The Nile is a monster, at 6,650 kilometers the longest river on the planet. Control of its waters has kept rulers in power for thousands of years. The Blue and White Niles merge in Khartoum then flow northwards, travelling through Sudan to Egypt, the glorious land of Pharaohs.
Abdelhak Bassou is one of the leading national and African security experts. He is a Senior Fellow at the Policy Center for the New South and a highly appreciated professor at the elite University Mohammed VI, near Marrakech. His opinions provoke thoughts and comments, just as they should. The Policy Center for the New South’s Annual Report on Africa’s Geopolitics, coordinated by Mr. Bassou, contains numerous reports on the damaging effects of COVID-19 on Africa’s societies: ‘Impact of COVID-19 on Governance for the Peace and Security of Africa’;‘COVID-19: A Perfect Storm of African Securities’ or ’Covid 19, un révélateur des maux des sociétés africaines’, and ‘L’Afrique entre deux pandémies: la Covid-19 et la famine’. In his foreword to the report, Bassou nevertheless makes it clear that “the current edition opted to stand out from a certain form of media coverage which, by focusing on COVID-19 in Africa, has neglected other main issues on the continent and has therefore undermined efforts to address them”.
Pan-Africanism is a dream that never dies. A project of African politicians, united in a vision, as old as the settled Africa, which liberated itself from the shackles of colonialism: Africa for Africans, Afro Americans, or the dark skinned people of Cuba, or Haiti, African immigrants in Paris, or Rome, in step to rekindle hope, freedom, equality, cultural revival, to build a future, construct the foundations of a borderless continent, an Africa without tribal struggles, wars, or poverty.
Elon Musk, owner of the electric car company Tesla, declared in February that his company would accept the digital currency Bitcoin, as a payment method. The news lifted the shares of the carmaker by around 20%. Three months later, Musk reversed his decision, sold 10% of his Bitcoin holdings and raked in the modest sum of $100 million. Economist and Senior Fellow at the Policy Center for the New South Henri-Louis Vedie noted in his Policy Brief, Bitcoin, a Speculative Virtual Currency Yet Not an Alternative to Fiat Currency that “what has happened is confirming the highly speculative character of the cryptocurrency”.
They did not know who the fighters were; the Turkic-language speaking citizens did not understand a word they said. Sure, they were the enemy, because they were killing their brothers and sisters and destroying their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh, a forgotten enclave loyal to Armenia but surrounded by Azerbaijan. In September 2020, when the fighting erupted again, it did not take long to find out who had sent these foreigners to kill or expel them from their land, named by its inhabitants as the Republic of Artsakh after the last civil war at the end of the 1980s. A United Nations working group on the use of mercenaries found “widespread reports that the government of Azerbaijan, with Turkey’s assistance, relied on Syrian fighters to shore up and sustain its military operation” (Human Rights Commission, October 2020).
The German town of Dinslaken, roughly 70,000 residents, has not really made a mark on history, but the former coal mining community still managed to get onto the front pages of national newspapers. Dinslaken became a hotspot for German jihadis, ready to join the radical Islamic State. Between 2011 and 2013 an Islamic group, 25 members, rented space just next to the office of the local commissioner of integration. About half of the group followed the call to arms, to fight the infidels in Syria and Iraq. Five of the believers returned, five died, among them Philip Bergner, who blew himself up in a suicide attack in August 2014 near Mosul, killing 20 Kurdish fighters.
For science fiction writers, the universe has no limits. They imagine spacecraft conquering the unknown, the mining of asteroids, access to solar power and room for colonization by earthlings tempted by new frontiers billions of miles and dreams away. Or worlds to conquer barred by radioactive fields, devilish storms, metallic dust, unbearable darkness leading towards black holes and hell in space, and the sun, radiating up to 15 million degrees Celsius, which suggests nothing less than nuclear fusion. The incredible projections of science fiction authors are beginning to be overtaken by reality and technology, and the creativity of the human brain. Spacecraft such as the New Horizons and the twin Voyager 1 and 2, race with an average speed of 38,000 miles per hour into the unending universe, traveling 14 billion miles away from earth, having moved from the solar system into the interstellar universe. The 815kg Voyager 2 went to explore Uranus and Neptune, and is still the only spacecraft to have visited the outer planets. Forty-three years, nine months and 18 days (as of June 7, 2021) after launch, the Voyagers are still traveling, in communication with ground control, which needs seven hours to reach the spacecraft. Meanwhile, the New Horizons 478kg spacecraft (launched in 2006), traveling at 36,400 miles per hour, powered by a nuclear battery, is expected to continue exploring until the late 2030s and possibly move into interstellar space in the 2040s...
For years, no one knew why dozens of battered wooden ghost boats, often with the corpses of North Korean fishermen, whose starved bodies were reduced to skeletons, routinely washed up on the Japanese coast, wrote Ian Urbina in an August 2020 report for Yale University’s 360 environment project. The explanation, he said, could be that “China is sending a previously invisible armada of industrial boats to illegally fish in North Korean waters, forcing out smaller North Korea boats and leading to a decline in once abundant squid stock ”.North Korean fishermen washing up in Japan—225 in 2018, 158 in 2019—might have “ventured too far from shore in a vain search for squid and perished”. In violation of United Nations sanctions, hundreds of Chinese vessels, tracked by satellites, fished in North Korean waters in 2019 (Foreign Policy, Nov. 20, 2020).
