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Friday 21st of August 2020 |
COVID latches onto weaknesses and vulnerabilities @yaneerbaryam Misc. |
COVID latches onto weaknesses and vulnerabilities: denialism, arrogance, exceptionalism, wishful thinking, incompetence, indecisiveness, assumptions, inflexibility, demonization, self-deception, selfishness, gullibility, rigidity, nonadaptiveness, antagonism, social fragmentation |
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30-APR-2018 :: "A new history starts now. An age of peace, from the starting point of history." Law & Politics |
The Events that took place on Friday at the truce village of Panmunjom and during the Inter-Korean Summit were breathtaking for the Hollywood Optics. The Opening Shot of Kim Jong Un surrounded by a Phalanx of North Korean Officials [later replayed as Chairman Kim sat in his Presidential Vehicle surrounded by his Ninja bodyguards] was almost as good as the opening Sequence in PT Anderson's Boogie Nights [Steadicam operator Andy Shuttleworth]. This was Cinema of the highest level which is no surprise when You consider that Kim Jong-Il the Father was obsessed with Cinema and amassed arguably the world’s largest personal film collection: over 20,000 bootlegged 35mm screening copies. Kim Jong-Il also had a penchant for Hennessy Paradis cognac and for two years in the mid-1990s, he was the world's largest buyer of Hennessy Paradis cognac, importing up to $800,000 of the stuff a year. Kim Jong-Il began his career as the head of the state’s propaganda and agitation department and its clear that Kim Jong-Un's sister Kim Yo Jong who holds the same role and evidently handles all the optics, is a chip off the old Block. Friday was tip-top Geopolitical Optics. Mike Pompeo, the newly minted US Secretary of State [His predecessor was fired via Twitter] had visited Pyongyang the previous week and pronounced; that the young North Korean leader was "a smart guy who's doing his homework" |
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SARS-Cov-2 Natural or Artificial? That is the Question Misc. |
It is a new virus that has been classified in the Family: Coronaviridae, Subfamily: Orthocoronaviridae, Genus: Beta Coronavirus, Subgenus: Sarbecovirus.Protein S on the surface of coronaviruses is responsible for its binding to the cellular receptor and the fusion process with its membrane, making it a determining factor in tropism and transmission capacity in a new host. The caves where the viruses with the most similarity to SARS-VOC-2 were found were collected in the Yunnan caves almost 1500 km from Wuhan. In no natural way could these bats have reached the place where the pandemic originated [31].Like many other viruses with the RNA genome, the mutation rate of coronaviruses is 10-nucleotide substitutions (x position and year), occurring basically in the first replicative cycles. It is therefore surprising that the study of the genome of 104 SARS-Cov-2 viruses, isolated from Wuhan patients between December 2019 and February 2020, showed a homology of 99.9% in their sequences. This data suggests that this new coronavirus originated from a single source in a very short period and was detected very early in the first days of its human spread SARS-CoV-2 binds with a high affinity for human ACE2, which would imply that a new optimal joining solution.” They also comment that “the second notable feature of SARS-CoV-2 is a predictive polybasic cleavage site (RRAR) at the leading protein at the junction of S1 and S2, the two subunits of the S protein.It is important to note that although very similar, the BatCoV-RaTG1 differs from the SARS-CoV-2 by at least 1,100 bases [40]. This volume is a “genetic abyss” to be explained by a simple viral mutation. Remarkably, this approach surprisingly revealed that the binding energy between SARS-CoV-2 protein S and human ACE2 was higher than for all tested species, including the bat, the postulated source of the virus.In contrast, SARS-CoV-2 expresses in its protein S, 12 extra letters (ccu cgg cgg gca) that constitute a cut-off point for a third scissors: furin. This makes a great evolutionary difference, since furin is present in almost all human cells. Indeed, the numerous pathways to the cell for SARS-CoV-2 have made it known to some researchers as the supervirus |
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Tesla's soaring stock cracks $2,000 ahead of share split World Of Finance |
The stock has jumped 45% just since Aug. 11, when Tesla announced a five-for-one stock split, with shareholders of record on Aug. 21 receiving four additional shares for each share they own, distributed after the close of trading on Aug. 28.
Thursday’s surge put Tesla’s stock market value at $372 billion, greater than all but seven of the S&P 500’s components.
Tesla’s stock is among the highest priced, per share, on Wall Street, and the Palo Alto, California-based company has said it was looking to make its shares more accessible to employees and investors.
However, with Robinhood and other brokerages increasingly letting customers by fractions of individual shares, the benefit of stock splits has become less obvious, making Tesla’s rally following the announcement of its stock split surprising to some professional investors.
Tesla’s stock is currently priced at an exceedingly high 148 times expected earnings, according to Refinitiv, and that valuation will not be affected by the upcoming stock split.
Tesla will start rolling out “made-in-China” Model Y vehicles at its factory in Shanghai starting in 2021, the Global Times tweeted on Thursday, citing an unnamed executive.
Investors expect important announcements when Tesla holds its long-awaited Battery Day on Sept. 22, the same day as its annual shareholder meeting.
The company is expected to present battery innovations, with analysts at Morgan Stanley predicting a company announcement on supplying “superior” battery packs to the auto industry.
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New Cabinet Paves Way for Successor to World’s Longest-Serving President @bpolitics Law & Politics |
The reappointment of key allies of Vice President Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue to the government of Equatorial Guinea signals the heir apparent to the world’s longest-serving president is consolidating power before a succession.
President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, 78, signed a decree for the return of many of his top ministers after forcing them to quit last week over a deepening economic crisis.
The cabinet reshuffle, announced on Wednesday, shows the growing clout of the vice president, who’s known as Teodorin.
Obiang Lima is known among oil executives as “The Godfather” for his tough “drill or drop” position.
He’s had to soften his tone to entice oil majors including Exxon Mobil Corp., Marathon Oil Corp., Kosmos Energy Ltd., and Trident Energy to keep investing after a sharp drop in crude prices as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Even before the disease outbreak, the country was engulfed in a crisis that shrank its economy by half since the last oil-price downturn in 2014.
Once as rich in per-capita terms as its former colonial master Spain, Equatorial Guinea has some of the world’s worst development indicators, with nearly a quarter of children dying before reaching the age of five.
Critics blame Obiang and his family for plundering much of the country’s oil wealth to remain in power. His administration is also known for torturing and killing dissidents, earning it a human-rights record comparable to that of Syria and North Korea in the latest rankings by U.S.-based thinktank Freedom House.
Teodorin, who is in charge of national security, was convicted in absentia by a French court in 2017 for embezzling more than $100 million of Equatoguinean public money to buy a fleet of supercars and a mansion near the Champs-Élysées.
He spent more than $300 million from 2004 through 2011 on luxuries including Michael Jackson memorabilia, U.S. Department of Justice lawyers said in a separate money laundering case settled in 2014.
That sum amounted to slightly less than 10% of Equatorial Guinea’s annual oil revenues at the time.
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10 countries account for 88% (849,503) of all reported #COVID19 cases in the African Region @WHOAFRO Africa |
10 countries account for 88% (849,503) of all reported #COVID19 cases in the African Region: South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Algeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Madagascar & Senegal.
South Africa accounts for 62% of all reported case.
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Standard Bank @StandardBankZA Sees Trading Revenue Falling After First-Half Jump @markets World Of Finance |
Standard Bank Group Ltd., Africa’s largest bank, expects trading revenue to fall in the second half of the year as a jump in credit losses cuts profit.
Adjusted first-half earnings dropped 44% as the lender increased provisions for doubtful debts because of the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and a deteriorating South African economy, Johannesburg-based Standard Bank said in a statement Thursday. Impairment charges were 2.7 times higher than a year earlier.
While strong foreign-exchange flows in South Africa and the West African region helped boosted trading revenue 40% in the six months through June, the level of income from that source will be lower in the second half, it said.
An increase in customer activity in July should support growth in fees and commission, although ongoing uncertainty may “constrain balance sheet growth.”
Standard Bank is the first of South Africa’s lenders to report earnings after a lockdown introduced in March to slow the spread of Covid-19 curbed economic output.
The central bank has cut interest rates to a record low to support the economy, which is expected to contract the most in nine decades this year.
Along with other lenders, Standard Bank has extended relief in the form of payment holidays and restructured debt, and granted government-guaranteed loans in an effort to shore up the economy, which was in recession even before the lockdown hit.
The uncertain outlook means Standard Bank is “unable to provide revised medium-term targets at this time,” it said.
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IN THE LAND OF KUSH @SmithsonianMag Africa |
Meroe’s pyramids, lined neatly in rows, rise as high as 100 feet toward the sky. “It’s like opening a fairytale book,” a friend once said to me.“Western archaeologists, including Reisner, were trying to find Egypt in Sudan, not Sudan in Sudan,” Bonnet told me.
Many Sudanese today are quick to point out that the number of standing ancient pyramids in the country—more than 200—exceeds the number of those in Egypt.
Across from the pyramids is the royal city, with surrounding grounds that are still covered in slag, evidence of the city’s large iron-smelting industry and a source of its economic power. Queens called by the title Kandake, known in Latin as “Candace,” played a vital role in Meroitic political life. The most famous of them was Amanirenas, a warrior-queen who ruled Kush from roughly 40 B.C. to 10 B.C.Many scholars believe that Amanitore’s successor, Amantitere, is the Kushite queen referred to as “Candace, queen of the Ethiopians” in the New Testament, whose treasurer converted to Christianity and traveled to Jerusalem to worship.
By the fourth century A.D., the power of Kush began to wane. Historians give different explanations for this, including climate change-driven drought and famine and the rise of a rival civilization in the east, Aksum, in modern-day Ethiopia.
“At its height, the Kingdom of Kush was a dominant regional power,” says Zeinab Badawi, a distinguished British-Sudanese journalist whose documentary series “The History of Africa” aired on the BBC earlier this year. Kush’s surviving archaeological remains “reveal a fascinating and uncelebrated ancient people the world has forgotten.”
While Egypt has long been explained in light of its connections to the Near East and the Mediterranean, Kush makes clear the role that black Africans played in an interconnected ancient world. Kush was “at the root of black African civilizations, and for a long time scholars and the general public berated its achievements,” Geoff Emberling told me. Edmund Barry Gaither, an American educator and director of Boston’s Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, says that “Nubia gave black people their own place at the table, even if it did not banish racist detractors.” The French archaeologist Claude Rilly put it to me this way: “Just as Europeans look at ancient Greece symbolically as their father or mother, Africans can look at Kush as their great ancestor.”
Today, many do. In Sudan, where 30 years of authoritarian rule ended in 2019 after months of popular protests, a new generation is looking to their history to find national pride. Among the most popular chants by protesters were those invoking Kushite rulers of millennia past: “My grandfather is Tirhaka! My grandmother is a Kandake!”
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BRITAM reports HY 2020 earnings World Of Finance |
Par Value:
Closing Price: 6.86
Total Shares Issued: 2523486816.00
Market Capitalization: 17,311,119,558
EPS: 1.41
PE: 4.865
BRITAM reports HY 2020 Earnings [The Earnings Release is unreadable]
HY Gross Written Premium 14.055644b versus 12.928780b
HY Net Earned Revenue 11.581990b versus 11.124653b
HY Investment Income 3.636796b versus 2.724543b
HY Total Income 12.943291b versus 16.942286b
HY Profit [Loss] before Tax [2.307762b] versus 2.426236b
HY Profit [Loss] after Tax [1.534506b] versus 1.673077b
HY EPS [0.66] versus [0.60]
Commentary via Dyer and Blair
Management attributed top line growth to continued growth of the international general insurance business which recorded an increase in gross earned premium of 34.0%, contributing 23.0% of the group’s gross earned premium and a profit of KES 575.0 MN.
Investment income rose 33.5% y-o-y to KES 3.6 BN whereas net unrealized gains on assets held at FVPL declined 228.4% y-o-y to a loss of KES 3.2 BN.
The group’s net assets declined 14.4% y-o-y to KES 25.1 BN on the back of a 2.6% y-o-y rise in total assets to KES 128.5 BN and a 7.8% y-o-y rise in total liabilities to KES 103.4 BN.
We do not anticipate a significant recovery until the stock market recovers from the COVID-19 related sell off.
On a trailing basis, Britam is trading at a P/E of 61.7x and a P/B of 0.7x against sector median price multiples of 3.7x and 0.6x respectively.
Conclusions
There is a Big Property exposure here.
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Sanlam Kenya Plc reports HY 2020 Earnings N.S.E Equities - Finance & Investment |
Par Value: 5/-
Closing Price: 13.50
Total Shares Issued: 144000000.00
Market Capitalization: 1,944,000,000
EPS: 0.79
PE: 17.089
Sanlam reports HY Earnings through 30th June 2020
HY Gross Written Premium 4.276831b versus 3.654964b
HY Net Earned Premium 3.014371b versus 2.757911b
HY Investment and Other Income 1.244604b versus 1.9223259b
HY Total Income 4.258975b versus 4.681170b
HY Net Claims 2.475887b versus 1.991741b
HY Total Expenses 4.395014b versus 3.744097b
HY Profit [Loss] before Tax [136.039m] versus 937.079m
HY Profit [Loss] after Tax [99.14m] versus 639.675m
HY EPS [0.83] versus 4.44
Conclusions
I expect further slippage into the FY Earnings Release.
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