The number of Africans living below the poverty line has fallen dramatically and the business climate is good. So what's holding back the fastest growing continent in the world?
With a projected average growth rate of 6 percent from 2013-2015 and one-third of African countries with economic growth rates currently above 6 percent, the African Development Bank says that Africa is now the fastest growing continent in the world.
In a new report, the African Development Bank Group says that 350 million Africans now earn between $2 and $20 a day as the share of the population living below the poverty line has fallen from 51 percent to 39 percent.
I received a cryptic note from a colleague earlier tonight:
“This one has time AND location data.”
The email contained a link to the Global Terrorism Database, which is maintained at the University of Maryland at College Park, which is an easy walk from a green line stop on the D.C. Metro. I poked around the site a bit and discovered that everything from 1970 through 2011 is available for download if you just fill out a form.
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The total content is large so I pulled out the 5,066 events from 2011. There are an amazing 127 attributes for each event, but it’s a sparse row setup, very easy to process. I unrolled just a few key items – city, country, and region. This resulted in over 15,000 lines indexed with their twelve digit event IDs. The first rough visualization I did was immediately exciting in terms of what was visible.
Here is an excellent essay that addresses an issue that has come to concern me more and more: the apathy of Americans, our passive acceptance of what is happening to our country.
The last four decades have witnessed the first-ever generalized stagnation of wages and benefits for working people in this country, as well as the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world, from middle and low income Americans to the billionaire gamblers, bankers, industrialists, and their hirelings. According to Mother Jones, from 1979 to the present, the productivity of American capitalism grew over 80 percent, while US wages only grew around 12 percent.
The share of US wealth held by half of American households plummeted in 2010 to 1.1 percent, while the top 10 percent's share was 74.5 percent. And according to the British aid agency Oxfam, the 2012 income alone of the 100 wealthiest families in the world was enough to end global poverty four times over!
EXTRACT (List Only):
1. Lack of class consciousness.
2. The bad taste left in the collective mouth by the Stalinist experiment.
The Syrian Arab Army seized 281 barrels with chemicals from insurgents at a farm in Banias, Tartus.
Syria: According to Syria media, and reported by Xinhua, the Syrian armed forces discovered a factory for manufacturing and storing toxic chemical weapons inside a “terrorists'” hideout near Damascus.
An official source told the state news agency, SANA, that “the army unit seized amounts of toxic chemical materials, in addition to seizing chlorine substances in containers, some of them foreign-made, while others were Saudi-made (sic).”
The source said that the haul included weapons and scores of mortar shells which were prepared to be filled with chemical materials. SANA published a photo of the captured materials to accompany the report.
Foreign chemicals seized near Damascus. Some of the chemicals originate in Saudi-Arabia
Comment: The published report did not identify which opposition group's hideout was captured. This could be a media stunt, but in publishing photos, the government has made itself vulnerable to demands for independent verification. It would be easy to expose, if it is a hoax.
It is a mistake to look on what has become endless wars, first centering in the Middle East, as struggles over religion, political theories, sectarian struggles or post-colonial realignments. Each hypothesis fails.
Increasingly, intelligence analysts are agreeing on one thing, there is clear evidence of “game theory/chaos theory” with one clear purpose, to reduce populations in specific areas where key resources are in abundance.
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The first hard evidence hit with the discoveries of Dr. Chris Busby, researching the effects of depleted uranium use in the Fallujah region of Iraq. It took several years to get access to the area. There was a reason.
Not only was it found that fertility had been suppressed and the region plagued with the onslaught of horrific birth defects but that samples taken from the local population indicated that it wasn’t just depleted uranium but pure, weapons-grade U-235 that was found.
Not only were nuclear weapons used in Iraq but purposefully “dirty” weapons, not the more modern MRR (Minimal Residual Radiation) 3rd and 4th generation nukes developed at Livermore Labs in California after 1991.
It was at that time that their weapons program not only bifurcated into a highly classified area but largely went “dark” with top weapons physicists being kept “out of the loop.”
Thus, we find the use of dirty weapons, never meant to win a battle or reduce an enemy stronghold but to destroy a race.
Then, of course, there is still the issue of the endless tons of depleted uranium, not just Iraq but Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and perhaps even Syria.
A recent piece in Uzbekistan's state-sanctioned media has advocated joining NATO and taking over the territory of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and most of the rest of Eurasia. The piece, published on 12news.uz, was taken down shortly after being published, but was preserved on inoSMI.ru. [PBI: English translation below the line.]
The piece, at nearly 9,000 words, offers a number of controversial (to put it kindly) claims: that Tajiks are merely Persian-speaking Uzbeks, that Uzbekistan is the successor state to the Mongol Golden Horde, that the agreement between Russia and Kyrgyzstan to develop hydropower plants is invalid because it misspells “Kyrgyzstan,” among many others. Its main thesis, however, is that the “threats of a natural-technical character” — namely proposed hydropower plants in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan — are the gravest security threats facing Uzbekistan, comparable to a nuclear bomb. And the solution is that Uzbekistan should join NATO.
The piece is a bit out there, but Uzbek analysts point out that it must have been officially sanctioned. “This site [12news.uz] is not just semi-official, it’s official,” dissident political analyst Tashpulat Yuldashev told uznews.net. “It's curated by Dilshod Nurullaev, former Security Commission chairman and advisor to the President,” he said. “There is total censorship in Uzbekistan, and such a politically charged article would not have been allowed to be published without permission from the very top.” That assertion was backed up by another Uzbek analyst to The Bug Pit.
More secrets, more water? The NSA data center in Bluffdale could require as many as 1.7 million gallons of water per day to operate and keep computers cool.
Initial reported estimates suggested the center would use 1,200 gallons per minute, but more recent estimates suggest the usage could be closer to half that amount.
“Our planning is anywhere from 1,000 acre-feet per year to 2,000 acre-feet per year, and that represents – if it was 1,000 acre-feet per year, that would be about 1 percent of our total demand,” said Jordan Valley River Conservancy District assistant general manager and chief engineer Alan Packard.
. . . . . . . .
Reid said Bluffdale otherwise wouldn't have had the resources to improve the land all the way to the south end of the city limits. Instead, the government funded $7 million in infrastructure to the data center, and an additional $5 million in infrastructure back from the site that will allow a third of the water used at the facility to be recycled.
The water would be used at the city park and on some of the city's lawns, Reid said.
Reid said the city was now pursuing other technology business to relocate to the south end of Bluffdale.
“We're looking to try and combine with Salt Lake County to make that a jobs area,” Reid said.
Phi Beta Iota: This is amusing in part because CIA has supposedly been getting a grip on water for the Department of State, and its obvious that NSA does not read CIA reports and does not care about little things like being in the middle of nowhere with vanishing aquifers.
Africa is the world’s fastest growing continent
