Artist Richard Mosse used multispectral photography to create large-scale images, which he refers to as “living maps,” that capture the forest in a state of dire decline, one that could lead to irreversible tipping points in just a few decades. 

They are part of his new Tristes Tropiques exhibition, a body of work that describes the destruction being carried out across what Mosse calls the Amazon’s “arc of fire,” the area of land with the highest number of fires per year in the rainforest. 

A gray whale’s record journey from the North Pacific to the waters off southwest Africa indicates the behavior of the species has been impacted by climate change.

The whale traveled 27,000 kilometers (16,777 miles) -- a record migration for a member of the cetacean family -- to where it was first sighted off the coast of Namibia in 2013. 

The whale’s genome has now been sequenced, showing that it was born in the North Pacific, according to a team of researchers from the U.K.’s Durham University and the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa.

“What we don’t know, however, is whether this remarkable long migration is just accidental vagrancy, or whether its presence in the Atlantic represents a foraging excursion, permitted by passage through the Arctic pack ice,” Rus Hoelzel, an evolutionary biologist who carried out the sequencing, said in a statement on Wednesday.

The gray whale was until recently presumed extinct in the Atlantic, with the last known sighting in Namibian waters being reported by whalers in the 1740s. 

The whale’s presence, along with several sightings in the North Atlantic over the past decade, indicates possible movement due to global warming.

“The most likely travel route for the Namibian whale was via the Arctic, a passage only made possible due to the receding ice flows attributed to climate change in recent years,” the researchers said in the same statement.

The real-time Feed is a c21st Netflix and is both unputdownable and incendiary. 

From Chile where protestors burned down the headquarters of ENEL [The Electricity Generating Co] after a proposed price increase and a state of emergency has been imposed.

All over Latin America from Peru to Ecuador to Haiti to Honduras, Demonstrators have taken to the Streets. 

The IMF cut the projected economic growth rate for Latin America from 1.4 per cent to 0.6 per cent, citing domestic policies and the U.S.-China trade war and clearly nose-diving economic opportunity is creating tinder-dry conditions

However, what I am noticing is a metastatic expansion of Protest

the ‘’Slaves’’ are now in revolt

This is a moment of Maximum Danger to the Control Machine

It was one of the first to visualise the massive scale of the crisis. 

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”

On 8th March when the Bears had gotten hold of the US 10 Year, I wrote that I expected the 10 Year to target 1.45% well we got real close on Friday before the market reversed 

Ten- year yields initially plunged to a more than two-month low of 1.46%, then reversed to end the day at 1.58%. However, I am resetting my target Yield to 1.25% now.

Given the volume of money Printing and the extraordinary stimulus I have to say that the US Recovery is actually really weak and I believe it will be very short lived and the Penny will drop soon with the Bond Market and the Shorts will be forced to cover.

The Consensus View appears to be that the Global economy is going to accelerate big time and that its going to BOOM! 

I beg to differ

Furthermore The Central Banks are in a corner. 

They have fired a lot of bullets and even if there was a meaningful bounce they cannot raise rates.

Here is why central banks are trapped and cannot raise rates even if inflation rises: @dlacalle_IA Feb 2 

Euro 1.2184

Dollar Index 90.009

Japan Yen 109.42

Swiss Franc 0.89376

Pound 1.4167

Aussie 0.7774

India Rupee 73.0511

South Korea Won 1111.51

Brazil Real 5.0555

Egypt Pound 15.6665

South Africa Rand 13.5284

@elonmusk I am become meme, Destroyer of shorts

• Western Cape cases up +51%

• KwaZulu Natal up +87%

• Eastern Cape up +49%

• Limpopo up +43%

The relations between Madrid and Rabat are heating up, following the last month’s influx of Moroccan and sub-Saharan migrants to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the Northern strip of Morocco. 

Eight thousand migrants entered the seaside border area, thousands of which returned to Moroccan soil after Spain sent troops to the enclave between the two countries.

Recently, Rabat is using the migrants card as a “nuclear” option in retaliation to Madrid, which provided COVID-19 treatment to Mr. Brahim Ghali, Polisario Front’s leader. 

Thus, this diplomatic episodic event between the two countries looks like a diplomatic provocation that might backfire on Rabat’s national interests in the face of this tragic humanitarian despair, manifested by thousands of Moroccan and non-Moroccan migrants who are seeking a better life elsewhere.

Aid and Protection or Law and Order 

Nonetheless, thousands of people of all ages; men, women, young people and children, managed to swim to Ceuta, in the middle of an unprecedented diplomatic crisis between Rabat and Madrid. 

Oddly, after passively observing the crossing for nearly 24 hours, Moroccan police decided to block the migrants and disperse the crowd, which had flocked to the Mediterranean coast.

Ceuta and Melilla, the two enclaves ruled by Spain for centuries, are the only land borders between Africa and the European Union.

Social injustice has deepened since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Morocco. Poverty has increased seven-fold according to data from the High Commission for Plan (HCP). 

Rabat’s measures of border closure due to COVID-19, which lasted more than fifteen months, have put an end to smuggling of all kinds of imported goods, cigarettes, alcohol, etc. and adversely impacted the whole northern region, leaving thousands of people without regular income.

As a result, several protests took place in Fnideq last winter due to the economic difficulties, despite the promises of the Moroccan government to tackle this thorny socioeconomic issue. 

However, Ceuta beach crisis turned from a tragic humanitarian issue into another episodic diplomatic tension between Rabat and Madrid. 

Rabat summoned the Spanish ambassador to convey its exasperation and asked for explanations after the treatment of Polisario’s leader in Spain.

Yet following the Ghali Gate, officials from both countries seem to want a cool-down in the rhetoric damaging the relations. 

Spanish Foreign Minister Arancha González declared that the influx of migrants to Ceuta was the result of a disagreement with Rabat.

Misleading Crisis 

The situation in Ceuta is becoming the Achilles’ heel of the bilateral relations between the two countries, affecting Morocco’s status as a privileged partner of the EU, which did not hesitate to show full support to Spain, while insisting on the normalization of EU-Morocco relations.

Hence, the tragic humanitarian event in Ceuta has unveiled the complex historical relations between Rabat and Madrid, notably under the ruling of the Socialist Workers Party, led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez since 2018. 

Usually, Rabat gets along well with the Republican Party, whose agenda focuses on domestic politics rather than on extra-regional ones — and the right-wing governments are implicitly supportive of the Moroccan thesis regarding the frozen conflict in the Western Sahara dossier.

However, Rabat saw that lately, Spain’s domestic politics has been quite shaky under Prime Minister Sanchez, who is fighting for his political future and for the functioning of his odd national coalition government, which might lead to the loss of confidence vote in the Parliament, and early elections next fall. 

This would give an opportunity to right parties to regain power.

This helps better understand why Rabat is using the migrants card to put pressure on Sánchez government to back down from its latest timid rapprochement with Algiers, following the announcement of large-scale maritime and gas deals, and to cast light on the future of relation between Algiers and Madrid in the coming months.

How much leverage will Rabat gain from the migrants card? Some analysts have linked this scenario with Ankara’s migrants policy with the EU. 

This tactic looks suicidal for Rabat because neither the left- nor the right-wing politicians in Madrid would accept this humanitarian blackmail. 

Even other European countries traumatized by the migrants question such as France, this is a winning political card against the xenophobic RN Party. 

Morocco and Spain have solid commerce, agriculture and fishing co-operations. 

With hundreds of thousands of legal Moroccan immigrants generating millions of Euros, Moroccans remain as the largest diaspora of foreign workers in Spain.

Thus, is Rabat able to face the migration issue alone? Because, there are also hundreds of thousands of migrants crossing from Sahel countries via Mauritania, which is another country in water disputes with Rabat. 

This adds to the long-term national security threats posed by jihadist armed groups, which also constitute an integral part of the EU’s domestic security concerns.

Migrants vs. National Security 

The EU will continue to put pressure on Rabat to prevent irregular flow of migrants and migrants crossing from northern Moroccan shores, and to properly and efficiently readmit illegal immigrants on Spanish soil.

Migration is a key element of the EU members’ national security concerns, in particular those of southern EU countries such as Spain, Italy and France, where the migrants question is occupying a large space in domestic politics and political debate. 

The free circulation of people, goods and services is at the heart of the EU, who adopted a new strategy for the future of Schengen Agreement, in order to ensure security and mobility while also boosting resilience to migration-related challenges in Eastern or Southern Europe.

Rabat’s Spain policy is unlike its relations with any other European country—even with its former occupier France. 

The relations have always been tense because of the geographical proximity and the historical animosity between the two monarchies that goes back to the 16th century. 

Despite the cold yet peaceful relations between the two countries in the last century, Rabat is still sensitive to any political rub off on Morocco politics like a real constitutional monarchy, which the Spaniards have had established in the aftermath of the fall of General Franco regime in 1975.

In sum, the year 1975 is not only a political shift in the relations between the two countries, but also a diplomatic issue that Rabat has to deal with in its relations with its neighbors in Maghreb, African Union members, and lately European super-powers like Germany. 

Moroccan diplomacy has recently appeared active on the Libyan dossier and showed impressive efforts in its relations with western and central African countries, even with Arab monarchies like Jordan and the Emirates on the Western Sahara dossier.

Madrid is, however, assessing the ongoing tensions as a complex process in its relations with Morocco. 

Madrid won’t let the ambivalence issue of Western Sahara to hurt the two countries’ relations. 

These rhetorical tensions will end with a detente note, and the two countries might work together to extend their influence to tackle the serious question of migrants, which should remain exclusively as a humanitarian issue and not as a tool of diplomatic pressure.

An improvement in the primary income account was the main driver, while the other balances moved sideways.

Buhari, speaking on Arise TV, said security was essential in order for investment in the country, where unemployment rose to 33.3% in the fourth quarter.

"Nobody is going to invest in an insecure environment. So I told them, I said they should tell the youth that if they want jobs, they will behave themselves," Buhari said. 

"Make sure that the area is secure. So that people can come in and invest."

- Kenya: Kshs. 3.66T ($33.9B)

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- Ethiopia: 561.7B birr ($13B)

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Kenya