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Tuesday 04th of August 2020
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To this day, the natural reservoir of Marburg is unknown. Marburg lives somewhere in the shadow of Mt. Elgon. Crisis in the Hot Zone Lessons from an outbreak of Ebola. Richard Preston Africa |
In 1980, a French engineer who was employed by the Nzoia Sugar Company at a factory in Kenya within sight of Mt. Elgon developed Marburg and died. He was an amateur naturalist who spent time camping and hiking around Mt. Elgon, and he had recently visited a cavern on the Kenyan side of the mountain which was known as Kitum Cave. It wasn’t clear where the Frenchman had picked up the virus, whether at the sugar factory or outdoors. Then, in the late summer of 1987, a Danish boy whose name will be given here as Peter Cardinal visited the Kenyan side of Mt. Elgon with his parents—the Cardinals were tourists—and the boy broke with Marburg and died. Epidemiologists at usamriid became interested in the cases, and they traced the movements of the French engineer and the Danish boy in the days before their illnesses and deaths. The result was weird. The paths of the French engineer and the Danish boy had crossed only once—in Kitum Cave. Peter Cardinal had gone inside Kitum Cave. As for the Ugandan trappers who had collected the original Marburg monkeys, they might have poached them from the Kenyan side of Mt. Elgon. Those monkeys might have lived near Kitum Cave, and might even have occasionally visited the cave. Mt. Elgon is a huge, eroded volcanic massif, fifty miles across—one of the largest volcanoes in East Africa. Kitum Cave is one of a number of caverns that penetrate Mt. Elgon at an altitude of around eight thousand feet and open their mouths in a deep forest of podo trees, African junipers, African olives, and camphors. Kitum Cave descends into tight passages and underground pools that extend an unknown distance back into Mt. Elgon. The volcanic rock within Kitum Cave is permeated with mineral salts. Elephants go inside the cave to root out chunks of salty rock with their tusks and chew on them. Water buffalo also visit the cave to lick the rocks, and they may be followed into the cave by leopards. Fruit bats and insect-eating bats roost in the cave, filling the air with a sour smell. The animals drop their dung in the cave—an enclosed airspace—and they attract biting flies and carry ticks and mites. The volcanic rock contains petrified logs, the remains of trees that were enveloped in lava, and the logs are filled with sharp crystals. Peter Cardinal may have handled crystals inside the cave and scratched his hands. Possibly the crystals were tainted with animal urine or the remains of an insect. The Army keeps some of Peter Cardinal’s tissues frozen in cryovials, and the Cardinal strain is viciously hot. It kills guinea pigs like flies. In February, 1988, a few months after Peter Cardinal died, the Army sent a team of epidemiologists to Kitum Cave. The team wore Racal suits inside the cave. A Racal is a lightweight pressurized suit with a filtered air supply, used for hot operations in the field. There is no vaccine for Marburg, and the Army people had come to believe that the virus could be spread through the air. Near and inside the cave they set out, in cages, guinea pigs and primates—baboons, green monkeys, and Sykes’ monkeys—and they surrounded the cages with electrified wire to discourage predators. The guinea pigs and monkeys were sentinel animals, like canaries in a coal mine: they were placed there in the theory or the hope that some of them would develop Marburg. With the help of Kenyan naturalists, the Army team trapped as many different kinds of wild mammals as they could find, including rodents, rock hyraxes, and bats, and drew blood from them. They collected insects. Some local people, the il-Kony, had lived in some of the caves. A Kenyan doctor from the Kenya Medical Research Institute, in Nairobi, drew blood from these people and took their medical histories. At the far end of Kitum Cave, where it disappears in pools of water, the Army team found a population of sand flies. They mashed some flies and tested them for Marburg. The expedition was a dry hole. The sentinel animals remained healthy, and the blood and tissue samples from the mammals, insects, arthropods, and local people showed no obvious signs of Marburg. To this day, the natural reservoir of Marburg is unknown. Marburg lives somewhere in the shadow of Mt. Elgon. |
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The risk of miscalculation, escalation and conflict between the US and China in the coming months is dangerously high, including around Hong Kong, Taiwan and particularly in the South China Sea. @ForeignAffairs @MrKRudd Law & Politics |
In just a few short months, the U.S.-Chinese relationship seems to have returned to an earlier, more primal age.
The world now finds itself at the most dangerous moment in the relationship since the Taiwan Strait crises of the 1950s.
The question now being asked, quietly but nervously, in capitals around the world is, where will this end?
The once unthinkable outcome—actual armed conflict between the United States and China—now appears possible for the first time since the end of the Korean War.
In other words, we are confronting the prospect of not just a new Cold War, but a hot one as well.Beijing has concluded it has much more freedom to maneuver in prosecuting its interests. Xi, however, is a master politician, steeped in the dark arts of his Machiavellian craft.
Taiwan has long been the single-biggest challenge in the U.S.-Chinese relationship. From the CCP’s perspective, one grounded in both ideology and nationalism, the “return of Taiwan to the motherland’s tender embrace,” as party veterans would put it, would complete the revolution of 1949.
It has also contributed to the general hardening of Taiwanese sentiment to any form of reunification with the mainland; recent opinion polls indicate that a record 90 percent of people in Taiwan now self-identify as Taiwanese rather than as Chinese.
It is increasingly plain from the impatience in Xi’s language that he wishes to see Taiwan return to Chinese sovereignty within his own political term. Whether he can do so or not is a separate question.
If Xi were to succeed, he would match, and perhaps even surpass, Mao’s place in party and national history.
Accordingly, any Chinese military push against Taiwan is more likely to come later in the 2020s, when Beijing thinks the military balance will have shifted even further in its favor—enough to effectively deter the United States and perhaps cause Taiwan to capitulate without a fight.
For now, all three parties—Beijing, Taipei, and Washington—have chosen to remain just within the broad parameters of permissible conduct. And while the DPP administration in Taipei is bold, it is not reckless.
Still, in the current political environment, the Trump administration could choose to escalate—by, say, allowing a U.S. naval visit to a Taiwanese port. The incendiary effect of such an action would be politically impossible for the Chinese leadership to ignore.
It is conceivable that China could retaliate by starting a “low-intensity” conflict centered on Taiwan’s offshore islands, such as the Dongsha Islands or Taiping Island (both in the South China Sea) or Wuqiu Island (just off the coast of the mainland).
The sea has become a case study in China’s “grey zone” strategy: using coast guard and fisheries operations to establish de facto territorial and maritime claims while avoiding the direct deployment of naval assets unless absolutely necessary.
Since then, the U.S. navy has ramped up its semiregular freedom-of-navigation operations in the area, going from two in 2015 to nine in 2019. The United States has also continued air reconnaissance flights along the Chinese coast and across the South China Sea.
Now, for the first time, Washington was formally rejecting the international legal validity of all Chinese maritime claims. (Australia followed suit ten days later, with a formal statement to the United Nations.) The South China Sea has thus become a tense, volatile, and potentially explosive theater
The question for both U.S. and Chinese leaders is, what happens now in the event of a significant collision? If an aircraft is downed, or a naval vessel sunk or disabled, what next steps have been agreed in order to avoid immediate military escalation?
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15 OCT 18 :: War is coming Law & Politics |
By March 2018 in a Shakespeare level moment of hubris, Xinhua pro- nounced this historical announce- ment; the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China “proposed to remove the expression that ‘the president and vice-president of the People’s Republic of China shall serve no more than two consecutive terms’ from the country’s constitution.”
In one fell swoop, President Xi Jinping was President for Life. That was the Apogee.
‘’This geopolitical contest will likely escalate dangerously. Powerful forces on both sides are driving the world’s two strongest countries toward full-fle- dged confrontation’’ [The writer is the Douglas Dillon professor of government at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of ‘Destined for War’ in the FT]
As a candidate, Do- nald Trump complained that China was “raping” America. After months of smaller steps, his administration has now pledged to fight back hard on all fronts — and win.
The US military is reportedly planning to send US warships, combat aircraft, and troops through the South China Sea, Taiwan Strait, and other contested waterways next month in a series of exercises designed to send a message to Beijing in November.
The incident with the USS Decatur where a Chinese warship came within 45 yards of the USS Decatur in South China Sea is surely a precursor.
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7 OCT 19 :: China turns 70 China |
They have “stood up.” Xi’s model is one of technocratic authoritarianism and a recent addition to his book shelf include The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos. Xi is building an Algorithmic Society.
Some of the Xi-era slogans are short and simple, in the manner of Western advertising, such as the “Chinese Dream,” the catchphrase embodying the party’s aim to be- come a global power by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People Republic of China.
But Xi has taken the propagation of ideology and the cult of personality to extremes not seen since the days of Chairman Mao.
Xi in fact has replaced Jesus in Churches and Mohamed in the mosques. “Unity is iron and steel; unity is a source of strength,”
“Complete reunification of the motherland is an inevitable trend..no one and no force can ever stop it!” he added.
Today we know the Chinese economy is slowing, but Xi is relying on Chinese resilience
“If there is a decoupling between the two econo- mies, so be it. The Chinese people can endure more pain than the spoiled and hubristic Americans.
“The Folks in Hong Kong [whom Xi is seeking to unmask so he can exercise algorithmic control over them] are in open rebellion.
Joshua Wong told German Media “Hongkong ist das neue Berlin”
I am sure Xi sees Hong Kong and Taiwan like a virus and he is looking to impose a quarantine just like he has imposed on Xinjiang.
The Chinese Dream has become a nightmare at the boundaries of the Han Empire.
The World in the 21st century exhibits viral, wildfire and exponential characteristics and feedback loops which only become obvious in hindsight. I would venture that Xi’s high water mark is behind him.
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Coronavirus: Iran cover-up of deaths revealed by data leak BBC Misc. |
The government's own records appear to show almost 42,000 people died with Covid-19 symptoms up to 20 July, versus 14,405 reported by its health ministry.
The number of people known to be infected is also almost double official figures: 451,024 as opposed to 278,827.
The first death in Iran from Covid-19 was recorded on 22 January, according to lists and medical records that have been passed to the BBC.
This was almost a month before the first official case of coronavirus was reported there.
The city of Qom, the initial epicentre of the virus in Iran, is worst hit proportionally, with 1,419 deaths - that is one death with Covid-19 for every 1,000 people.
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“Not getting to the bottom of this crisis would be the height of absurdity. Too much is at stake'' @JamieMetzl Law & Politics |
“Not getting to the bottom of this crisis would be the height of absurdity. Too much is at stake. To ensure everyone’s safety, the WHO and outside investigators must be empowered to explore all relevant questions about the origins of the pandemic without limits. This comprehensive forensic investigation must include full access to all of the scientists, biological samples, laboratory records and other materials from the Wuhan virology institutes and other relevant Chinese organizations. Denying that access should be considered an admission of guilt by Beijing.” |
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Dear @MaEllenSirleaf & @HelenClarkNZ The starting point of your enquiry has to be precisely what is being precluded below because “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.” #COVID19 China |
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 – Wuhan is to the CCP as Idlib is to the Syrian Regime – and propagated world wide.
According to Daszak, the mine sample had been stored in Wuhan for six years. Its scientists “went back to that sample in 2020, in early January or maybe even at the end of last year, I don’t know. They tried to get full genome sequencing, which is important to find out the whole diversity of the viral genome.”
However, after sequencing the full genome for RaTG13 the lab’s sample of the virus disintegrated, he said. “I think they tried to culture it but they were unable to, so that sample, I think, has gone.”
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Goodbye Weak Dollar, Hello Emerging Market Crisis? @markets @bopinion World Currencies |
But last week ended with a distinct variation of the theme. The 10-year real yield dropped below minus 1% for the first time since inflation-protected Treasury bonds have been on issue.
Also, a strong dollar causes problems for emerging markets. The depreciation of the last few months should have relieved pressure on a number that had taken on too much dollar-denominated debt.
The only problem is that this hasn’t in fact happened. The following chart, from NatWest Markets, shows that the dollar’s weakness of June and July has been almost solely about the strength of other developed-market currencies, particularly the euro.
Against Asian currencies it has held steady. And against “high-yield” emerging market currencies, it has actually strengthened.
This NatWest Markets chart shows that despite the precipitous fall in U.S. real yields, emerging markets rates are at the narrowest spread over rates in the G-10 since the taper tantrum of 2013.
Potential pressure on emerging markets remains considerable if the dollar begins to regain strength:
The critical flaw in the dollar over the last two months has been the deterioration in the public health situation in the U.S., while other countries continued to have the virus under some kind of control.
The resurgence being seen in the virus is posing a speed bump in the re-opening and recovery process. The work of monetary and fiscal policy is not over.
In particular, there is growing evidence that Covid can lead to ongoing damage to the heart, even in the healthy 20-somethings who would be allowed to take part in such tests.
In the U.S., the fact that Eduardo Rodriguez, a well-known baseball pitcher, who is 27 years old and built like an ox, has been forced to abandon the current season with myocarditis following a Covid-19 infection makes clear that this could infect anyone.
My main impression after spending two weeks immersing myself in vaccine development and the battles between bio-ethicists is that investors should beware of treating this as a process with binary outcomes, or even one with a finite outcome.
It’s quite possible that the first four or five vaccine candidates won’t work.
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How the Pandemic Defeated America A virus has brought the world’s most powerful country to its knees. @TheAtlantic Misc. |
How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom.
In the first half of 2020, SARS‑CoV‑2—the new coronavirus behind the disease COVID‑19—infected 10 million people around the world and killed about half a million. But few countries have been as severely hit as the United States, which has just 4 percent of the world’s population but a quarter of its confirmed COVID‑19 cases and deaths.
“The U.S. fundamentally failed in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined,” Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me.
Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields. I’ve learned that almost everything that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable.
But the COVID‑19 debacle has also touched—and implicated—nearly every other facet of American society: its shortsighted leadership, its disregard for expertise, its racial inequities, its social-media culture, and its fealty to a dangerous strain of individualism.
How will the U.S. fare when “we can’t even deal with a starter pandemic?,” Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and an Atlantic contributing writer, asked me.
The pandemic can be prevented in two ways: Stop an infection from ever arising, or stop an infection from becoming thousands more. Humanity has squeezed the world’s wildlife in a crushing grip—and viruses have come bursting out.
Trump, who had spent his entire presidency learning that he could say whatever he wanted without consequence, assured Americans that “the coronavirus is very much under control,” and “like a miracle, it will disappear.” With impunity, Trump lied. With impunity, the virus spread.
On February 26, Trump asserted that cases were “going to be down to close to zero.” Over the next two months, at least 1 million Americans were infected.The CDC developed and distributed its own diagnostic tests in late January. These proved useless because of a faulty chemical component.
Meanwhile, Sabeti’s lab developed a diagnostic test in mid-January and sent it to colleagues in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. “We had working diagnostics in those countries well before we did in any U.S. states,” she told me.
It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly the testing debacle incapacitated the U.S. People with debilitating symptoms couldn’t find out what was wrong with them. Health officials couldn’t cut off chains of transmission by identifying people who were sick and asking them to isolate themselves.
Water running along a pavement will readily seep into every crack; so, too, did the unchecked coronavirus seep into every fault line in the modern world. Consider our buildings. In response to the global energy crisis of the 1970s, architects made structures more energy-efficient by sealing them off from outdoor air, reducing ventilation rates. Pollutants and pathogens built up indoors, “ushering in the era of ‘sick buildings,’ ” says Joseph Allen, who studies environmental health at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Energy efficiency is a pillar of modern climate policy, but there are ways to achieve it without sacrificing well-being. “We lost our way over the years and stopped designing buildings for people,” Allen says.
The indoor spaces in which Americans spend 87 percent of their time became staging grounds for super-spreading events. One study showed that the odds of catching the virus from an infected person are roughly 19 times higher indoors than in open air. Shielded from the elements and among crowds clustered in prolonged proximity, the coronavirus ran rampant in the conference rooms of a Boston hotel, the cabins of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and a church hall in Washington State where a choir practiced for just a few hours.
The hardest-hit buildings were those that had been jammed with people for decades: prisons. Between harsher punishments doled out in the War on Drugs and a tough-on-crime mindset that prizes retribution over rehabilitation, America’s incarcerated population has swelled sevenfold since the 1970s, to about 2.3 million. The U.S. imprisons five to 18 times more people per capita than other Western democracies. Many American prisons are packed beyond capacity, making social distancing impossible. Soap is often scarce. Inevitably, the coronavirus ran amok. By June, two American prisons each accounted for more cases than all of New Zealand. One, Marion Correctional Institution, in Ohio, had more than 2,000 cases among inmates despite having a capacity of 1,500.
Other densely packed facilities were also besieged. America’s nursing homes and long-term-care facilities house less than 1 percent of its people, but as of mid-June, they accounted for 40 percent of its coronavirus deaths.
It should address the health inequities that flow from its history. Not least, it should elect leaders with sound judgment, high character, and respect for science, logic, and reason.
The pandemic has been both tragedy and teacher. Its very etymology offers a clue about what is at stake in the greatest challenges of the future, and what is needed to address them. Pandemic. Pan and demos. All people.
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Angela Merkel: “You cannot fight the pandemic with lies and disinformation...the limits of Populism are being laid bare.” Law & Politics |
Angela Merkel: “You cannot fight the pandemic with lies and disinformation...the limits of Populism are being laid bare.” Angela Merkel
The Correlation between the Case Load and Populism has a stupendously high correlation coefficient.
political decision-making is now driven by often weaponized babble. @FukuyamaFrancis
I was reading Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah which sought to explain the intrinsic relationship between political leadership and the management of pandemics in the pre-colonial period.
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”
To thwart calamities, rulers should possess certain qualifications. Khaldun recognizes wisdom, logic, honesty, justice and education as the most desirable qualities in a ruler.
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Zimbabwe Stocks Slide as Market Reopens Without Old Mutual @markets Africa |
Zimbabwean stocks tumbled as trading resumed for the first time in five weeks after authorities shut down the exchange for allegedly contributing to the plunge in the local currency.
The government had said that the shares of Old Mutual Ltd., PPC Ltd. and Seedco Ltd. were being used to manipulate foreign-exchange rates.
Those stocks, which have dual listings on other exchanges outside the country, weren’t allowed to resume. The main index fell 4.5%, while mining counters dropped by 2.4%.
Activity was light, with 117 trades worth a total 10.25 million Zimbabwean dollars ($134,000). That compares with an average daily turnover of 95 million Zimbabwean dollars in June.
“It has been an excruciating time,” Justin Bgoni, chief executive officer of the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange, said on Twitter, referring to the suspension in dealing that started on June 29.
Bgoni said he was satisfied with the volumes, given the circumstances.
The exchange had been in weeks of talks with the government on how to reopen the market.
The ruling party had demanded that the listing of Old Mutual, the biggest company by market value, be terminated.
Authorities said the insurer’s share price was being used to determine a future rate of the country’s currency.
The market upheaval has added to an economic crisis in the southern African nation, where inflation has surged to more than 700% and there are shortages of food, fuel and foreign exchange. T
The Zimbabwe dollar trades at more than 100 in a parallel market, compared with the official rate of 76.7596 to the U.S. dollar.
The bourse has been a counter to inflation, with the all-share index having climbed more than sevenfold this year.
The state wants to transfer the three companies’ listings onto a foreign-currency denominated exchange in the resort town of Victoria Falls, planned for opening later this year.
The resumption of trading should help restore the integrity of the local market and offer some relief to people who couldn’t access their investments, said Ranga Makwata, an independent financial analyst.
“Obviously, the collateral damage from the suspension is huge and it may take a while to restore investor confidence to its pre-suspension level,” he said. |
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21-JAN-2019 :: Its the End Game in Harare Law & Politics |
“Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.”
“Cowry shells and dollars have value only in our common imagination. Their worth is not inherent in the chemical structure of the shells and paper, or their colour, or their shape. In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind.”
The Point I am seeking to make is that There is a correlation between high Inflation and revolutionary conditions, Zimbabwe is a classic example where there are $9.3 billion of Zollars in banks compared to $200 million in reserves, official data showed.
The Mind Game that ZANU-PF played on its citizens has evaporated in a puff of smoke.
President Mnangagwa was cavorting around the World with his scarf
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@Shoprite_SA Holdings Limited, has stated it will auction its @Shoprite_NG outlets in Nigeria @TheNationNews Africa |
The update reads: “Following approaches from various potential investors, and in line with our re-evaluation of the Group’s operating model in Nigeria, the Board has decided to initiate a formal process to consider the potential sale of all, or a majority stake, in Retail Supermarkets Nigeria Limited, a subsidiary of Shoprite International Limited.
“As such, Retail Supermarkets Nigeria Limited may be classified as a discontinued operation when Shoprite reports its results for the year. Any further updates will be provided to the market at the appropriate time.”
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Eaagads Ltd. reports FY 2020 EPS [-2.18] Earnings N.S.E Equities - Agricultural |
Par Value: 1/25
Closing Price: 10.50
Total Shares Issued: 32157000.00
Market Capitalization: 337,648,500
EPS: -2.18
PE:
FY Earnings through 31st March 2020 versus 31st March 2019
FY Revenue 48.622m versus 179.615m
FY Gross [Loss]/Profit [37.378m] versus 40.085m
FY [Loss] Profit for the Year [69.997m] versus 2.647m
FY EPS [2.18] versus 0.08
Commentary
114 tons of Coffee compared with 419 tons
severe drought in first half of the Year
Average price increased to $3.75 per KG versus $3.37
Revaluation surplus of 51.6m = Freehold Land
International Coffee prices at 1000 US cents per pound lowest level for more than a decade.
No Dividend
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