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Friday 05th of March 2021
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The Street Octavio Paz Misc. |
Here is a long and silent street.
I walk in blackness and I stumble and fall
and rise, and I walk blind, my feet
trampling the silent stones and the dry leaves.
Someone behind me also tramples, stones, leaves:
if I slow down, he slows;
if I run, he runs
I turn :
nobody.
Everything dark and doorless,
only my steps aware of me,
I turning and turning among these corners
which lead forever to the street
where nobody waits for, nobody follows me,
where I pursue a man who stumbles
and rises and says when he sees me:
nobody.
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10-MAY-2020 :: #COVID19 and the Spillover Moment ―Brazil is the global epicenter of the coronavirus [again] Misc. |
.@jairbolsonaro ''Brazilians aren‘t infected by anything, even when they fall into a sewer''
“It‟s tragic surrealism ... I can‟t stop thinking about Gabriel García Márquez when I think about the situation Manaus is facing.” Guardian
Viruses are in essence non linear exponential and multiplicative and COVID19 has ‟escape velocity‟ in Brazil.
Brazil’s Covid Crisis Is a Warning to the Whole World, Scientists Say @nytimes
Conclusions
I expect th P.1 Lineage to be dominant worldwide in 8-12 weeks notwithstanding the Focus on SARS-CoV-2 lineage B.1.1.7
My Thesis is based on the ultra hyperconnectedness of the c21st World.
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.@FHeisbourg François Heisbourg: «Le coronavirus, c’est un Tchernobyl chinois à la puissance dix» Misc. |
FIGAROVOX / INTERVIEW - For the geopolitologist, the debate on the origin of the virus remains open and the question of the responsibility of the Chinese authorities remains legitimate. By Isabelle Lasserre. LE FIGARO. March 2, 2021.
François Heisbourg is special advisor to the Foundation for Strategic Research. The geopolitologist is also a member of the Global Commission for Post-Pandemic Policy, an ad hoc group that works in particular on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.
LE FIGARO. - A year after the global spread of the coronavirus, which has already claimed 2.5 million lives and caused a major economic crisis, everyone seems to have forgotten the Chinese origin of the virus. How come no one is calling Beijing to account?
François HEISBOURG. - Because we let China build its narrative, that of a triumphant management of the virus, which contrasts with the supposed decadence of the West - without bringing it the slightest contradiction.
By allowing this rhetoric to settle in, by abstaining from any reaction, China has been freed from the question of its initial responsibility.
Is not this initial responsibility of China, however, obvious and major?
The Chinese are so aware of this that they have done two things in an attempt to erase it.
First, they staged their "exemplary handling" of the pandemic in a very loud manner, in order to avoid interest in the regime.
And then they severely punished countries that demanded an impartial international investigation, made up of the best experts. Australia, which had insisted on the need for transparency, was imposed economic sanctions and a block on its imports.
The other countries drew the conclusion that it was necessary to remain discreet ...
We therefore find it natural that China waits a year to authorize, in January 2021, a WHO team to finally go to Wuhan, where it has not. not had access to the requested data.
The team was furthermore composed in an opaque manner, not of experts appointed by the international community, but of members chosen between the Chinese authorities and the WHO, which itself was not very clear in its attitude. vis-à-vis the Chinese authorities during the management of the epidemic.
In the end, there is only one leader who, when he spoke of Covid-19, spoke of the "Chinese virus", and that is Donald Trump ...
Yes, and since he was no longer taken seriously by the rest of the international community, especially for the contempt he had, on most matters, for knowledge and the truth, no one paid attention.
It is a pity that this reminder of the facts came from him.
As it is a pity that some have launched explanations too early, such as Professor Montagnier who mentioned an artificial origin of the virus without providing any proof.
These two elements explain why it is very difficult today to relaunch the subject.
The debate on the origin of the virus remains totally open, fundamental and potentially explosive.
Open because we still don't know anything about how he was born.
Fundamental because you have to know how it happened to prevent things from happening again.
And potentially explosive because, if China is at fault, the communist power will be indicted, inside and outside the country.
The whole narrative of the ideal management of the pandemic will suddenly collapse.
If Beijing had communicated from the start, the story would have been digested.
But China acted as if it had something to hide; not even the then USSR tried to communicate the effectiveness of the disaster management to infer that the Soviet regime was the best of it. all.
What is the most likely hypothesis about the origin of the virus?
Something happened. We don't know what, but in terms of the consequences, it's Chernobyl to the power of ten.
Chernobyl was an accident. For a week, the Soviet authorities tried to hide it, but they soon had to admit the facts.
Even the then USSR did not try to communicate the effectiveness of the disaster management to infer that the Soviet regime was the best of all.
So today, China speaks as if it has achieved a great feat in controlling an accident at home that has affected the entire planet. It's unbearable.
For a year, China sat on the Pressure Cooker of its original sin and we were all kicked out of the Garden of Eden ... And all this in a city, Wuhan, with a hypermodern infrastructure in the field of virological analysis, with a P4 laboratory built with the help of the French.
There are not more than four or five laboratories on earth with so much expertise in virology. And we don't know why the virus left Wuhan?
The Chinese have all the tools to do forensics and find out where the virus comes from. But they didn't do anything except cover up.
So what do you think happened?
Perhaps the same happened with SARS in 2003, a virus that came out of a Chinese market because of the close proximity between humans and wild animals.
But if so, why didn't the Chinese say so? And why did they not allow the WHO team to do their job? It is therefore unlikely.
The second hypothesis is that of an industrial accident, hence my analogy with Chernobyl. Either security processes were not followed or someone inadvertently made a mistake. The virus was able to escape from a laboratory.
If he started from the famous P4, the Chinese owe us even more explanation. This ultra-sensitive laboratory would never have existed without France.
However, the Chinese have ended cooperation between Beijing and Paris and driven the French out of the system.
Today we are still in immediacy and astonishment. But the time for taking stock will come and the people will demand accountability.
Will we ever know?
It took fifty years for Moscow to recognize its responsibility for the Katyn massacre, the execution in 1940 of 22,000 Polish officers ... Today we are still in immediacy and astonishment.
But the time for taking stock will come and the people will demand accountability.
As Jacques Chirac said, it is at the end of the fair that we count the dung… The original sin remains there and we know how difficult the original sins are to forget… The affair of the origins is a time bomb .
The longer this lasts, the harder it will be for China to explain why it has not said anything. But we'll find out one day.
In the nuclear field, new technologies are now making it possible to reconstruct a posteriori the past actions of certain countries.
As a result, it was discovered that Egypt and South Korea had, at one point, carried out illicit activities. The IAEA called them to account.
Forensic science in virology has also made tremendous progress. We know how to do things today that we didn't know how to do four years ago. Including with old data.
The Covid is not a "cold affair". China is not quit, and just because it lives in relative peace today, because it intimidated Australia, doesn't mean that the water that is sleeping is not going to boil.
One day, the people will demand accountability. Russia cannot have normal relations with Poland today because of Katyn. Some things cannot be forgiven ...
Has the management of the pandemic been so successful in China?
This is the official speech. The Chinese Communist Party, led by a great leader, Xi Jinping, heroically defeated the virus with fewer deaths than Slovakia!
I do not believe for a moment in the Chinese figures concerning the province of Hubei and its capital Wuhan.
The images depicting scenes of chaos at the start of the pandemic are more reminiscent of what happened in Lombardy.
There were bound to be more than 4,000 deaths and China did not handle the pandemic better than Italy at the time.
In the rest of China, it is indeed likely that there were relatively few deaths. The situation is more like what happened in Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, but also Singapore and South Korea, in the countries that have best handled the pandemic.
But this has nothing to do with the nature of the Chinese political regime. China was able to react in time, like some countries in the region, including democracies. It was not the autocrats who discovered the perlimpine powder.
success does not depend on the regime but on actions that were or were not taken in time.
And the political management of Beijing?
China immediately decided to handle the matter at the geopolitical level.
When the epidemic was flaring in Wuhan and factories were closed, the European Union helped China by providing it with masks. Beijing had imposed a condition: no media coverage.
The story shouldn't be made public so as not to make the Chinese lose face!
But when the catastrophe reached Italy, China fully played the diplomacy of the mask, in the media to the extreme its actions and by multiplying, thanks to the "fighting wolves" (the new generation of Chinese diplomats, Editor's note) the declarations on the decline of the West and the lack of mutual aid between countries of the European Union.
The string was so thick that it was counterproductive in our countries. China is reproducing the same policy today with vaccines.
She heavily publicized her commitment to many countries, including friends of France such as Senegal.
However, in terms of vaccination, it does not do better than Europe at home ..
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However, searching for the animal vehicle could be a “red herring”. Cryopolitics of Covid-19 By Frédéric Keck Law & Politics |
There are a dozen laboratories in Wuhan where virologists have worked on coronaviruses since the SARS-Cov emerged in 2003.
This suspicion has been increased by information, published by Shi Zhengli in Virologica Sinica in 2016, suggesting a direct infection from bat guano to miners who worked in a cave in Mojiang (Southern China) and were treated in a hospital in Kunming in 2013.
The hypothesis of a lab accident is also confirmed by phylogenetic trees displaying a “frozen evolution” in bat coronaviruses related to SARS-Cov-2.
An article published in PlosBiology in April 2020 thus connects an outbreak of bluetongue in Europe 2015 to a previous outbreak in 2008, contained by vaccination, showing that the 2008 virus had not been replicating for multiple years prior to its re-emergence in 2015.
The term “frozen evolution” is used when a phylogenetic tree has long branches without mutations, indicating that a virus is stable in a freezer before it escapes and starts mutating again.
It is also used in evolutionary theory to explain the adaptation of species to stable environments.
The debate on the origins of Covid-19 thus takes place at the crossroads of two cold chains which incidentally meet in Wuhan: one connecting farms and markets between North and central China, the other connecting hospitals and labs between South and central China.
The problem of biosecurity in the closed spaces of farms and labs is thus connected to questions of maintenance of the cold chain over long distances, which is also at the heart of discussions on vaccines against Covid-19.
Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal have used the term “cryopolitics”, to contrast it with what Michel Foucault has called “biopolitics”.
While the debate about the origins of COVID-19 asks who is responsible for “making live” and “letting die”, the maintenance of the cold chain aims requires attentions to the degrees and distances in “making latent life and deferring death”.
While the debate on the origins of Covid-19 is characteristic of “hot societies”, replaying the origins to regenerate norms, the investigation on technologies of conservation uses modes of reasoning from “cold societies”, mapping the diversity of non-human species co-evolving with humans.
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01-MAR-2020 :: The Origin of the #CoronaVirus #COVID19 Misc. |
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
“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.”
“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.”
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In 1929, President Herbert Hoover assured the country that things were already “back to normal,” Liaquat Ahamed writes in Lords of Finance World Of Finance |
Five months later, in March 1930, Hoover said the worst would be over “during the next 60 days.”
When that period ended, he said, “We have passed the worst.”
Eventually, Ahamed writes, “when the facts refused to obey Hoover’s forecasts, he started to make them up.”
Government agencies were pressed to issue false data. Officials resigned rather than do so, including the chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And we all know how that turned out: The Great Depression.
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World food prices rose for a ninth consecutive month in February, hitting their highest level since July 2014, led by jumps in sugar and vegetable oils, the United Nations food agency said on Thursday. @ReutersBiz Commodities |
The Food and Agriculture Organization’s food price index, which measures monthly changes for a basket of cereals, oilseeds, dairy products, meat and sugar, averaged 116.0 points last month versus a slightly revised 113.2 in January.
The Rome-based FAO also said in a statement that worldwide cereal harvests remained on course to hit an annual record in 2020, adding that early indications pointed to a further increase in production this year.
FAO’s cereal price index climbed 1.2% month on month in February.
Among major coarse grains, sorghum prices increased the most, rising 17.4% on the month and 82.1% year on year, driven by strong demand from China.
Maize and rice prices edged up while wheat export prices remained largely stable, FAO said.
Sugar prices climbed 6.4% month on month amid concerns over supplies in 2020/21 because of production falls in major producing countries and strong demand from Asia. [SOF/L]
The vegetable oil price index increased 6.2% to reach its highest level since April 2012, with palm oil prices rising for a ninth month, lifted by worries over low inventories in major exporting nations.
Dairy prices rose 1.7%, while the meat index posted a modest 0.6% gain.
FAO said pig meat quotations fell, hit by reduced purchases from China amid heavy oversupply and a rise in unsold pigs in Germany due to a ban on exports to Asian markets.
FAO raised its forecast for the 2020 cereal season to 2.761 billion tonnes from an estimate of 2.744 billion made last month pointing to a 1.9% increase year on year.
That revision reflected a 7.5 million tonne increase in the world wheat production estimate, driven by recently released official data from Australia, the European Union, Kazakhstan and Russia.
The forecast for global rice production was also raised by 2.6 million tonnes from last month on more buoyant production forecasts from India.
FAO raised its forecast for global cereal stocks ending in 2021 by 9 million tonnes to 811 million which would represent a 0.9% decline year on year.
“Looking ahead, current indications suggest a small rise in world cereal production in 2021,” FAO said.
“While most of the wheat crop in the northern hemisphere is still dormant and southern hemisphere countries are yet to plant, FAO’s preliminarily forecast for global wheat production in 2021 points to a third consecutive annual increase, to 780 million tonnes, a new record.”
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Turning to Africa the Spinning Top Africa |
Democracy from Tanzania to Zimbabwe to Cameroon has been shredded.
We are getting closer and closer to the Virilian Tipping Point
“The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street''
Political leadership in most cases completely gerontocratic will use violence to cling onto Power but any Early Warning System would be warning a Tsunami is coming
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Ethiopia: Persistent, credible reports of grave violations in Tigray underscore urgent need for human rights access – @mbachelet @UNHumanRights Africa |
“Deeply distressing reports of sexual and gender-based violence, extrajudicial killings, widespread destruction and looting of public and private property by all parties continue to be shared with us, as well as reports of continued fighting in central Tigray in particular,” Bachelet said.
“Credible information also continues to emerge about serious violations of international human rights law and humanitarian law by all parties to the conflict in Tigray in November last year.”
“Without prompt, impartial and transparent investigations and holding those responsible accountable, I fear violations will continue to be committed with impunity, and the situation will remain volatile for a long time to come.”
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Eritrean armed forces massacred scores of civilians, including children as young as 13, in the historic town of Axum in Ethiopia’s Tigray region in November 2020, @hrw Africa |
The United Nations should urgently establish an independent inquiry into war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in the region to pave the way for accountability, and Ethiopian authorities should grant it full and immediate access.
“Eritrean troops committed heinous killings in Axum with wanton disregard for civilian lives,” said Laetitia Bader, Horn of Africa director at Human Rights Watch.
“Ethiopian and Eritrean officials can no longer hide behind a curtain of denial, but should allow space for justice and redress, not add to the layers of trauma that survivors already face.”
Survivors consistently identified Eritrean troops by the vehicles bearing Eritrean license plates, their distinctive uniforms, the spoken dialect of Tigrinya, and their plastic “congo” shoes, worn by Eritrean forces since the liberation struggle.
Crimes against humanity include murder and other unlawful acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population.
“Hyenas had eaten the corpses on May Quho, so we didn’t collect many dead bodies from there,” said one man carrying the dead. “I counted around 25 remains that could not be identified.” Another said: “The hill was like a graveyard, a ghost hill.”
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@PMEthiopia has launched an unwinnable War on Tigray Province. Africa |
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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They fancied themselves free, wrote Camus, ―and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences. Africa |
In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences.
A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.
But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they have taken no precautions
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.@StanbicKE reports FY 2020 EPS -18.469% Earnings here N.S.E Equities - Finance & Investment |
Par Value: 5/-
Closing Price: 83.75
Total Shares Issued: 395321638.00
Market Capitalization: 33,108,187,183
EPS: 13.13
PE: 6.378
The Kenyan Banc assurance model includes CFC Bank, CFC Financial Services and Heritage Assurance.
Stanbic Holdings reports FY 2020 Earnings versus FY 2019
FY Loans and Advances to Customers 196.300029b versus 191.194571b
FY Financial Investments 87.583535b versus 70.077921b
FY Total Assets 328.594515b versus 303.624592b
FY Deposits from Banks and Customers 259.970053b versus 224.672913b
FY Total Liabilities 276.863559b versus 254.589827b
FY Net Interest Income 12.795161b versus 13.347740b
FY Non-Interest Revenue 10.442209b versus 11.433073b
FY Total Income 23.237370b versus 24.780813b
Credit Impairment Charges [4.875692b] versus [3.150559b]
FY Income after Impairment charges 18.361678b versus 21.630254b
FY Total Operating Expenses [12.134524b] versus [13.920490b]
FY Profit before Taxation 6.227154b versus 7.709764b
FY Profit after Tax 5.192240b versus 6.380616b
FY EPS 13.13 versus 16.14 -18.649%
FY DIVIDEND 3.80 versus 7.05
Cash and Cash Equivalents 95.436759b versus 85.210690b
NPL ratio came in at 15.3% As at 3Q20, NPL ratio stood at 11.8%.
Stanbic bank is currently trading at a P/B multiple of 1.0x
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