> “Despite political and economic challenges, 2023 saw air cargo markets regain ground lost in 2022 after the extraordinary Covid peak in 2021. Although full-year demand was shy of pre-Covid levels by 3.6 percent, the significant strengthening in the past quarter is a sign that markets are stabilising towards more normal demand patterns,”

I am looking at Gaza and the lives whose loss we are witnessing every hour and thinking how this will directly shape the US election. The traditional US camps are pro-Israel as usual, and I don’t expect any of them to relent on that position else they lose the “numbers at the polls”.

We saw in 2020 how COVID response was constrained by the general election in the US. Even when it was clear why public policy should have saved more lives, the assumptions in Republican strategy limited clear action on the biological threat.

In 2024, we are faced with a similar scenario where clear decisions on saving lives and avoiding genocide in Gaza — and easily avoiding an unpredictable war — is constrained by the upcoming 2024 elections.

Fuel prices will blow up, inflation always lurks behind fuel prices, social dislocation, and perhaps more authoritarian rules emerging around the world as they justify increased (in)security measures to ward off terrorism.

We are staring at a dark phase.

> Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, who has been detained since Dec. 28, was charged with two counts of “offensive communication” for his alleged efforts on Twitter to “disturb the peace” of President Yoweri Museveni and his son, Lt. Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, who commands the East African country’s infantry forces.

> First, the lawsuit challenges USDA's unprecedented allowance of electronic or digital disclosure on packaging, also known as "QR code" or "smartphone" labeling, without requiring additional on-package labeling. Second, CFS is challenging USDA's labeling language restrictions. When on-package text is used, the rules limit it to only "bioengineered," despite the law allowing use of similar terms. But for 25 years, every aspect of the issue—science, policy, and marketplace—has used genetically engineered (GE) or genetically modified organism (GMO). Lastly, the USDA rules prohibit grocers from providing more and better labeling, in violation of their First Amendment rights.

> According to Alex Lewin, author of Real Food Fermentation and Kombucha, Kefir, and Beyond, fermenting is the opposite: ‘It’s unlike canning—with canning you kill all of the microbes and seal it hermetically. With fermentation you invite the microbes you want and don’t let in the ones you don’t. Fermentation is diplomacy and canning is a massacre. Canning is a high-tech food technology.’

> The border area has been the source of frequent clashes over the last two years. Reportedly, 700,000 acres of Sudanese agricultural land has been illegally appropriated by Ethiopian farmers since the 1960s.

> The pomegranate tree was also the source of life-giving waters in Mesopotamian religion (Muthmann 1982: 13–14), and Neoassyrian seals often depicted pomegranate, the “tree of life” (Avigad 1990: 165). Scholars have suggested that the Tree of Life from the book of Genesis was a pomegranate because of this symbolic history, though of course many fruit-bearing trees have auditioned for this role.

cross-posted from: https://baraza.africa/post/7986

> > “While the introduction of a cashless payment system is laudable in view of containment of the spread of Covid-19, KFS’ refusal to accept cash or any other cashless payment system save for M-Pesa is discriminative, oppressive, unfair and unjust,” Muhuri says in its petition. > >

> “While the introduction of a cashless payment system is laudable in view of containment of the spread of Covid-19, KFS’ refusal to accept cash or any other cashless payment system save for M-Pesa is discriminative, oppressive, unfair and unjust,” Muhuri says in its petition.

> “Elephants eat vast amounts of food each day, 200-250kg, from many different types of plants, so it is not surprising that people have found numerous uses for the stuff that comes out of the other end,” adds Ole Reyia.

> Thus, by possessing the most virulent strain of rinderpest, and which had been kept safely and alive in the Muguga laboratory, Kenya was sitting on two things: a biological warfare agent or the answer to rinderpest control. > > Scientists had designated this strain as “Kabete O”. It is still one of the oldest laboratory strains of any virus in existence.

> Fernandez told the crowd that the electoral turmoil in Bolivia reminded all Latin Americans about the need for regional solidarity. “We are part of a large nation,” he said. “We don’t want countries for some, we want countries for all. It is the duty of all of us to stand up for threatened peoples.”

Abstract

This article excavates the imperial origins behind the recent turn towards digital biometrics in Kenya. It also tells the story of an important moment of race-making in the years after the Second World War. Though Kenya may be considered a frontier market for today's biometrics industry, fingerprinting was first introduced in the early twentieth century. By 1920, the Kenyan colonial government had dictated that African men who left their reserves be fingerprinted and issued an identity card (known colloquially as a kipande . In the late 1940s, after decades of African protest, the colonial government replaced the kipande with a universal system of registration via fingerprinting. This legislative move was accompanied by protests from members of the white settler community. Ironically, the effort to deracialize Kenya's identification regime only further normalized the use of biometrics, but also failed to fully undermine associations between white male exceptionalism and exemption from fingerprinting.