Somali Rebels Embrace Twitter Terrorism
El Shabbab, the fundamentalist Islamic insurgency group fighting to control southern Somalia, reject most things Western and/or modern, but ironically have embraced Twitter, garnering thousands of followers. In addition to straightforward updates on battles and territory, the best part is the taunting that goes on between the insurgents and Kenyan military spokesman Major E. Chirchir:
China’s Economic Boom Fueling Poaching In Africa
Greg Neale and James Burton writes in the Guardian:
Elephant poaching in Africa and Asia is being fuelled by China’s economic boom, according to a study of the ivory trade.
Authors of the new report found that the number of ivory items on sale in key centres in southern China has more than doubled since 2004, with most traded illegally. The survey comes amid reports of a dramatic rise in rhino poaching across Africa, and a spate of thefts of rhino horns from European museums and auction houses.
Based on the results of their survey, the ivory researchers are calling for China to tighten its enforcement of ivory trading regulations, saying that such a move is vital to reduce the number of elephants that are killed illegally. The report is published on the eve of a meeting in Geneva of the Cites organisation, which is responsible for controlling trade in endangered wildlife species.
Esmond…
South Africa’s Cancer Of Corruption
DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA: Twenty one years after Nelson Mandela walked free, corruption has become the issue du jour in South Africa.
Even president Jacob Zuma who narrowly slithered out of a corruption trial before his election is blasting corruption in the ranks of the African National Congress which came to power as the morally superior alternative to an apartheid regime that shamelessly used the wealth it controlled to benefit Afrikaners and deprive the black majority of services.
“Let’s make a plan,” were the code words members of the all white National Party used to scheme ways of stealing state resources to benefit themselves, a cozy reality overshadowed by the vicious racial policies that outraged the world.
As the ANC prepared to win power democratically, there was concern among leaders that a deprived black majority might feel it was “their turn” and thus, their right to cash in on their political victory. Some of their…
Young Children In South Africa Eaten By Giant Rats
A chilling urban legend from New York City comes terribly true on the opposite side of the globe, as three-foot rats run amok, feasting on human babies. The Daily Mail writes:
Giant rats as big as cats have killed and eaten two babies in separate attacks in South Africa’s squalid townships this week.
Lunathi Dwadwa, three, was killed as she slept in her parent’s shack outside Cape Town and another girl was killed in Soweto township near Johannesburg the same day. Bukiswa Dwadwa, 27, said: ‘I can’t forget how ugly my child looked after her eyes were ripped out. ‘She was eaten from her eyebrows to her cheeks, her other eye was hanging by a piece of flesh.’
Residents of South Africa’s impoverished townships say the giant rats grow up to three-foot long, including their tails, and have front teeth over an inch long. The suspects in the baby attacks are believed to be…
Sakawa Boys: Ghana’s Cyber-Juju Email Scam Gangs
What do you get when you combine identity theft and email fraud with black magic, spells, and shape shifting? The explosively popular West African subculture known as Sakawa. Via Motherboard, who filmed their visit in Ghana with Sakawa boys:
While Nigeria’s 419 scammers may have written the book on West African internet fraud, their shtick looks like Compuserve compared to what’s going on in Ghana. Ghana’s scammers decided to stack the odds in their favor the old-fashioned way: witchcraft.
Traditional West African Juju priests adapted their services to the needs of the information age and started leading down-on-their-luck internet scammers through strange and costly rituals designed to increase their powers of persuasion and make their emails irresistible to greedy Americans. And so “Sakawa” was born.
Not only is Sakawa the country’s most popular youth activity and one of its biggest underground economies, it’s a full-blown national phenomenon. Sakawa has its own tunes, clothing…
How A Human Virus Is Killing Endangered Gorillas
Photo: FlickreviewR (CC)
Alasdair Wilkins writes in io9:
There’s fewer than 800 Mountain Gorillas left in the entire world, and their survival depends in part on people willing to pay money to go see them. But all this human interaction is bringing gorillas into contact with dangerous diseases.
Although humans are most closely related to chimpanzees, gorillas rank a very respectable second, sharing about 98% of their DNA with us. The current zoological consensus is that there are two distinct species of gorillas, western and eastern, and these are further divided into two subspecies each.
While all the gorilla species are to some degree threatened, the population levels vary wildly. There are at least 100,000 Western Lowland Gorillas in the wild, and 4,000 in zoos, while fellow western subspecies, the rarely seen Cross River Gorilla, is thought to have a remaining population of just 280. As for the eastern subspecies, the Eastern Lowland Gorilla…
Rwanda To Run Vasectomy Campaign To Curb Population Growth
Photo: Rwanda soilders singing anti-AIDS songs. All soilders are counseled and tested for HIV.
An interesting tactic in controlling population growth, but how does one come up with a slogan for a campaign supporting both vasectomies and HIV prevention? Stop the spread of disease and babies? BBC News reports:
Rwanda’s government has said it wants to encourage men to have vasectomies in a bid to stem the small landlocked country’s growing population.
It would be done along with its HIV prevention campaign to encourage all men to be circumcised.
Health officials would take the opportunity to talk to men about the birth-control method at the same time.
A BBC reporter in Rwanda says vasectomies are uncommon in the country and the move may meet resistance.
[Continues at BBC News]
Oil Profits Soar Even In Crippled Economy
Site editor’s note: This post from DJ Pangburn originally appeared on death + taxes.
What a joy it is to see some businesses doing well as the corpse of capitalism slowly re-animates…
Very few industries bloom in harsh economic times, but the oil and energy industries are doing just fine. Did anyone expect anything less?
Exxon-Mobil reported a 55% surge in third quarter earnings compared to last year. The U.S. oil giant posted $7.4 billion in earnings, which translates to $1.44 per share. It’s annual revenue rose $13 billion to $95.3 billion, much of the credit going to the demand coming out of China attempting to feed its unstoppable economic engines.
In a statement, ExxonMobil chairman Rex Tillerson commented on Exxon-Mobil’s profits:
“Despite continuing economic uncertainty, we had strong quarterly results and continued to advance our robust investment opportunities.”
Royal Dutch Shell’s quarterly earnings also rose significantly, even as the company divests itself of some of their…
Two-Thirds of the West African Nation of Benin is Underwater
Via BBC News:
The UN refugee agency is to start an emergency airlift of tents to the West African nation of Benin this week, amid the worst flooding there in decades.
Some 3,000 tents will be flown in from Denmark to provide shelter for some of the estimated 680,000 people affected.
Two-thirds of Benin has suffered from months of heavy rain, and about 800 cases of cholera have been reported.
It is the worst flooding to hit the country — one of the poorest in the world — since 1963.
Areas previously thought not to be vulnerable to flooding have been devastated and villages wiped out.
“There are huge areas that are covered in water so people are living on the tops of their houses, because people try to stay near their homes,” Helen Kawkins of the Care aid agency told the BBC.
African Newspaper Purposefully ‘Outs’ Gays, Suggests Hanging
Photo: AP
This is quite a shocker, reported by Godfrey Olukya and Jason Straziuso for AP, especially as it seems to have been instigated by American Christian fundamentalists:
KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — The front-page newspaper story featured a list of Uganda’s 100 “top” homosexuals, with a bright yellow banner across it that read: “Hang Them.” Alongside their photos were the men’s names and addresses.
In the days since it was published, at least four gay Ugandans on the list have been attacked and many others are in hiding, according to rights activist Julian Onziema. One person named in the story had stones thrown at his house by neighbors.
A lawmaker in this conservative African country introduced a bill a year ago that would have imposed the death penalty for some homosexual acts and life in prison for others. An international uproar ensued, and the bill was quietly shelved.
But gays in Uganda say they have faced…
UN Identifies the World’s Most Expensive Broadband Access
In the Central African Republic, broadband internet service costs 3891% of the average monthly income. Put another way, a month’s broadband service costs more than three years’ average wages in the country,” notes this technology blog, “compared with less than two hours’ earnings in Macau.” (The world’s cheapest broadband access…)
A United Nations’ technology group released the figures in a new report in advance of a September 19 summit on the digital divide in developing countries. (”We are trying to avoid a broadband divide,” said Dr. Hamadoun Toure, the secretary general of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union says in the report.) Their agency noted that the rate for broadband penetration is below 1% in many poor countries, with monthly costs higher than the average monthly income, whereas in the world’s most developed economies, 30% of people have access to broadband at less than 1% of their income.
And the report also estimates…
The Genocide Behind Your Smart Phone (Video)
Alan Mascarenhas writes on Newsweek:
It takes a lot to snap people out of apathy about Africa’s problems. But in the wake of Live Aid and Save Darfur, a new cause stands on the cusp of going mainstream. It’s the push to make major electronics companies (manufacturers of cell phones, laptops, portable music players, and cameras) disclose whether they use “conflict minerals” — the rare metals that finance civil wars and militia atrocities, most notably in Congo.
The issue of ethical sourcing has long galvanized human-rights groups. In Liberia, Angola, and Sierra Leone, the notorious trade in “blood diamonds” helped fund rebel insurgencies. In Guinea, bauxite sustains a repressive military junta. And fair-labor groups have spent decades documenting the foreign sweatshops that sometimes supply American clothing stores. Yet Congo raises especially disturbing issues for famous tech brand names that fancy themselves responsible corporate citizens.
A key mover behind the Congo campaign is the anti-genocide Enough Project: witness its clever spoof of the famous Apple commercial.
True Blood For African Addicts
At what point do people need a fix so bad that they are willing to inject another person’s blood into themselves? With the constant presence of AIDS related deaths in Africa, and the progressive educational-outreach towards sex workers and addicts, it would seem a foolish thought. BBC reports:
Desperate heroin users in a few African cities have begun engaging in a practice that is so dangerous it is almost unthinkable: they deliberately inject themselves with another addict’s blood, researchers say, in an effort to share the high or stave off the pangs of withdrawal.
The practice, called flashblood or sometimes flushblood, is not common, but has been reported in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on the island of Zanzibar and in Mombasa, Kenya.
It puts users at the highest possible risk of contracting AIDS and hepatitis. While most AIDS transmission in Africa is by heterosexual sex, the use of heroin is growing in some cities, and…
A New African Ocean?
For over the past 5 years, scientific researchers have been observing an ocean in the making. Scientists at the Royal Society, claim that the African continent will be split in two based on a 60 kilometer crack in the Earth’s surface in Ethiopia. Tim Wright, the lead researcher, estimates that the process of forming a new ocean will take approximately ten billion years. The crack is caused by molten rock slowly rising from deep below the Earth’s surface. Matt McGrath of the BBC goes into detail:
“Dr James Hammond, a seismologist from the University of Bristol – who has been working in Afar – says that parts of the region are below sea level and the ocean is only cut off by about a 20-metre block of land in Eritrea.
“Eventually this will drift apart,” he told the BBC World Service. “The sea will flood in and will start to create this new…
Albinos Killed in Burundi for Belief That ‘Good Luck’ is Brought by Body Parts
Photo: Muntuwandi (CC)
Tom Odula writes on the AP:
Attackers in Burundi chopped off the limbs of a 5-year-old albino boy and pulled out his mother’s eye, killing them over the belief that their body parts would bring wealth and success, human rights activists said Friday.
Those deaths and other recent attacks in Tanzania are part of long pattern of violence against African albinos. At least 10,000 have been displaced or gone into hiding since attacks against them spiked in late 2007, the International Federation of the Red Cross says.
Since then, 57 albinos have been killed in Tanzania and 14 in Burundi, said Vicky Ntetema with the rights group Under The Same Sun.
The killings are fueled by superstitious beliefs that human albino body parts will bring others wealth and success, Ntetema said.
“Body parts are sought for their supposed miraculous powers,” she said. “Some use them as human sacrifice as advised by witch doctors.”
Read…
Scientists Find 95-Million-Year-Old Bugs In African Amber
Scientists have found amber containing perfectly-preserved 95-million-year-old bugs. From Wired Science:
Suspended in the stream of time were ancestors of modern spiders, wasps and ferns, but the prize is a wingless ant (above) that challenges current notions about the origins of that globe-spanning insect family.
The amber, which is formed when plant resin fossilizes, preserving flora and fauna trapped within, was found in what is now northwest Ethiopia. Ninety-five million years ago, it was part of a disintegrating Gondwana, one of two vast land masses that spawned the seven modern continents.
While it will take years to interpret the ecological tales trapped in the new amber, one important story is already suggested. Inside the Ethiopian amber is an ant that looks nothing like ants found in Cretaceous amber from France and Burma. Those deposits had placed the origin of ants in Laurasia. That’s no longer certain.
Read more at Wired Science
…
Playground Politics: Geopolitics Made Simple By Children, On a Playground (Video)
From HBO’s Funny Or Die Presents, the lesson learned from this episode featuring the USA and Africa is: “If you have natural resources, then you’ll receive food…”
Archbishop Tutu’s DNA Helps Show African Diversity
By Malcolm Ritter for AP via comcast.net News:
Scientists who decoded the DNA of some southern Africans have found striking new evidence of the genetic diversity on that continent, and uncovered a surprise about the ancestry of Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
They found, for example, that any two Bushmen in their study who spoke different languages were more different genetically than a European compared to an Asian. That was true even if the Bushmen lived within walking distance of each other.
“If we really want to understand human diversity, we need to go to (southern) Africa and we need to study those people,” said Stephan Schuster of Pennsylvania State University. He’s an author of the study, which appears in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.
The study also found 1.3 million tiny variations that hadn’t been observed before in any human DNA. That should help scientists sort out whether particular genes promote certain diseases or…
Alabama-Born Jihad
The New York Times has an article on a kid raised as a Southern Baptist in small town Alabama who grew up to become an Al Qaeda-aided Jihadist leader in Somalia:
As a teenager, his passions veered between Shakespeare and Kurt Cobain, soccer and Nintendo.. “It felt cool just to be with him,” his best friend at the time, Trey Gunter, said recently. “You knew he was going to be a leader.”
A decade later, Hammami has fulfilled that promise in the most unimaginable way. Some 8,500 miles from Alabama, on the eastern edge of Africa, he has become a key figure in one of the world’s most ruthless Islamist insurgencies. The rebels are known for beheading political enemies, chopping off the hands of thieves and stoning women accused of adultery.
