Egypt-5,000 Year Old Beer Factory

 

Funeral Beer

Ancient Egyptians loved beer so much they developed large factories to mass-produce it, according to a recent find.

An American-Egyptian team discovered what could be the world’s oldest known beer factory, dating back about 5,000 years, the BBC reported.

Located in the ancient burial ground of Abydos, the ancient factory had a production capacity of about 5,000 gallons of beer, archeologists believe. It comprised eight large areas, each 65 feet long and each containing about 40 earthenware pots used to heat a mixture of grain and water to make beer.

Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities said that the old brewery dates back to the era of King Narmer, who ruled more than 5,000 years ago.

Narmer was responsible for the unification of Egypt and for founding the First Dynasty.

The ministry said in a statement that the old brewery “may have been built in this place specifically to supply the royal rituals that were taking place inside the funeral facilities of the kings of Egypt.”

While beer was important for funerary and sacrificial rites, it was also the perfect treat – and pay – for the workers that assembled the large pyramids, archeologist Patrick McGovern told Smithsonian Magazine in 2011.

“The pyramids might not have been built if there hadn’t been enough beer,” he said.

Violence In The Democratic Republic Of The Congo

 

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

Wave of Violence

Italy’s ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and two other people were killed Monday during an attack on a humanitarian convoy, the latest incident in a wave of violence in the country’s east, the New York Times reported.

Ambassador Luca Attanasio and the other two victims were traveling north to a food initiative at a school as part of a United Nations convoy before they were ambushed by unknown gunmen.

The World Food Program said the attack “occurred on a road that had previously been cleared for travel without security escorts.”

Italian officials offered their condolences for the diplomat’s death, and Congo’s government vowed to find the perpetrators.

The killings occurred in the North Kivu province near the border with Rwanda, an area known as a hotbed for violent activity by dozens of armed groups.

The province’s governor, Carly Nzanzu Kasivita, said that initial investigations suggested that the attackers spoke Kinyarwanda, an official language in Rwanda.

Authorities suspect that the attack might have been perpetrated by members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, a rebel group with links to the 1994 genocide in that country.

The attack comes amid a wave of violence in the area in recent weeks, including a deadly attack by a different militia in Virunga National Park that left six people dead last month.

South Africa-Division, Disease, And Doubt

 

SOUTH AFRICA

Division, Disease and Doubts

South Africa was going to launch a massive campaign to inject its citizens with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. But researchers discovered that the vaccine wouldn’t prevent the spread of the country’s variant of the coronavirus. So, as the Associated Press reported, those plans had to be scrapped.

Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine might not be as effective against the South African variant as it is against other versions of the virus either, according to studies cited in a Reuters story. South Africa is therefore pinning its hopes on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, CNN wrote. It’s the first country to approve the use of the drug.

Meanwhile, of course, the pandemic continues to ravage the country, one of the hardest hit on the African continent.

Lee McCabe lost both his parents only a few weeks before the government rolled out the Johnson & Johnson inoculations. He had placed them in a cottage on his property to keep them safe. But they insisted on going home. Somewhere in between they caught COVID-19 and died.

“Maybe if we didn’t let them go home, they’d still be around,” McCabe told CBS News. “If this [a vaccine] arrived a few months earlier, their lives would have been saved. That makes me angry, because I feel that we have delayed so long in getting much needed help to people that need it.”

To many South Africans, there is a discrepancy between wealthy countries that can harness their formidable medical research infrastructure to care for their citizens and others that must scramble to survive the smacks of Apartheid, the racist system of segregation that South Africans overthrew in the early 1990s.

Thabo Cecil Makgoba, the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, evoked Apartheid when he spoke to the Intercept to publicly request that President Joe Biden allow South Africans to use the Moderna vaccine by waiving patent protections that now keep the country from administering it.

The legacy of Apartheid is also affecting public health efforts within South Africa. People celebrated when white-minority ruled ended. But governments since then have been corrupt and incompetent. Consider this Maverick piece on an alleged plan to defraud the South African police, for example.

Trust in officials is at a low, Agence France-Presse reported. Many people are skeptical of vaccines and hesitant to take them.

President Cyril Ramaphosa said he hoped South Africa could become self-reliant in manufacturing vaccines, according to Eyewitness News, a local outlet.

Self-reliance would certainly help the country’s efforts to fight the virus. But reaching that milestone is easier said than done.

A Big Kidnapping In Nigeria

 

NIGERIA

A Terrible Routine

Unknown gunmen kidnapped 42 people, including 27 students during an attack on a boarding school in north-central Nigeria Wednesday in what has become a terrible routine for Africa’s most populous nation, Reuters reported.

The attackers stormed the institution in the Kagara district in Niger state overnight, killing one student in the attack.

President Muhammadu Buhari condemned the attack and sent security chiefs to coordinate rescue operations.

Northern states have been plagued by such kidnappings by armed groups for years, and it remains unclear who perpetrated the latest abduction.

The Islamist Boko Haram group is known for carrying out similar kidnappings in the past, including the 2014 abduction of more than 270 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok. About 100 kidnapped girls remain missing to this day.

The latest kidnapping comes two months after gunmen abducted nearly 350 boys in the northwestern Katsina state. The boys were later rescued by the security forces.

Buhari’s government has been criticized for its handling of national security amid rising insecurity and kidnappings in the country.

In January, the president appointed a new military high command.

Ugandan Child Soldier Found Guilty

 

THE NETHERLANDS

Shades of Gray

The International Criminal Court (ICC) found a Ugandan former child soldier-turned-rebel commander guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in a case that was described as “morally the most complicated” the Netherlands-based court had ever handled, reported Al Jazeera.

The court found former Lord’s Resistance Army commander Dominic Ongwen guilty of 61 charges, including murder, the abduction of children as well as forced pregnancy – the latter a legal first for the court.

Ongwen faces life imprisonment.

Ongwen, 45, was abducted by the LRA when he was a child and the charges are related to crimes committed in the early 2000s.

His lawyers said that he suffered psychological damage as a result of being abducted as a child and was a “victim and not a victim and perpetrator at the same time.”

Judges, however, said the defendant was responsible for his own actions.

Analyst Kristof Titeca noted that the case involved a “huge gray area which is difficult to determine in international law, which thinks in terms of victims and perpetrators.”

Under the leadership of Joseph Kony, the LRA terrorized Uganda for nearly two decades, killing more than 100,000 people and abducting 60,000 children.

In 2005, the Ugandan military was able to expel the group from the country but Kony’s whereabouts remain unknown.