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Friday 06th of January 2017 |
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All the ladies wanted to see le ne'gre du Czar at their houses, and they vied with one another to catch him Africa |
That same night he left for Russia. The journey did not seem as terrible as he had expected. His imagination triumphed over reality. The farther he got from Paris the more vivid and the closer did the objects he was leaving for ever present themselves to him.
Without realizing it, he reached the Russian frontier. Autumn had already set in, but in spite of the bad state of the roads he was driven with the speed of the wind, and on the morning of the seventeenth day of his journey he arrived at Krasnoye Selo, through which at that time the highway ran.
There were still another twenty-eight versts to Petersburg. While the horses were being changed Ibrahim went into the post-house. In a corner, a tall man wearing a green caftan and with a clay pipe in his mouth, was reading the Hamburg newspapers, leaning with his elbows on the table. Hearing somebody come in, he looked up.
"Ah, Ibrahim!" he cried, rising from the bench. " How are you, my godson?"
Ibrahim, recognizing Peter, rushed forward to him in delight, but respectfully stopped short. The Tsar drew near, embraced him and kissed him on the forehead.
"I was told you were coming," said Peter, "and came here to meet you. I've been waiting for you since yesterday." Ibrahim could not find words to express his gratitude. "Order your carriage to follow on behind," the Tsar continued; "you come and sit with me, and we'll go home."
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Mysterious radio signal traced to dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away @CNNI Africa |
A mysterious signal that has confounded scientists for years has been traced to a spot in the sky more than 3 billion light-years away. Almost a decade after the first fast radio burst (FRB) was discovered, an international team of researchers has pinpointed the origin of one such signal as a dwarf galaxy in the pentagon-shaped constellation Auriga. Scientists originally thought the signal -- sporadic bursts of radio waves -- was coming from within the Milky Way itself, or from our closest galactic neighbors, but a new report in the journal Nature confirms it emanates from a tiny galaxy 1% the mass of our own. "These radio flashes must have enormous amounts of energy to be visible from over 3 billion light-years away," Cornell University researcher Shami Chatterjee said in a statement.
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"We have a deviate, Tomahawk." Africa |
Don DeLillo, who is a prophetic 21st writer, writes as follows in one of his short stories: The specialist is monitoring data on his mission console when a voice breaks in, “a voice that carried with it a strange and unspecifiable poignancy” He checks in with his flight-dynamics and conceptual-paradigm officers at Colorado Command: “We have a deviate, Tomahawk.” “We copy. There’s a voice.” “We have gross oscillation here.” “There’s some interference. I have gone redundant but I’m not sure it’s helping.” “We are clearing an outframe to locate source.” “Thank you, Colorado.” “It is probably just selective noise. You are negative red on the step-function quad.” “It was a voice,” I told them. “We have just received an affirm on selective noise... We will correct, Tomahawk. In the meantime, advise you to stay redundant.” The voice, in contrast to Colorado’s metallic pidgin, is a melange of repartee, laughter, and song, with a “quality of purest, sweetest sadness”. “Somehow we are picking up signals from radio programmes of 40, 50, 60 years ago.” I have no doubt that Putin ran a seriously 21st predominantly digital programme of interference which amplified the Trump candidacy.
“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” ― Neil Armstrong
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THE POETRY OF RUMI By Rozina Ali @rozina_ali @NewYorker Africa |
A couple of years ago, when Coldplay’s Chris Martin was going through a divorce from the actress Gwyneth Paltrow and feeling down, a friend gave him a book to lift his spirits. It was a collection of poetry by Jalaluddin Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet, translated by Coleman Barks.
Rumi is often described as the best-selling poet in the United States.
Rumi was born in the early thirteenth century, in what is now Afghanistan. He later settled in Konya, in present-day Turkey, with his family.
Rumi continued his theological education in Syria, where he studied the more traditional legal codes of Sunni Islam, and later returned to Konya as a seminary teacher. It was there that he met an elder traveller, Shams-i-Tabriz, who became his mentor. The nature of the intimate friendship between the two is much debated, but Shams, everyone agrees, had a lasting influence on Rumi’s religious practice and his poetry.
Rumi built a large following in cosmopolitan Konya, incorporating Sufis, Muslim literalists and theologians, Christians, and Jews, as well as the local Sunni Seljuk rulers.
Conclusions
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McCain added that the point of the hearings was "not to question the results of the election." New Yorker Law & Politics |
McCain, after his suggestion that the Russian role was historic in nature, quickly added that the point of the hearings was “not to question the results of the election.” In one of his first questions to Clapper, McCain said that if the Russians had been successful “in changing the results of an election, which none of us believe they were”—he drew that word out, into what sounded like a cross between a purr and a warning, and then continued—“that would have to constitute an attack on the United States of America because of the effects if they had succeeded, would you agree with that?”
Conclusions
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The U.S. doesn't have a problem with Russia. It has a problem with Vladimir Putin @Kasparov63 Law & Politics |
With Putin’s background as a career KGB officer, he takes a particular interest in operations dealing with that organization’s specialties of disinformation and manipulation. The KGB is called the FSB these days, a makeover that made sense after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but under Putin it is as aggressive as ever in its mission of infiltrating and destabilizing the West.
The Russian meddling in the 2016 election documented by the Obama administration last week relied on partisan enmity to disregard its origins and the eagerness of American news outlets to take their cues from social media by turning stolen emails into daily headlines about their trivial content. Editors and algorithms designed to maximize social sharing were woefully unprepared for a coordinated and well-funded propaganda assault.
Hacking is an ideal new front in this type of shadow war. It’s difficult to trace and, like terrorist attacks, cyberwar has a very high impact-to-cost ratio.
Unfortunately, the United States and Putin’s other main target, the European Union, are proving unable to defend themselves from Putin’s hybrid war and unwilling to respond forcefully once attacked. The United States and Europe possess overwhelming economic and military advantages, but they’re being pushed around by Putin because they are unwilling to use them — or even threaten to use them — and he knows it. Putin grows bolder with each victory, and what greater success could he achieve than influencing the American election? Even if the Russian hacking and propaganda onslaught were not decisive in installing the most blatantly pro-Russian major-party candidate in U.S. history, that goal was accomplished nonetheless, making Putin look like a big global player again.
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We do not live in a "post-truth" world, neither in the Middle East nor in the West - nor in Russia, for that matter. Law & Politics |
We live in a world of lies. And we always have lived in a world of lies.
Just take a look at the wreckage of the Middle East with its history of people’s popular republics and its hateful dictators. They feast on dishonesty, although they all – bar the late Muammar al-Gaddafi – demand regular elections to make-believe their way back to power.
Now, I suppose, it is we who have regular elections based on lies. So maybe Trump and the Arab autocrats will get on rather well. Trump already likes Field Marshal/President al-Sissi of Egypt, and he’s already got a golf course in Dubai. That he deals in lies, that he manufactures facts, should make him quite at home in the Middle East. Misogyny, bullying, threats to political opponents, authoritarianism, tyranny, torture, sneers at minorities: it’s part and parcel of the Arab world.
And look at Israel. The new US ambassador-to-be – who might as well be the Israeli ambassador to the US – can’t wait to move the American embassy to Jerusalem. He seems to feel more antagonism towards the Jewish left in America than the Palestinians who claim East Jerusalem as a capital and whose state he has no interest in. Will Trump enrage the Arabs? Or will he get away with a little domestic rearrangement of the Israel embassy on the grounds that the Gulf Arabs, at least, know that Israel’s anti-Shiism – against Syria, Iran and Hezbollah – fits in rather well with the Sunni potentates who’ve been funding Isis and Jabhat al-Nusrah and all the other jolly jihadis?
I’ve never accepted the nonsense about Nazism and the American right. Trump is not Hitler, although there is a kind of theatrical fascism about his performance. He’s more buffoon than satanic, more Duce than Fuehrer. Cesare Rossi, an early collaborator of Mussolini, once described his leader as moving quickly “from cynicism to idealism, from impulsiveness to caution, generosity to cruelty... moderation to intransigence. It was as though he never knew his genuine self and was always striving after some counterfeit impersonation.” Could there be a better description of Trump?
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Dollar Traders Challenge Trump-Rally Thesis for the First Time World Currencies |
The dollar’s biggest two-month rally against the yen in two decades came to an abrupt halt Thursday, with the greenback slumping as much as 1.7 percent. Several triggers fueled the slide, including China’s central bank muscling into the funding market to support the yuan, as well as improving economic data from China and Europe juxtaposed with U.S. figures suggesting the job market may be softening.
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For every flight departing Dubai as cabin crew head to their airplanes last room they traverse is a hall with mirrors Emerging Markets |
In their fifth week of training, women hired as flight attendants at Emirates Airline spend a day in Dubai with Pamela Mizzi. A makeup artist from Malta who spent 12 years in the sky herself, Mizzi greets the students in a windowless instruction space about 20 feet across, lined on three sides by mirrors divided into vanities by bright roundels of light, like an old-timey dressing room. Her job is to teach the trainees how Emirates expects them to look.
Female cabin crew, referred to invariably as “girls,” are to tie their hair back in tight buns, preferably secured by a scrunchie in Emirates-brand red. For makeup, a seven-step process is recommended, starting with foundation and concealer, then moving on to lipstick, also in preauthorized shades of crimson. At the back of Mizzi’s classroom are two display racks of Emirates-approved emollients for “body shaping,” “firming,” “wrinkle control,” and “luminosity.”
“We have standards in regards to nail care,” Mizzi says. The same is true for weight. If a crew member looks too heavy, his or her superiors are to report their suspicions to a central fitness and nutrition department. “And they follow up,” she says. Little escapes scrutiny. By the time crew members reach Mizzi’s classroom, they have moved into Emirates-managed apartments with Emirates-imposed curfews, travel to work in Emirates-branded minibuses, and see Emirates-employed doctors at in-house Emirates clinics.
Frontier Markets
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An Exit Plan for Congo's Kabila NYT Africa |
Either President Joseph Kabila honors the deal, in which case he steps down at the end of the year, elections are held, political prisoners are freed and a political crisis is averted — or he uses the time to figure out how he can keep clinging to power.
At this stage nobody knows which it will be. As Jeffrey Gettleman reported in The Times, Mr. Kabila, who has already overstayed his term in office, is probably not interested in remaining president for life. Holed up in his Kinshasa mansion, he has shown little interest in ruling Congo, and he has already looted his resource-rich country of untold millions. But like many another rapacious strongmen, the president, who is 45, is also keenly aware that his loot and his life are safe only as long as he has the presidential levers and guns to preserve them.
So there is every reason to be skeptical that Mr. Kabila will honor the deal. In fact, while members of both his and the opposition party have signed it, he has not — thinking, perhaps, that he can kick the can down the road and that a solution that preserves his power will pop up. It is therefore up to the bishops, the opposition, the United States and others interested in bringing a modicum of democracy to Congo to persuade him that he has been offered the best and only available exit plan.
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"The fact of the matter is, he has no good exit plan, so he has little interest in respecting this agreement," said Jason Sterns Africa |
Mr. Stearns was not all negative about the deal, saying it was “astounding” that Mr. Kabila’s side had agreed to important concessions, such as appointing a member of the opposition to be the new prime minister and not changing the Constitution so that Mr. Kabila could run again.
But Mr. Stearns also said Mr. Kabila “could have just realized that he needed a good excuse to kick the can down the road further and a solution would pop up in the long term.”
And why did the opposition agree?
Opposition leaders had vowed never to allow Mr. Kabila to stay in office beyond Dec. 20. They threatened to mobilize millions in an Arab Spring-like uprising to drive him out.
That did not happen. Some demonstrators hit the streets on Dec. 19 and 20, but they were quickly run off by the security forces, who have remained loyal to Mr. Kabila partly because he has paid them relatively well despite a crashing national economy.
Conclusions
Round 1 in the Battle for the Street goes to President Kabila
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12-DEC-2016 :: A trend-change is at hand. Africa |
Africa is a very non-linear place but recent elections from President Buhari of Nigeria through president-elect Barrow in the Gambia through president-elect Akufo-Addo of Ghana (pictured below) is surely signalling a trend-change is at hand.
You might turn around and ask: What about the DRC where a President with less than 10% national support is manoeuvring to hold on? Burundi? Ethiopia? Zimbabwe? Equatorial Guinea? and too many more to mention.
The big picture point is in fact a demographic one. Many commentators define the African population surge as a ‘’dividend’’ but what is clear is that if it is allowed a Free and Fair vote its going be a Terminator for a whole number of regimes. The demographic bulge is now arriving at voting age. is is that moment, its importance cannot be gainsaid. These regimes are now facing an existentialist crisis.
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Kenyan Senate Passes Controversial Electoral Law Amendments Kenyan Economy |
The amendments to the electoral law provide for a manual mechanism for voter registration and results transmission as a fall-back plan should electronic methods fail. The Coalition for Reforms and Democracy, Kenya’s main political opposition group, says the changes may open the electoral system to abuse by enabling the registration of dead people or under-aged voters.
The proposed changes were approved by the National Assembly last month. CORD, led by ex-Premier Raila Odinga has threatened nationwide street protests should President Uhuru Kenyatta signs the amendments into law.
Kenyatta, 55, is seeking a second term at general polls on Aug. 8. He won the 2013 presidential elections with 50.07 percent of the total followed by Odinga, who got 43.3 percent.
Conclusions
Closely contested Elections present a clear and present danger in SSA. The LSE in a report I quoted last year spoke to anti-Incumbency Trend across the Continent. Its a little like what drove Trump. ABC or ABI [Anyone but Clinton or Anyone but Incumbent]. Furthermore, we have a big spike in newly enfranchised Young People, the bulge has passed meaningfully into the voting configuration. The Opposition need to coalesce around a left-field candidate like Adama Barrow. This Election is president Kenyatta's to lose.
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N.S.E Today |
Globally there has been plenty of action. The Chinese Authorities squeezed overnight lending rates for the Yuan to as high as 100% burning short Sellers. The Chinese currency strengthened by the most in 11 years this week. BITCOIN as i have previously mentioned has become a proxy for Chinese capital flight and the rebound in the Yuan was a catalyst for a big sell-off in BITCOIN. I am bullish BITCOIN in 2017.
The Kenya Shilling was last trading at 103.70. The Slide [which seems to have captured everyone's attention] is -1.17% since the start of the Year. The Media and most commentators are fixated by the Dollar Exchange Rate and it worth noting that the Dollar has been on a tear since November 8th and the Election of Donald J. Trump. The Shilling has outperformed in point of fact, its fall against the Dollar is less than the Dollar Index has risen. So that is the first Point, the Shilling is having to face down a very vibrant and muscular ''Trump'' Dollar, which, for example, has sent the likes of the Malaysian Ringgit [close to 20 year lows] and the Turkish Lira to a record Low [Turkey of course has its own internal dynamic of Syrian-spillover risk]. So a Strong Dollar was demanding a retracement of the Shilling. A further consideration is that on a trade-weighted basis the Shilling has been strengthening. Sub-optimal Precipitation [weather shocks have triggered outsize inflationary effects via higher food prices] and an Election Year have also turned some Investors more defensive. There is also a sense that the Central Bank might dial down the level of their interventions. Finally, Kenya [and the rest of East Africa] received a significant Tail-Wind from lower Oil Prices and of late Crude Oil Prices have floated higher on OPEC Quota Optimism. I expect Crude Oil prices to hold below a $60.00 a Barrel in New York and that therefore Oil related worries are overblown. Currency concerns might well be pressuring the Stock Market as the selling was broad-based across the Big Caps today. The Nairobi All Share slumped -1.285% to close at a 4 month Low of 129.76. The All Share us -2.68% in 2017. The Nairobi NSE20 Index retreated -0.99% to close at 3139.21. Equity turnover was 779.916m with most of it transacted in Safaricom.
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N.S.E Equities - Commercial & Services |
Safaricom eased back -1.06% to close at 18.60 and traded 28.016m shares worth 521.513m.
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N.S.E Equities - Finance & Investment |
The Banking Stocks came under persistent sell-side pressure today. KCB Group was marked down -3.48% to close at 27.75 a 9 week low. KCB traded 3.180m shares worth 88.712m. Equity Group traded -3.36% lower to close at 28.75 a 12 week Low. Equity traded 2.118m shares.
BRITAM firmed +1.82% to close at 11.20 and closed out the first week of 2017 +11.2% having traded as high as 13.90 during the week.
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N.S.E Equities - Industrial & Allied |
EABL closed -1.71% at 229.00 and traded 275,100 shares.
Mumias Sugar bucked the bearish trend and bounced 4% to close at 1.30 and was trading 1.35 +8.00% for most of the session.
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