, or the face of one’s beloved.
A few years ago, I was invited to join a panel discussion about information and communication in the twenty-first century.
One of the panelists, an Internet pioneer, said proudly that his young daughter surfed the Web twelve hours a day and had access to a breadth and range of information that no one from a previous generation could have imagined.
I asked whether she had read any of Jane Austen’s novels, or any classic novel. When he said that she hadn’t, I wondered aloud whether she would then have a solid understanding of human nature or of society, and suggested that while she might be stocked with wide-ranging information, that was different from knowledge.
Half the audience cheered; the other half booed.
Much of this, remarkably, was envisaged by E. M. Forster in his 1909 story “The Machine Stops,” in which he imagined a future where people live underground in isolated cells, never seeing one another and communicating only by audio and visual devices.
In this world, original thought and direct observation are discouraged—“Beware of first-hand ideas!” people are told.
Humanity has been overtaken by “the Machine,” which provides all comforts and meets all needs—except the need for human contact.
One young man, Kuno, pleads with his mother via a Skype-like technology, “I want to see you not through the Machine. . . . I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”
He says to his mother, who is absorbed in her hectic, meaningless life, “We have lost the sense of space. . . . We have lost a part of ourselves. . . . Cannot you see . . . that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine?”
This is how I feel increasingly often about our bewitched, besotted society, too.
As one’s death draws near, one may take comfort in the feeling that life will go on—if not for oneself then for one’s children, or for what one has created.
Here, at least, one can invest hope, though there may be no hope for oneself physically and (for those of us who are not believers) no sense of any “spiritual” survival after bodily death.
But it may not be enough to create, to contribute, to have influenced others if one feels, as I do now, that the very culture in which one was nourished, and to which one has given one’s best in return, is itself threatened.
Though I am supported and stimulated by my friends, by readers around the world, by memories of my life, and by the joy that writing gives me, I have, as many of us must have, deep fears about the well-being and even survival of our world.
Such fears have been expressed at the highest intellectual and moral levels.
Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and a former president of the Royal Society, is not a man given to apocalyptic thinking, but in 2003 he published a book called “Our Final Hour,” subtitled “A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in This Century—on Earth and Beyond.”
More recently, Pope Francis published his remarkable encyclical “Laudato Si’, ” a deep consideration not only of human-induced climate change and widespread ecological disaster but of the desperate state of the poor and the growing threats of consumerism and misuse of technology.
Traditional wars have now been joined by extremism, terrorism, genocide, and, in some cases, the deliberate destruction of our human heritage, of history and culture itself.
These threats, of course, concern me, but at a distance—I worry more about the subtle, pervasive draining out of meaning, of intimate contact, from our society and our culture.
When I was eighteen, I read Hume for the first time, and I was horrified by the vision he expressed in his eighteenth-century work
“A Treatise of Human Nature,” in which he wrote that mankind is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”
As a neurologist, I have seen many patients rendered amnesic by destruction of the memory systems in their brains, and I cannot help feeling that these people, having lost any sense of a past or a future and being caught in a flutter of ephemeral, ever-changing sensations, have in some way been reduced from human beings to Humean ones.
I have only to venture into the streets of my own neighborhood, the West Village, to see such Humean casualties by the thousand: younger people, for the most part, who have grown up in our social-media era, have no personal memory of how things were before, and no immunity to the seductions of digital life.
What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.
Nonetheless, I dare to hope that, despite everything, human life and its richness of cultures will survive, even on a ravaged earth.
While some see art as a bulwark of our collective memory, I see science, with its depth of thought, its palpable achievements and potentials, as equally important; and science, good science, is flourishing as never before, though it moves cautiously and slowly, its insights checked by continual self-testing and experimentation.
I revere good writing and art and music, but it seems to me that only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass.
This idea is explicit in Pope Francis’s encyclical and may be practiced not only with vast, centralized technologies but by workers, artisans, and farmers in the villages of the world.
Between us, we can surely pull the world through its present crises and lead the way to a happier time ahead.
As I face my own impending departure from the world, I have to believe in this—that mankind and our planet will survive, that life will continue, and that this will not be our final hour.
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We live in an Era of gobbledygook debate, a moment of complete combustion. Just open your social media account and its a torrent of bite sized nonsense.
Misc.
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04-JAN-2021 :: we are witnessing massive decline in the cognitive capacity of leadership and a steep decline in the intellectual capacity of the corpus.
Misc.
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09-MAY-2021 :: The Lotos-eaters
World Of Finance
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28-MAR-2021 :: The Pandemic Is a Portal
World Of Finance
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The Way We Live Now
Misc.
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The democratization of authority spurred by the digital revolution has flattened cognitive hierarchies along with other hierarchies, and political decision-making is now driven by often weaponized babble. @FukuyamaFrancis
Law & Politics
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I entered a Margaret Atwood wormhole when i saw the below captioned quote
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A virulent plague that “travelled through the air as if on wings, it burned through cities like fire”.
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And I started with The Year of the Flood
Misc.
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and then I visited the Muthaiga Library and have now finished
Stone Mattress
The Testaments
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and am now reading “Oryx and Crake”
Misc.
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Atwood, who is the daughter of a biologist, vividly imagines a late-twenty-first-century world ravaged by innovations in biological science. Like most literary imaginings of the future, her vision is mournful, bleak, and infernal, and is punctuated, in Atwood style, with the occasional macabre joke—perhaps not unlike Dante’s own literary vision.
Atwood’s pilgrim in Hell is Snowman, who, following a genetically engineered viral cataclysm, is, as far as he knows, the only human being who has survived.
Snowman (formerly Jimmy) has become arboreal, living in trees and in shelters of junk, roaming the beaches and picnic grounds of a former park—where fungi sprout from rotting picnic tables and barbecues are festooned with bindweed—scavenging for food.
His only companions are a dozen or so humanoids, the Crakers—gentle, naked, beautiful creations of Jimmy’s old, half-mad scientist friend Crake. Freed from their experimental lab, the Crakers also live near the beach.
They eat nothing but grass, leaves, and roots; their sexual rituals have been elegantly and efficiently programmed to minimize both sexual reproduction and unrequited lust. T
o them, the man they call Snowman is a demigod or a prophet. Unable to tolerate sunlight, Jimmy wears a ghostly bedsheet.
For the Crakers, the real gods are Crake, whom they have never seen, and his girlfriend, Oryx, whom they have.
The Crakers await their return and listen to stories that Snowman tells them about Crake and Oryx. A holy, yarny scripture is already emerging.
Parallel with this vision of a blighted future is the novel’s dramatic story of how the global apocalypse came to pass, told in flashback.
Jimmy and Crake grow up as friends in gated communities, safe from the environmental degradation that has already overtaken the outside world.
They are the privileged children of scientists who work for top-secret agribusiness and biotech companies with names like HelthWyzer and OrganicInc Farms.
The latter, for medical-transplant purposes, makes pigs that are genetically altered with human DNA; after the apocalypse, these extra-clever “pigoons” go hunting for Snowman like hounds after a fox.
There are other mistakes, too—creatures called wolvogs, which are exactly what you would expect.
Later, Crake’s classmates work on developing, for a fast-food venture, headless, legless chickens—“Sort of like a chicken hookworm,” Crake says.
Such genetic ambitions will not sound outlandish to anyone who has kept abreast of current poultry-farming practices or knows that scientists have experimented with splicing fish genes into tomatoes to prevent freezing.
Although the boys’ daily lives are full of swimming pools, bullet trains, completely self-contained shopping malls, and games like Kwiktime Osama, they maintain a curiosity about the world outside in “the pleeblands,” of which they have little experience.
They have lost parents in the madness of this sinister and isolated life style.
Crake’s father, burdened with the knowledge of pharmaceutical conspiracies, “jumped” from an overpass; Jimmy’s mother, critical of her husband’s work, grew depressed, then disappeared.
While quite young, both boys come to suspect that their parents have been executed.
Tonally, “Oryx and Crake” is a roller-coaster ride. The book proceeds from terrifying grimness, through lonely mournfulness, until, midway, a morbid silliness begins sporadically to assert itself, like someone, exhausted by bad news, hysterically succumbing to giggles at a funeral.
Atwood begins to smirk and deadpan: “There was a lot of dismay out there, and not nearly enough ambulances.” She invents an assisted-suicide site called nitee-nite.com.
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Political Reflections
Law & Politics
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Powerful combo picture has just hit the @AFP wire. Tiananmen anniversary vigils in Hong Kong's Victoria Park @JeromeTaylor
Law & Politics
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Shows Tiananmen anniversary vigils in Hong Kong's Victoria Park in 1990, 1999, 2004, 2011, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2020 and... tonight
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7 OCT 19 :: Xi’s model is one of technocratic authoritarianism and a recent addition to his book shelf include The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos.
Law & Politics
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Xi is building an Algorithmic Society.
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Microsoft's Bing search engine blocked content in the U.S. deemed politically sensitive to China’s government on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre @WSJ
Law & Politics
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Xi Jinping has exhibited Chinese dominance over multiple theatres from the Home Front, the International Media Domain, the ‘’Scientific’’ domain
Law & Politics
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I'm 99.9% certain this was a gray zone hit against Taiwan. @man_integrated
Law & Politics
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I'll be more blunt.
The ship was empty when it shouldn't have been, speeding into a port it should not have been anywhere near, with no officials making any statements of disapproval or issuing recriminations.
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Xi Jinping is both Sun Tzu ‘'The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting'' And hard edged at the same time.
Law & Politics
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That big thing may be that he who rules Taiwan rules the world @bopinion @nfergus
Law & Politics
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28-MAR-2021 :: I expect China to occupy Taiwan before the end of the year
Law & Politics
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The World in the c21st exhibits viral, wildfire and exponential characteristics and feedback loops which only become obvious in hindsight.
Law & Politics
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Why is the universe so uncannily, so eerily, so terribly quiet? Because in the dark forest, anything that makes a sound gets eaten.
Misc.
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The alien researcher on the other side of the communication warns her that its society is utterly twisted and that she must never make contact again, lest they invade Earth:
Do not answer!
Do not answer!!
Do not answer!!!
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Sound on. Last July, @NASASun 's Parker Solar Probe flew through the ionosphere of Venus... and detected an unexpected signal. courtesy @NASA @ThePlanetaryGuy
Misc.
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"The Dark Forest," which continues the story of the invasion of Earth by the ruthless and technologically superior Trisolarans, introduces Liu’s three axioms of “cosmic sociology.” @nfergus
Misc.
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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.
This is intergalactic Darwinism.
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PUTIN: "The problem of empires But problems keep piling up. And, at some point, they’re no longer able to cope with them. And the USA is now walking the Soviet Union’s path” @ASBMilitary
Law & Politics
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This is insane (h/t @tankertrackers and @Juniorballs) @chigrl The moment fire started at Tehran's Tondguyan Refinery a few days ago·@Khaaasteh
Law & Politics
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6 JAN 20 :: The Escalation of 'Shadow War'
Law & Politics
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Kronsteen out- lines to Blofeld his play
Blofeld Kronsteen, you are sure this plan is foolproof?
Kronsteen Yes it is because I have anticipated every possible variation of counter-move.
''a cornered country that has increasingly less to lose. The risks of miscalculation are at an all-time high’’ Vali Nasr.
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Interesting camera operator knew where and when to focus. @TrollColors
Misc.
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Daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases @OurWorldInData
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28-MAR-2021 :: The Virus remains an exogenous uncertainty that is still not resolved #COVID19
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Nations w/ most average COVID-19 cases/day @jmlukens
Misc.
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Colombia and Malaysia #COVID19 average cases per day up more than 50% past 2wks. @jmlukens
Nations w/ most average COVID-19 cases/day
#India: 145.6k
#Brazil: 65.9k
#Argentina: 31.6k
#Colombia: 24.1k
#US: 15.0k
#Iran: 9.9k
#Russia: 9.0k
#France: 8.4k
#Malaysia: 7.7k
#Chile: 7.2k
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''viruses exhibit non-linear and exponential characteristics''
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Nations w/ high COVID-19 2wk avg case/day increase United Kingdom 5,655 #COVID19 cases yesterday above 4,393/day avg up 164% past 2wks. @jmlukens
Africa
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Uganda: 590%
Zambia: 587%
Afghanistan: 279%
UK: 164%
Namibia: 93%
Mongolia: 92%
Colombia: 71%
Cambodia: 70%
South Africa: 51%
Bangladesh: 50%
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United Kingdom 5,181 #COVID19 cases yesterday above 3,747/day avg up 146% past 2wks and appears to be accelerating. @jmlukens
Misc.
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The occupants of No10, like Tolstoy’s characters in War and Peace, are blown around by forces they do not comprehend as they gossip, intrigue, and babble to the media. OCTOBER 30, 2014 BY @Dominic2306 The Hollow Men II
Law & Politics
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The outcome? Everybody rushes around in tailspins assembling circular firing squads while the real dynamics of opinion play out largely untouched by their conscious actions.
In terms of a method to ‘manage’ government, it is not far from tribal elders howling incantations around the camp fire after inspecting the entrails of slaughtered animals.
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A linear scale. Growth rate advantage of B.1.617.2 vs B.1.1.7: 10.7% per day @TWenseleers
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If you have a "normal" pandemic that is fading, but "variants" that [are] surging, the combined total can look like a flat, manageable situation. @spignal
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08-MAR-2021 the ultra hyperconnectedness of the c21st World.
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Here also some fits on the rate of spread of variants of concern in the USA, based on GISAID lineage frequencies from 20 states @TWenseleers
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“We don’t know what’s happening in the countryside. It could be serious, very serious, or disastrous." - @ramakumarr LA TIMES
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“We don’t know what’s happening in the countryside,” said R. Ramakumar, a professor of development studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai.
“It could be serious, very serious, or disastrous. There’s very little data being put out by the government.”
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A virulent plague that “travelled through the air as if on wings, it burned through cities like fire”. The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
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Police take stock of the shallow graves on the banks of Ganges River in Prayagraj, India, in May.(Rajesh Kumar Singh / Associated Press ) LA TIMES
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“Dehshat hai. (It’s a horror.)”
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The quacks running the Indian Govt. are incapable of learning on the job. Their world view is deeply anchored in ancient myths. @sonaliranade
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.@jairbolsonaro Trump @narendramodi @BorisJohnson Politics is no longer about competence but tribal identity psychobabble.
Law & Politics
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09-MAY-2021 :: “Kumbh Mela [which] may end up being the biggest super spreader event in the history of this pandemic.” Professor Ashish Jha
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"We are capable of delivering any message we want to the public - whether sweet or sour true or fake." said @AmitShah
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09-MAY-2021 :: Benito Modi whose hyper incompetence even the Die Hard BJP ''Deadenders'' are finding it impossible to defend
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The politicians who mismanaged the pandemic committed "social murder" and must be held accountable, writes @bmj_latest @KamranAbbasi @EricTopol
Law & Politics
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Drinking The Kool Aid
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India in total absolute excess deaths… 2,800,000 so far. Insane. Ht @fibke @DrEricDing
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.@GVDBossche May '21, FAQ #19: "In the context of mass vaccination, it is important to understand that ‘more infectious’ variants are merely to be seen as an intermediate stage in the evolution towards full resistance" @DavidLWindt
Misc.
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And the belief in Vaccine Efficacy is now bumping at euphoric levels. Folks I followed on Twitter for their epidemiological excellence now simply recite Vaccine / Inoculation data like a liturgy.
Misc.
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“Immune escape” in #DeltaVariant. That’s the latest finding - that #B16172 is as bad for antibody neutralization as the Beta variant #B1351 from South Africa @DrEricDing
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1st dose alone very small effect— 2 doses needed, but weakest against Delta. Let’s walk through evidence Thread #COVID19
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SARS2’s genome was “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory”. @ydeigin
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27-JAN-2020 :: the only explanation left is artificial DNA modification, possibly by the Wuhan Institute of Virology
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01-MAR-2020 :: The Origin of the #CoronaVirus #COVID19
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What is clear is that the #COVID19 was bio-engineered The Science [and I am not a Scientist is irrefutable and in the public domain for those with a modicum of intellectual interest.
This information is being deliberately suppressed.
This took me to Thomas Pynchon
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
“There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of the things they aren't telling us.”
Now Why are we being led away from this irrefutable Truth
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The West’s Wuhan cover-up will not be forgotten easily @Telegraph
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The more frightening thing is it appears now to be a complete free for all. If I was a Terror Org I would be scooping up all the virologists I could.
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13-JUL-2020 :: Year of the Virus
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I am convinced that the only ‘’zoonotic’’ origin was one that was accelerated in the Laboratory.
There is also a non negligible possibility that #COVID19 was deliberately released –
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Biostatisticians Calculated Odds Of Coronavirus Evolving Naturally To Be 1 In 13 Billion, Top Ex-Pandemic Investigator Says
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04-JAN-2021 :: What Will Happen In 2021
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Today only the Paid for Propagandists and Virologists and WHO will argue that there is a ''zoonotic'' origin for COVID19.
It is remarkable that the Propaganda is still being propagated more than a year later.
Those who have chosen to propagate this narrative are above the radar and in plain sight and need to be called to account.
The Utter Failure to call these 5th columnists to Account is the clearest Signal that there is no external threat because it is already on the inside.
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Maybe Kristian was advised by his lawyer to do this? Given the “pending investigation” redactions in the Fauci emails. @ydeigin
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“Based on data presented, it's clear the Huanan market was the epicenter of the early outbreak,” writes @K_G_Andersen @amymaxmen
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International Markets
World Of Finance
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Currency Markets at a Glance WSJ
World Currencies
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Euro 1.2158
Dollar Index 90.214
Japan Yen 109.48
Swiss Franc 0.8995
Pound 1.4127
Aussie 0.7733
India Rupee 72.774
South Korea Won 1111.8555
Brazil Real 5.0471
Egypt Pound 15.69
South Africa Rand 13.4330
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Dollar Index Chart INO 90.213
World Currencies
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Euro versus the Dollar Chart 1.2158
World Currencies
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He could have led, but he created chaos instead. @goldseek
World Currencies
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Maybe that was the plan after-all? I don't know, but it was pretty clever, relatively cheap move to get some control over Bitcoin, crypto.. get access to cult like followers globally.
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08-FEB-2021 :: The Markets Are Wilding
World Currencies
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@elonmusk I am become meme, Destroyer of shorts
Mr. Musk can pump [and dump] just about anything with a tweet. he has superpowers.
And on February 4 He tested that hypothesis
No highs, no lows, only Doge @elonmusk Feb 4
Dogecoin is the people’s crypto @elonmusk Feb 4
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.@maxkeiser $BTC @Fredilly
World Currencies
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8 JAN 18 :: The Crypto Avocado Millenial Economy.
World Currencies
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The ‘’Zeitgeist’’ of a time is its defining spirit or its mood. Capturing the ‘’zeitgeist’’ of the Now is not an easy thing because we are living in a dizzyingly fluid moment.
Paul Virilio has said ‘Wealth is the hidden side of speed and speed the hidden side of wealth’ and he is not wrong.
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The lights must never go out, The music must always play
World Currencies
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Build a circus and the clowns will come. @NorthmanTrader
World Currencies
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09-MAY-2021 :: The liquidity of this complex is illusory, as the reflexivity embedded within creates a lurking shadow convexity that is vulnerable to predatory flows. @FadingRallies
World Currencies
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Commodity Markets at a Glance WSJ
Commodities
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Crude Oil Chart INO 69.08
Minerals, Oil & Energy
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The continent had a 20% increase in cases in the past two weeks, with eight countries recording a rise of more than 30% in the past week.
Africa
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“The threat of a third wave in Africa is real and rising,” Moeti said.
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Drinking The Kool Aid
Africa
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Africa nations w/ most avg COVID-19 cases per day Uganda & Zambia avg #COVID19 cases per day up >580% past 2wks. South Africa up 51% past 2wks. @jmlukens
Africa
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South Africa: 4,632
Tunisia: 1,487
Uganda: 821
Zambia: 684
Namibia: 485
Botswana: 349
Morocco: 332
Algeria: 318
Libya: 305
Kenya: 263
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One senses that the caretakers of coronavirus on the continent are very nervous. The Indian variant has a foothold. Might it scale? @Africa_Conf
Africa
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09-MAY-2021 Africa might be casting a weary glance over its shoulder at India and would certainly be prudent to do so.
Africa
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Africa is currently reporting a million new infections about every 94 days @ReutersGraphics
Africa
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Uganda is at Peak
The average number of new infections reported in Uganda has been consistently increasing for 12 days
Namibia is at 98%
Zambia reports highest number of new infections since February
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380,250 Active COVID-19 Cases in Africa @BeautifyData
Africa
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Active #Covid19 cases record 520,000 was in January 2021 @NKCAfrica
Africa
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#COVID19 numbers in South Africa • Cases +22% • Test positivity at 12.1% @rid1tweets
Africa
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Remain on a sustained increase with cases, test positivity and hospitalisations going up
Deaths down but lagging
• Cases +22%
• Tests +7%
• Test positivity at 12.1%
• Hospitalisations +16%
• Deaths -10%
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In terms of growth in cases the map of reproduction number (R) of COVID-19 below sets out what is happening now clearly. @Lrossouw
Africa
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Namibia Experiencing Third Wave of Coronavirus Infections @business
Africa
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Namibia is experiencing a third wave of coronavirus infections, with the health ministry confirming 717 new cases on Thursday -- a daily record.
The test positivity rate and Covid-19-related hospitalizations and deaths have risen sharply, according to Health Minister Kalumbi Shangula.
The alarming increase in the caseload “is an indication that the public is not strictly following the Covid-19 infection prevention and control measures,” Shangula said Friday.
“More people are becoming symptomatic, getting seriously ill and dying.”
By Thursday, 56,981 people had tested positive for the disease in the nation with a population of 2.5 million and 877 of them had died -- 47 of them in the past three days -- while 90% had recovered.
Increased hospital admissions have placed the oxygen-supply infrastructure under pressure, the health ministry warned.
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Ethiopia: 5.2 million people in Tigray need emergency food assistance. That's 91% of the population. @UNOCHA
Africa
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Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Africa
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When systematic brutalisation becomes the de facto law of the land, then these types of horrors become the modus operandi of dehumanisation and terrorisation practices on path to ethnic cleansing. #Tigray @mukeshkapila
Africa
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I also saw this in the genocides in #Rwanda & #Darfur. When systematic brutalisation becomes the de facto law of the land, then these types of horrors become the modus operandi of dehumanisation and terrorisation practices on path to ethnic cleansing. #Tigray
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.@PMEthiopia has launched an unwinnable War on Tigray Province.
Africa
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Ethiopia which was once the Poster child of the African Renaissance now has a Nobel Prize Winner whom I am reliably informed
PM Abiy His inner war cabinet includes Evangelicals who are counseling him he is "doing Christ's work"; that his faith is being "tested". @RAbdiAnalyst
@PMEthiopia has launched an unwinnable War on Tigray Province.
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"Rather than stay home and be slaughtered, you must fight." @rcoreyb
Africa
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Ethiopian troops ride through traffic in Mekele. @NatGeo
Africa
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‘The genie out of the bottle’ @AfricanBizMag
Africa
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The elections will only serve to reinforce the growing perception that a man who won the Nobel Peace Prize has become just another brutal dictator. @MailandGuardian @thecontinent_
Africa
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Ethiopia’s general elections, now scheduled for 21 June after repeated postponements
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If you think Ethiopia's problems are just in Tigray, look at this map from: https://epo.acleddata.com @martinplaut
Africa
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[Dissolution risk is blinking amber] A fiendishly complicated task fending off the centrIfugal forces which are tearing Ethiopia apart @PMEthiopia has lost this battle
Africa
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Selassie Gugsa's residence in mekelle @rhaplord
Africa
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17-SEP-2012 Information warfare will not be couched in rationale of geopolitics, the author suggests, but will be "spawned" - like any Hollywood drama - out of raw emotions
Africa
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The information campaign about France's role the #Sahel continues. This time in the form of a comic book. @kcsalmon @florence_parly
Africa
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28 OCT 19 :: From Russia with Love
Africa
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“Our African agenda is positive and future-oriented. We do not ally with someone against someone else, and we strongly oppose any geopolitical games involving Africa.”
“Russia regards Africa as an important and active participant in the emerging polycentric architecture of the world order and an ally in protecting international law against attempts to undermine it,” said Russian deputy foreign minister Mikhail Bogdanov back in November 2018.
In July this year, a three-minute animated video appeared on YouTube. Called Lionbear, the cartoon was aimed at children and told the story of a brave but beleaguered Central African lion, who was fighting a losing battle against a pack of hungry hyenas.
Luckily the lion had a friend who came to the rescue — the strong Russian bear.
The bear fights off the hyenas brings peace to the land and everyone lives happily ever after.The video was produced by Lobaye Invest, a Russian mining company with links to the Wagner Group.
Lobaye runs a radio station in the CAR, and orga- nised a Miss CAR pageant.
But, as a CNN investigation reported this year, Lobaye also funds the 250 Russian mercenaries who are stationed in the country.
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PODCAST / AFRICA 3 JUNE 2021 @CrisisGroup The Insurrection in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado
Africa
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This week on Hold Your Fire!, Richard Atwood and guest co-host @EroComfort talk to Crisis Group’s Deputy Africa Director @DinoMahtani
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President Yoweri Museveni said authorities “already have clues to those killers” in the incident. There is no clarity yet as to the motives of the attackers, despite feverish speculation in Kampala. @MailandGuardian @thecontinent_
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“I think that, in fact, Europe is morally and legally responsible for everything that’s happened as of 2011 andespeciallytheUKandFrance,”said Fathi Bashagha @MailandGuardian @thecontinent_
Africa
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France, the UK and the US intervened militarily to oust the dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 – against the advice of the African Union – plunging the country into a conflict from which it has yet to recover.
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24 OCT 11 :: Gaddafi's Body in a Freezer - What's the Message?
Africa
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A place weeping @NewFrame_News
Africa
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The social devastation of mass unemployment renders South Africa a non-viable society for millions. Something must give.
Unemployment in the United States peaked at 24.9% during the Great Depression.
On the eve of Adolf Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933, unemployment in Germany was at 24%.
The protests that launched the Arab Spring in 2011 were ascribed, in part, to what the International Labour Organization called an “extremely high youth unemployment rate of 23.4%”.
In Gaza, the unemployment rate was 43.1% at the end of last year. We know what Gaza is. It is a ghetto formed by violent dispossession and sustained with violent repression. It is walled and surveilled. Its residents are subject to routine organised humiliation.
There are organised ideological attempts to expel them from the count of the human race. Their protests are met with ruthless and spectacular violence.
In a 2009 essay on Gaza, John Berger, a writer for the ages, borrowed two lines from Kurdish poet Bejan Matur: “A place weeping enters our sleep / a place weeping enters our sleep and never leaves.”
In South Africa, unemployment is at 42.3%. The rate for young people is 74.7%. The scale of this social devastation is extraordinary in global terms.
A 2019 survey placed the youth unemployment rate in the country, then calculated at 57.47%, as the worst in the world – a position it has held since 2017.
Millions of young people find that the world does not extend them any kind of welcome.
They are, in the words of poet Lesego Rampolokeng, “frustrated hoisted then dropped against the rocks of promise”.
Millions of people endure blocked lives, passing time in a stasis marked by tightening circles of shame, failure, fear and despair.
Some start to sleep most of the day. Some turn to transactional forms of religion, offering submission in the hope of reward. Some succumb to the temptation to dull their pain with cheap heroin.
Some take what they can from who they can, how they can. Some, often supported by the grace of family, friends and community, manage to find a way to hold on to enough hope to keep going.
The weight of what all this means for these people and their families, the colossal squandering of their gifts and possibilities, are not taken as a crisis for our state, the people that govern it or most of our elite public sphere.
Lives are rendered as waste, voices as noise rather than speech, protests as traffic issues or crime.
People are told that their suffering is a matter of personal failure, their attempts to cope with their situation consequent to moral dissolution.
They can be murdered by the state during a protest or an eviction without consequence.
It is unsurprising that the demand to be recognised as human is often central to the language of popular protest.
It is telling that the phrase “service delivery protests” is relentlessly imposed on much more complex phenomena by those whose unconscious investment in organised dehumanisation is such that they simply cannot recognise that the plainly expressed yearnings of the oppressed often extend far beyond aspirations for the basic means to sustain bare life.
It is not uncommon for thousands of people to apply for jobs that offer drudgery, exploitation and exhaustion for meagre rewards. People have died in stampedes for these kinds of jobs.
New forms of work are often precarious, and often organised with the aim of ensuring that employers can avoid the obligations imposed by generations of trade union organisation and struggle.
The unions operate on the terrain of constant crisis, gearing up to oppose austerity in the state and fighting a long, losing battle to retain jobs as deindustrialisation escalates.
Neither democracy nor the NGOs calling themselves ‘civil society’ or the public sphere are really taken to include the people as a whole.
Millions of people just don’t count as people. Weeping enters their sleep. It comes to sit in their bones. It comes to structure their sense of themselves, their place in their families and their understanding of the world.
We know what Gaza is. But do we understand what South Africa is?
South Africa is a chunk of territory, its borders drawn by an invading force, its people violently conquered, enslaved, dispossessed of their land, wealth and autonomy, contained in ghettos and forced into forms of labour – domestic, agricultural and industrial – structured as racial servitude.
Violence built a system of racial appropriation, exploitation and exclusion, and violence sustained it.
The sequence of popular organisation and struggle that began in Durban in the early 1970s moved into the Soweto revolt and then the growing power of the trade union movement.
The urban insurrection that followed in the 1980s, often organised by or in the name of the United Democratic Front, raised the possibility of radical democracy, popular power and deep structural transformation.
But an alliance between contending elites, backed by imperialism, was able to take the initiative in the early 1990s and follow the broad outlines of the standard path towards liberal democracy developed at the end of the Cold War.
The people were thanked for their service, given rights on paper and sent home.
The ANC in power moved swiftly to co-opt or dissolve grassroots organisations, while union leaders were brought into the new circuits of state, corporate and party power.
It was able to begin to make progress towards the deracialisation of the middle class and elites through enabling legislation and other forms of regulation.
Later on, a new class of politically connected elites became wealthy – sometimes massively wealthy – by appropriating public funds. Impoverishment and inequality worsened.
Repression
When new social movements like the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign and the Landless People’s Movement emerged at the turn of the century, they were met with paranoia and repression.
When popular protest, usually organised through road blockades marked out with burning tyres, began to become a ubiquitous backdrop to everyday life from 2004, protesters were murdered by the police at a steady clip.
When a movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, emerged from these protests, it was met with slander, assault, arrest, torture and murder.
When workers on the platinum mines struck outside of the authority of a co-opted union in 2012, they were massacred.
The ANC was committed to opening access to elite spaces, but it showed no commitment to fundamentally transforming society in the interests of the majority.
The question of who has access to the fortified nodes of wealth was, and remains, intensely contested.
The question of what happens to the people locked out remains largely ignored, apart from empty and often cynical rhetorical gestures.
Where there have been advances, such as the expansion of the grants system or the antiretroviral rollout, they were not aimed at achieving anything beyond sustaining bare life.
RDP houses were smaller and more poorly constructed than the township houses built under apartheid, and often extended rather than contested the logic of colonial spatial planning.
A non-viable society
There is no commitment to the flourishing of the majority, let alone to a fundamental shift in political and economic power.
As grants come in, the money is taken to the supermarkets, to white capital.
The state has not even bothered to undertake a project as basic as serious urban land reform and support for small-scale farming cooperatives and markets that would allow impoverished people to grow their own food and sell it to each other.
Across space and time, very high rates of unemployment, especially among young people, have led to major social upheaval, sometimes taking progressive forms and sometimes marked by an attraction to authoritarianism and a will to scapegoat vulnerable minorities.
South Africa is not a viable society for a large proportion of the people who live here, and if history is a reliable guide to the future, something will have to give.
The question is what gives – and what comes next?
Will an authoritarian figure bent on displacing the crisis onto migrants step into the breach?
Will our politics throw up more of the sort of crude chauvinists who took the recent by-elections in Eldorado Park? Will we have to endure our own Trump or Bolsonaro?
Will there be a long stasis in which the impoverished majority is governed with escalating violence as the better-off take what they can before getting out?
Or will there be new forms of democratic popular power able to make some progress towards bending the state to their will, disciplining capital and insisting that every life be counted as a life?
None of these possibilities are foreclosed, and there are many more.
But what is certain is that most of our people are young and urban, and most of them are without work.
No social force will be able to decisively shape our future without the participation or sanction of these people.
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12 November 2020: Homes in overcrowded Alexandra township stand in contrast to the skyline of affluent Sandton in Johannesburg. (Photograph by Waldo Swiegers/ Bloomberg via Getty Images) @NewFrame_News
Africa
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21 OCT 19 :: The New Economy of Anger
Africa
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Nose-diving economic opportunity is creating tinder-dry conditions
Paul Virilio pronounced in his book Speed and Politics,
“The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words, a producer of speed.’’
The Phenomenon is spreading like wildfire in large part because of the tinder dry conditions underfoot. Prolonged stand-offs eviscerate economies, reducing opportunities and accelerate the negative feed- back loop.
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South Africa All Share Bloomberg
Africa
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Dollar versus Rand Chart INO 13.4338
Africa
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Egypt Pound versus The Dollar Chart INO 15.68
Africa
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The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) in the US is alleging that Nigeria is close to being a failed state. @moneyacademyKE
Africa
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Report says it’s in final phase from point of no return as banditry, insurgency, secession violence, and kidnapping seem to have overwhelmed governance.
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Nigeria announces Twitter ban ... on Twitter @MailandGuardian @thecontinent_
Africa
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The announcement came after the social media company deleted President Muhammadu Buhari’s tweet earlier this week in which he threatened to punish pro-Biafra groups blamed for escalating violence in the southeast.
Twitter said the tweet violated its “abusive behaviour” policy, leading to a 12-hour suspension of Buhari’s account.
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It’s back to talking drums and smoke signals folks @gechife
Africa
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Who can say it won't get to N700? @FinPlanKaluAja1 Naira hits N502/$1 at parallel market @thecableng
Africa
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5 March 2020 A Currency Devaluation is now predicted and predictable. @TheAfricaReport
Africa
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December 9, 2019 Time to Big Up the Dosage of Quaaludes
Africa
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Ghana Stock Exchange Composite Index Bloomberg
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The number of scheduled Passengers carried by African airlines is estimated to have dropped from 95.6 million in 2019 to just 34.7 million in 2020. @MihrThakar
Africa
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02-MAR-2020 :: #COVID19 and SSA and the R Word
Africa
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TOP TEN INTRA AFRICAN ROUTES BY PASSENGERS CARRIED AFRAA ESTIMATES @MwangoCapital
Africa
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TOP TEN DOMESTIC ROUTES BY PASSENGERS CARRIED AFRAA ESTIMATES @MwangoCapital
Africa
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TOP TEN INTRA CONTINENTAL ROUTES BY PASSENGERS CARRIED AFRAA ESTIMATES @MwangoCapital
Africa
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The 17th cent. bangwe (public square) of Funi Haziri on grande comore, Comoros #historyxt @rhaplord
Africa
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Such public squares were a common feature of comoronian-swahili city architecture as places where customary activities took place and public meetings were held
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The Queen of Sheba is known as Bilqis, In another instance, in a demonstration of her equal status, Solomon sent his powerful ring to her.@aaolomi
Africa
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He directed a bird-like jinn to carry it to her, but the confused creature got lost and accidently dropped the ring into the sea where it became Cumoro Island.
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The legendary Queen of Sheba is one of the most fascinating figures in Islam. The wife of King Solomon and a queen in her own right, her story is full of mystery and jinn. @aaolomi
Africa
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2.7-million ...tonnes of maize in Zimbabwe's bumper crop, the highest yield in 20 years @MailandGuardian @thecontinent_
Africa
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09-SEP-2019 :: This is an economy which was the "breadbasket" of the region.
Africa
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A snapshot of Airtel Africa FY 2021 results: @MwangoCapital
Africa
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A Kumbh-Mela-like epiphany. @hervegogo Attendees of Madaraka Day fete urged to get tested, self-isolate @ntvkenya
Africa
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@CBKKenya usable foreign exchange reserves USD 7,510 million translating to 4.59 months of import cover @ouma_timothy
Kenyan Economy
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Kenya Shilling versus The Dollar Live ForexPros
Africa
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Nairobi All Share Bloomberg
N.S.E General
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Nairobi ^NSE20 Bloomberg
N.S.E General
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10 companies on the exchange accounted for 97.48% of May's total turnover of the exchange. @tradingroomke
N.S.E General
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The remaining companies combined had less than 3% in market activity.
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@SafaricomPLC Safaricom still dominates activity on the exchange, covering 54.5% of the total market turnover for May 2021. @tradingroomke
N.S.E Equities - Commercial & Services
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.@SafaricomPLC share price data here
N.S.E Equities - Commercial & Services
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The @SafaricomPLC -led consortium has paid the $850M telecom licence fee to begin operating in Ethiopia
N.S.E Equities - Commercial & Services
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With 55.7% stake in the consortium it's share is $473 million.
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TPS Eastern Africa Plc was the month's worst performing stock, having a decline of 15.03%. B.O.C Kenya Plc was May's top gainer, giving investors a 22.45% returns on the exchange. @tradingroomke
N.S.E General
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Jubilee Holdings preparing to buy back its own shares. Business Daily @moneyacademyKE
N.S.E Equities - Finance & Investment
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The company is currently trading 38% below its net asset value of 451.
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Jubilee Insurance Company Ltd. share price data
N.S.E Equities - Finance & Investment
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Price: 280.00
Market Capitalization: 20,292,426,000
EPS: 50.06
PE: 5.593
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Every Listed Share can be interrogated here
N.S.E General
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