Water Is Becoming A Precious Commodity!

 The water we drink, bathe with, cook with, and clean with is becoming a precious commodity. We have a local website here in the Pacifica area that shares news in the community. It is called Next Door Sharp Park. There were numerous warnings from local residents about water bills that had gone up substantially. (Elena and I got lucky and saw no uptick in our bill.) This is caused by rainfall that did not meet expectations. We are in a drought and must conserve water. One of my swim friends gave me some more shocking news about the new regime of water rationing. If a ratepayer uses excessive amounts of water, he or she will get a much higher water bill. There will also be a penalty that will show up on the person's property tax bill.

    If you live in Santiago now, you are experiencing a drought. If you live in my beloved Cape Town, you survived a very bad drought some years ago where reservoirs dried up almost completely. Local residents and companies showed incredible ingenuity and initiative. Small and cost-effective desalinization plants were brought online. Even with spotty electricity delivery from Eskom, these plants saved the day for many residents.

Israel is the world leader in desalinization systems that turn seawater into drinking water.

     There is one huge problem with turning seawater into drinking water. Massive amounts of electricity are required. This makes water from the sea much more expensive. The Rolls Royce Jet Engine Company and Microsoft founder Bill Gates have come to the rescue.

    Rolls Royce started to build ultra-small nuclear reactors for spacecraft doing deep space missions. As you can imagine such reactors are exposed to wild temperature extremes and bombardment with all sorts of unpleasant radiation. They must be tough and dependable. They must be 100% safe. Imagine the uproar if a spacecraft crashed to earth and released dangerous nuclear materials.

     Bill Gates has developed similar nuclear reactors. These could be used to provide more cost-effective electric power for desalination plants.

    I sat in on a Zoom meeting with Bill Gates where he talked in-depth about his reactors. I suspect that they would be approved by some very hard-nosed environmentalists.

Oil Rich Angola Is Fighting Hunger!

 

No Free Lunch

ANGOLA

Angolans traditionally offer meals of cornmeal or cassava porridge and beans with palm oil in honor of a recently departed loved one. Now hunger and high unemployment have led desperate Angolans to hang around cemeteries and then follow the families of the deceased back to the venues where the mourners are given this free fare.

These reception crashers are known as “death hunters.”

“Every month, two or three times I go there to wait for a funeral so that I can feed myself,” João Baptista Kifuta, 23, a death hunter, said in an interview with Africanews.

Hunger due to extreme droughts, locust infestation and skyrocketing food prices have compelled thousands of Angolans to walk miles through rugged terrain in search of better opportunities in neighboring Namibia, the Guardian reported in a stunning photo essay. People in the photos were eating grass to stave off hunger pains, the photographer wrote. They were among 1.3 million in the region who faced starvation, according to ReliefWeb.

The war in Ukraine is now expected to make things much worse if that is even possible. As the war has dragged on, wheat production in Eastern Europe has stalled and prices have increased, the UN-sponsored magazine Africa Renewal noted. That spells disaster for poor countries that are dependent on wheat imports, especially after the troubles and economic contraction of the coronavirus pandemic.

Incredibly, President João Lourenço has denied that hunger is a major problem. Observers believe he is nervous about upcoming elections in August, African Arguments said. Father Jacinto Pio Wacussanga, a Catholic priest who has been organizing local farmers to make their crops more resilient to climate change-induced droughts, reflected that view when he told the Catholic News Service that he thought Lourenço was putting his head in the sand by ignoring the real suffering of the people.

Lourenço has pledged to make Angola more business-friendly, the Africa Report recounted. He made the same pledge in 2017 but now says he needs more time to implement his reforms. He has succeeded in boosting natural gas exports as prices have risen due to the Ukraine war, for example, Bloomberg added.

The president has also ramped up the security state. The Angolan government, for example, still controls the country’s media, Reporters Without Borders wrote. Independent and critical reporting is very hard to come by. Police have cracked down on protesters peacefully calling for free and fair elections, Human Rights Watch noted.

The death hunters, meanwhile, ply their trade.

Ukraine war boosts demand for South African coal • FRANCE 24 English

South Africa-Paws And Profits

 

Paws and Profit

SOUTH AFRICA

South Africa’s tiger farming industry poses a major threat to the big cat species already in decline, according to a report released by global animal rights charity Four Paws on Tuesday, Agence France-Presse reported.

Lion breeding for commercial hunting and bone exports for Asia is legal in South Africa but some breeders have begun farming tigers in recent years for similar purposes.

The new report found that South Africa exported 359 tigers – almost a tenth of the global tiger population – between 2011 and 2020. Around 255 of them were sold to zoos.

Four Paws said that the animal is not native of South Africa and does not enjoy legal protections. The country also does not have an official count of its tiger population.

Wildlife Trade Expert at Four Paws, Kieran Harkin, noted that many breeders opted to switch to tigers because it was more profitable.

“The market being in Asia was already there, demand was there, so it made perfect sense for the (breeders) to move over to the tiger, which was again even more lucrative than lions,” he told AFP.

Harkin accused the South African government of breaking international laws that stipulate that tigers should not be bred for their parts.

South African officials have yet to comment on the report.

Meanwhile, the organization also urged the country to stop the commercial breeding of all big cats, whose populations have been in decline due to trade with Asian countries.

Uganda-Class Is Sort Of Back In Session

 

Class is Sort Of in Session

UGANDA

More than half of Ugandan students stopped attending school at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020. Only recently did schools reopen, ending the longest school shutdown in the world. But few experts believe the move will result in much education.

Instead, a third of Ugandan students are expected to remain in the workforce to help their impoverished families make ends meet. “The damage is extremely big,” said the executive director of the education nonprofit Uwezo Uganda, Mary Goretti Nakabugo, in an interview with the New York Times. “We may have lost a generation.”

The social consequences of closing schools for more than a year are proliferating. Unwanted pregnancies, for example, have spiked among girls who might have avoided parenthood if they had been in class, CNN wrote. Teen mothers face higher chances of difficult childbirths and fewer opportunities for educational and economic advancement later in life. An Anglican bishop has called on Catholic schools not to enroll pregnant or breastfeeding girls, for example, wrote the East African, a Kenyan newspaper.

Many schools that were shuttered during the pandemic won’t reopen. In the capital of Kampala, more than 40 schools have closed permanently. Many have been turned into bars, restaurants or hotels, the Guardian reported.

And many teachers are unlikely to return because they’ve found other jobs. Ugandan teacher Florence Nankya turned to begging after her school stopped making payments at the outset of the lockdown. She took out a loan and started a fruit cart business. Now, she’s earning a good living and has reservations about returning to class, according to the Nile Post News, a local newspaper, via allAfrica.com.

Education is not the only sector where Covid-19 restrictions might be doing more harm than good in the landlocked East African country.

Virus testing fees for truckers caused gridlock on Uganda’s border with Kenya recently, the Associated Press reported. Truckers insisted they shouldn’t be forced to take the tests if they could prove they had tested negative in Kenya. Because landlocked Uganda has virtually no fuel sources of its own, shortages occurred as a result.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s government had to reverse its decision to require passengers to show proof of vaccination to board public transport after widespread criticism of the order and vows of defiance, added Deutsche Welle.

The president’s critics claimed that he could have done more to avert these disasters, the Associated Press reported. It’s hard to argue they’re wrong. An authoritarian who has been in office since 1986, Museveni appointed his wife as education minister.

Ethiopia-Let's Parlay

 

Let’s Parley

ETHIOPIA

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed freed a number of opposition figures and pledged to open dialogue with opponents, amid an ongoing conflict that risks tearing apart Africa’s second-most populous country, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Ethiopian federal forces have been fighting against rebels of the northern Tigray region for 14 months. The conflict has resulted in the deaths of thousands, the displacement of millions and reports of atrocities from both sides.

Abiy announced that those freed included Sebhat Nega, the founder of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), and Abay Weldu, the former president of Tigray. The prime minister added that his government aims to achieve national reconciliation and promote unity.

However, he made no mention of negotiating with TPLF rebels, who have expressed willingness to hold talks with the government in recent weeks.

The amnesty is a significant milestone in a war that has threatened to fracture one of the United States’ most important allies in the region’s anti-terrorism efforts. Fighting has raged across the country since the prime minister authorized an operation in response to a TPLF raid on a government military site in November 2020.

The freeing of opposition figures follows international pressure against Abiy, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for ending a three-decade conflict with neighboring Eritrea. It also follows a meeting between Abiy and departing US envoy for the Horn of Africa Jeffrey Feltman, who urged for an end to the conflict.

In November, the US removed Ethiopia from its trade program, citing the ongoing fighting.

Egypt-Perception Is Key

 

Perception is Key

EGYPT

French automaker Citroën recently apologized for airing a television commercial in Egypt that featured the popular Egyptian performer Amr Diab driving a C4 crossover sport utility vehicle. In the commercial, Diab uses a built-in camera in the car to snap a picture of a woman crossing the street. The woman seems to enjoy the unsolicited attention. Later in the commercial, she and Diab appear as if they are on a date.

In a country where sexual harassment and gender-based violence are rampant, the advertisement stirred controversy, the Associated Press reported.

Public criticism rarely engenders much change in other areas of human rights in Egypt, however.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi recently issued a national strategy for human rights, for example. “It is a practical path to enhance the rights of the Egyptian people, integration with the national development path of Egypt, which establishes the principles of the new republic,” the president wrote on social media, according to the Daily News Egypt. “This comes in response to the aspirations of the present and future generations.”

But critics on the Washington Post’s editorial board and elsewhere claimed that el-Sissi’s real strategy appears to be designed to trample on human rights, not protect them.

An Egyptian court recently sentenced an activist, a human rights lawyer and a blogger to prison terms ranging from four to five years on charges of spreading false news that harmed national security, wrote the New York Times. Others face similar charges.

The verdict was delivered under emergency measures undertaken in the wake of el-Sissi’s rise to power in a 2013 coup that toppled the late President Mohamed Morsi, an Islamist with links to the extremist Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt has designated the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, explained Middle East Eye. Morsi was elected president after the downfall of President Hosni Mubarak, a dictator who was in office for 30 years until the Arab Spring of 2011.

Some Egyptian human rights groups have praised el-Sissi for installing women in government positions, pardoning political prisoners and other moves, reported Ahram Online, a division of the state-owned newspaper Al-Ahram.

Human Rights Watch and other groups blasted the president’s prosecutions of activists and others, though. El-Sissi has technically lifted the emergency measures. But authorities filed charges against at least 48 activists before his decision, dooming them to a judicial process where they can’t appeal the court decisions. The Egyptian government has also released deceptive videos that make its prisons look clean and orderly while in reality they are squalid and rife with torture and other abuses, Human Rights Watch stated.

Whether being targeted by car companies or politicians, Egyptians must beware of the differences between images and reality.