I am close to finishing all the Margaret Atwood books in the Muthaiga Library 

“When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back'

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.” 

Schulman maintained that “burnt water” is “the dominant image of [Paz’s] poetry” and found that the image fulfills a role similar to that of the two sides of the coin in Eagle and Sun? 

She noted: “Paz sees the world burning, and knows with visionary clarity that opposites are resolved in a place beyond contraries, in a moment of pure vision: in that place, there are no frontiers between men and women, life and death.” 

Chiles called the Aztec combination of fire and water “particularly apt in its multiple connotations as a symbol of the union of all warring contraries.”

Mozambique: 573%

Rwanda: 355%

Burma: 321%

Bangladesh: 138%

Indonesia: 133%

UK: 125%

South Africa: 106%

Portugal: 91%

Kyrgyzstan: 81%

Uzbekistan: 75%

When Donald Trump suggested injecting bleach, the Genesis II Church had just the “sacrament”—until Operation Quack Hack landed four elders in jail.

At different points, Grenon claimed the formula could cure autism, depression, HIV, multiple sclerosis, and more. 

Instructions were tailored to the affliction: To eradicate kidney stones, ingest three drops every hour for eight hours a day over the course of three weeks. 

To urgently treat a heart attack, 2 tablespoons.

 To fight skin cancer, spray the entire bare body. 

Facebook posts from the early 2010s showed members of U.S. groups dedicated to promoting MMS uploading pictures of what appeared to be chemical burns on their or their children’s arms, legs, and torsos, asking whether they were a sign the sacrament was working.

Grenon and Humble, as well as Grenon’s bishop sons, Jordan, Jonathan, and Joseph, began hosting two-day seminars in hotel conference rooms in Chile, New Zealand, South Africa, the U.S., and other countries. 

Attendees paid $450 each, or $800 per couple, to be ordained as “health ministers,” trained in manufacturing MMS and approved to dispense it in their local communities. 

The seminars and the attendant sales boost helped the Grenons start netting at least $100,000 per year, according to bank statements provided by Wells Fargo & Co. to the FDA. (Wells Fargo cut all ties with the Grenons following their arrest.)

To convey their status as archbishops, Grenon and Humble would dress for the seminars in blinding-white starched shirts, trousers, ties, and fedoras adorned with a turquoise-colored stone. 

One of the PowerPoint slides they showed held that the body was a temple and that believers “need to maintain said temple in a clean manner as God, our Creator, demands”—an appeal to fundamentalist Christian belief. 

Another slide said that symptoms such as acute nausea and diarrhea were proof that MMS was purging the body of toxins.

“100,000 bottles at $15 and 100,000 books at $15 is $3 MILLION dollars. Double that and we’re the SIX MILLION DOLLAR MEN”

By then there was evidence that using MMS could be fatal. In 2009, American retiree Doug Nash and his Mexican wife, Sylvia Fink, embarked on a circumnavigation of the globe aboard their sailboat, Windcastle. 

On their way to the Solomon Islands, they met a couple, a Belgian man and an American woman, who sold MMS to Fink as a prophylaxis against malaria. 

On an August morning, after a night of dancing with villagers on the remote island of Epi to celebrate an annual canoe race, Fink added 2 drops of MMS to 10 drops of lime juice and drank the mixture on the boat’s sundeck. 

Within 15 minutes, she’d started vomiting uncontrollably, continuing until she was throwing up only bile. She also suffered burning urinary pain. 

Nash radioed for medical assistance, but by sundown Fink had lapsed into a coma. By 9 p.m. she was dead.

The autopsy report noted a significantly high level of methemoglobin in the blood—a symptom of high exposure to chlorite—which would have effectively starved her body of oxygen. 

“It was a substance, used in the fashion that was being recommended, that was definitely acting like a poison would on your gut,” Nash says of the MMS. “Her body got so dehydrated that her organs started to fail.”

Now in his late 80s, Nash relocated aboard the Windcastle to Honolulu, where he’s writing a book about his wife’s death. 

He recalls Grenon mocking the incident in early podcasts and even suggesting Nash was somehow to blame. 

“He’s a crude, vile, dishonest person,” Nash says while discussing Grenon’s arrest. “I have no idea what the penalty should be for what he did, peddling an industrial chemical that’s very dangerous if you use it incorrectly. But he deserves to be punished.”

Fink’s death resonated enough in Oceania that when Grenon and Humble went to Australia and New Zealand to host a dozen seminars five years later, seeking to market MMS as a cure for Ebola, which was then spreading in West Africa, some legs of their tour were shut down by local governments. 

From 2009 to 2014, the Victorian Poisons Information Centre had attributed at least 10 poisonings in Australia, including four that required hospitalization, to MMS. 

In one particularly serious case from April 2009, a woman had been fined for injecting cancer sufferers with MMS in her garage, advising them not to seek chemotherapy and charging them as much as $2,000 per shot; 

one breast cancer patient had to be treated for a life-threatening blood clot afterward. 

While Grenon and Humble were in New Zealand, lawmakers were seeking to pass a bill that would help regulators ban products such as MMS, but it eventually stalled out.

Word of Genesis II’s practices reached the FDA in the early 2010s, according to a person familiar with the subsequent investigation. 

With MMS adoption rising thanks to Facebook groups and church affiliates, the agency contacted the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo, which began working with the Dominican government to halt the distribution of bleaching products marketed for ingestion. 

A team of local police officers visited Barahona to apprehend Grenon and Humble, the person said, but they left, infuriated and divided on the reach of their authority, when the two men said, “We’re a church.”

In 2015 police forces in the U.K. raided a home outside London where Grenon was meeting with a chapter founded by a couple who manufactured MMS at a Bulgarian ski resort hotel they owned. 

That year the U.S. government also sentenced Louis Daniel Smith, a Genesis II Church member in Washington state, to almost five years in prison for selling MMS through a business called Project GreenLife, which had masqueraded as a wastewater treatment company to obtain the ingredients necessary to produce chlorine dioxide without the FDA’s notice. 

According to court records, Smith had emailed his father outlining the economics of selling MMS and associated products, noting that “100,000 bottles at $15 and 100,000 books at $15 is $3 MILLION dollars. Double that and we’re the SIX MILLION DOLLAR MEN.”

Sometime around 2015, Humble and Grenon fell out over what Humble has cast as Grenon hoarding his share of the profits. 

Humble left Genesis II to build a new life in rural Mexico. In 2016, after being tracked down in Guadalajara by an ABC News team, he became an apostate, writing in a blog post, “Today I declare, MMS cures nothing!” (Humble didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment.)

MMS kept spreading, largely away from the public eye despite the 16,000 chlorine dioxide poisonings taking place in the U.S. from 2014 to 2019. 

The exact percentage that can be traced directly to MMS is unknown, though in one notable instance from 2017, an autistic 6-year-old girl was hospitalized with liver failure after her parents gave it to her. 

Genesis II held that, over time, it trained 2,000 ministers globally and sold millions of vials of MMS to members and to online buyers transacting through Amazon.com and EBay. 

Church-branded MMS hasn’t been listed on those websites since the Grenons’ arrest, but several imitations with names such as “Jim Humble’s Formula” are still available for purchase. 

(Amazon and EBay said in separate statements that they have procedures and tools in place to monitor and remove listings that don’t comply with laws and regulations. Each company took down a listing for a chlorine-dioxide-based product included in Businessweek’s request for comment.)

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Martin Aglo, a law student from Benin, told Reuters: “After the Arab Spring, this is the Black Spring”.We need to ask ourselves; how many people can incumbent shoot stone cold dead in such a situation – 100, 1,000, 10,000?

This is another point: there is a threshold beyond which the incumbent can’t go. Where that threshold lies will be discovered in the throes of the event.

The Event is no longer over the Horizon.

Robert Godec, acting assistant secretary of state for the State Department's Bureau of African Affairs, said the Biden administration was far advanced in its assessment of whether to call events crimes against humanity, genocide or war crimes.
"The administration is in full agreement that horrifying atrocities are being committed in Tigray," he told the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee.

"We will not stand by in the face of horrors in Tigray," he said, urging the Eritrean government to immediately join in the cessation of hostilities and calling for a commitment of all parties to a permanent, negotiated ceasefire in the region.

The country must collectively abandon the use of force as a means of settling political disputes and commit to inclusive and constructive dialogues to address competing visions for the country. 

Turning a blind eye will lead to further chaos with the potential to spread beyond Ethiopia’s borders to the rest of the Horn of Africa—a nightmare scenario to be avoided at all costs.

Sudan is the 38th country to reach this milestone, known as the HIPC Decision Point.

Sudan’s external public debt will be irrevocably reduced—through HIPC debt relief and other debt relief initiatives anchored to the HIPC initiative—by more than US$50 billion in net present value terms, representing over 90 percent of Sudan’s total external debt—if it reaches the HIPC Completion Point in about three years’ time.

“This decision is an important milestone which will support Sudan’s reform and development agenda and our efforts to move away from the past and foster better lives for our people,” said Abdallah Hamdok, Prime Minister, Republic of Sudan. 

Altogether, Sudan’s external debt burden is expected to fall from about US$56 billion (163 percent of GDP) in NPV terms as of end-2020 to US$6 billion (14 percent of GDP) once the Completion Point is reached and with the participation of all creditors.

Africa’s third wave of infection comes at a perilous moment for the continent: Just 1.1% of its 1.3 billion people are fully vaccinated, medical supplies have been depleted, doctors are physically and mentally exhausted and, in some cases, unpaid and hospitals are turning patients away for lack of beds and oxygen.

Deaths more than doubled from the week earlier.