Kiwon Waldron participated in four races at Harrah’s Hoosier Park, consistently finishing mid-pack in a competitive evening of harness racing in Indiana. Waldron’s first race was in the pace class, where he drove Where’s Drogon to a sixth-place finish in a time of 1:53&3. In race 3, another pace class event, Waldron and Mary Jo […]

The Bermuda National Trust [BNT] is inviting anyone with an interest in photography to submit entries for its Bermuda Natural Wonderland 2025 Calendar Photo Contest, featuring Bermuda’s flora and fauna.” “Last year was the first time we invited all members of the community to contribute to our annual calendar, and the result was a beautiful, […]

The Bermuda Zoological Society [BZS] is inviting the general public to take part in the second Eat’Um to Beat’Um Lionfish Chowder Competition this Saturday [March 16th] from 2.00 pm to 4.00 pm at the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum & Zoo [BAMZ]. A spokesperson said, “The Bermuda Government has provided free admission to the BAMZ facility from noon […]

[Written by Stephen Wright] Bermudian physique athlete Susan Simons has set her sights on a top-two finish at the NPC Worldwide Royal Grand Prix Bermuda Regional at the Ruth Seaton James Centre in Devonshire on Saturday [September 9]. Simons, who will compete in the wellness masters and wellness open divisions, returned to training in January in […]

The Bermuda Sandcastle Competition took place on Saturday [August 31] at Horseshoe Bay Beach, with the ‘best on the beach’ prize being awarded to Pete Faverio. Best on the Beach Prize A spokesperson said, “Pete Faverio returns from Delaware to stun and amaze spectators with his castles. This is his third year joining us. Adult category #1 Team […]

Get ready for the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest, just a few weeks away. While Israel's initial song was disqualified for being too political, their second entry has also been painstakingly scrutinized despite many of the songs in the competition carrying similar hidden political messages.

Apex Group Ltd. announced it has acquired the technology platform and conference business of Context365, “an established global provider of technology and events that connects alternative asset class investors with high quality asset managers.” A spokesperson said, “Context365 connects LPs and GPs through its software as a service [SaaS] digital networking and research platform, further […]

Here is the new content:

I've mentioned that I have been working on running a five-minute mile on the treadmill this year, a goal that at one point seemed in reach. I think I also complained that I got sick and that when I got back to it, they had swapped out all the treadmills for fancy treadmills with built-in Netflix and air conditioning and stuff like that, which I now refer to as "Bob's Tred Mill." There's some good things about these, and some things that make me crazy, but one thing that especially made me crazy is they felt significantly faster than the old Precor ones I was used to. It's definitely a real thing that treadmills are sometimes not calibrated correctly (or the tread stretches out or slips, etc.) but it was also possible that being sick set me back more than I thought. The important thing is to get The Data instead of just The Upset Feelings so I was shopping for things like those hand-held unicycles that you can wheel around to measure how long things (like streets) are, as it does seem like the kind of device that I would own, looking at like the world's most accurate hand-held unicycle thing, and then I noticed at the last thing that most of them have a MAX SPEED of something like 10mph, which would not do. I finally had the brain-stroke that I could use a laser tachometer to do it, since these have a max speed more like 99999 RPM. So I measured the tread length with some chalk marks and put reflective tape on there. The treadmill will go at different speeds when loaded (running on it) vs unloaded, which also depends on your weight and stride and stuff a little, so you also gotta engage in the dexterity-testing act of measuring while running on it, which looked like this:

POV: You are me

Pointing the laser at the reflective tape dot (visible right next to the laser dot here) as it flies by while running kinda fast is definitely tricky, although I must say that it was one of those times when I thought, "I've been training my whole life for this!" and you can see that I'm showing off a little bit here by also photographing it at the same time. But you are not impressed since it reports 0 RPM. The nice thing about the tachometer is that it only needs a pair of observations to give you a frequency, and you can easily tell if you missed the tape, which you do often on account of the shaking, because you get some integer multiple that's way off from the right answer. Anyway I dutifully took multiple readings unloaded and loaded at (nominally) 6mph, 7mph, ... 12mph and made a spreadsheet with all the results converted, and... found that the treadmill is just about 1% too fast loaded, all across the board. This would be just 3 seconds for a five-minute mile, which is not nothing, but it definitely does not vindicate my Upset Feelings (I was thinking it felt more like 10%). My best guess is that the old treadmills were (all?) actually too slow, which is annoying because now I doubt some of the unofficial 5k records I painfully set for myself during the summer. But, well, the thing about endeavoring to do challenging things is: No Cheating!

In project news, I feel I have a foothold now to get myself out of this math hole, as I've finally migrated this algorithm to work only with 64-bit integer arithmetic and so I can port it to GPU soon and then be out of ideas about how to make it faster. I have no idea if there's a good story to be told for this project, but I'll try (and also, it is okay if sometimes the hobby programming doesn't lead to a video or Sigbovik paper, you know?). And speaking of Sigbovik: Heroes have emerged quite on time this year, so it's certainly looking like there will be a proceedings and conference (perhaps with livestream), so start writing those papers now.

Aside from the math hole, I've been making some progress on two other concurrent projects. It's getting normal again (even quiet) at work and winter break is coming up, and I'm looking forward to having some several-day stretches to work on them.

I played through Golf Peaks (well, I haven't beat all the bonus levels yet but I've been working back to front so it's just a matter of a little time at this point), which was a very nice little puzzle game that does almost everything right. Other than the very irritating music in one world, I think my only disappointment was that it doesn't elegantly handle infinite-length puts. I'm also still working on Return to Monkey Island, which I do like, although it doesn't hold up to my memory of the first two. I think one of the problems with modern point-and-click adventure games is the voices, actually: Not because the voice acting bothers me, but because it goes so slow compared to reading. It's like when you just want to figure out the maximum speed of the hand-held unicycle and they're trying to get you to watch a video instead of just reading. Tears of the Kingdom (which I'm still savoring, but getting close to the end now) does a good job with this; you do hear snippets of voices, which helps with the characterization, but you can blow through the dialog at a pretty fast pace. Probably a lot cheaper, too!

Primary Food Processors are essential to Europe’s food security. But we face significant challenges in today’s changing landscape. We urgently call on policymakers to implement strategies that improve sustainability and efficiency of our sector, ensuring Europe’s resilient future food supply.

Phase One – Article Writing & Initial Blog Posting’s Quality articles are the de’facto now a day’s. I started with five articles that were completely unique and of quality content for my readers. The purpose of my analysis was to find out the significance of article writing, article submission and the importance of writing quality […]

Linking yourself as an author to your content is relatively easy. If you do not have a Google+ profile created yet, start with by creating one. Next, on your header section of your HTML place the <link href=”[profile_url]” rel=”publisher” /> as this will notify Google you are the publisher of the content. After placing this […]

The Role of Google Authorship If you are the author of the article, can Google tell the difference when using article submission services? The facts point to no at this point, but there are more and more sites starting to follow the same authorship standard and business site verification standards. With authorship being more common […]

First thought that comes to mind. Try making use of the rel=author attribute. For example: a WP blog allows for authorship as well as sites like BloggerSpot and ArticlesBase.com. From experience it would seem that when sites are joined or for a better term utilized as assets to help the later of the sites, duplicate […]

The post The Most Beautiful Country Photography Contest appeared first on English Russia.

Join the Program in Judaic Studies and the Department of Religion on Tuesday, November 19, for this talk delivered by Ilana Pardes. Lunch will be available before the event's start, between 11:30am–12:00pm only. The account of the rise of Israelite kingship in the Book of Samuel is one of the greatest narratives of antiquity that has been passed down to us. Far from being a dry chronicle, it offers both an unblinking perspective on political realities and a daring representation of the humanness, the nakedness, of royal figures. The talk will revolve around the encounter of King David and the wise woman of Tekoa (2 Samuel 14). Special attention will be given to the dramas behind the scenes, to the hidden links between the parabolic tale of the wise woman and the story of the House of David. All are welcome to attend, but space is limited – please RSVP to judaic@princeton.edu and note any dietary needs. More about Ilana Pardes Ilana Pardes is the Katharine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is currently a Visiting Professor in the Program in Judaic Studies Program at Princeton University. Her work has focused on the nexus of Bible, literature, and culture as well as on questions of gender, aesthetics, and hermeneutics. She is the author of Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Harvard University Press, 1992), The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (University of California Press, 2000), Melville's Bibles (University of California, 2008), Agnon's Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture (The Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies, University of Washington Press, 2013), The Song of Songs: A Biography (Princeton University Press, Lives of Great Religious Books, 2019), and Ruth: A Migrant’s Tale (Yale University Press, Jewish Lives, 2022).

The Oscar-nominated trio behind 'A Single Life' is back with a new dark comedy about climate change and individual responsibility.

Mathilde Bédouet's 'Summer 96' qualified for the Oscars by winning the prestigious César Award, France's equivalent of the Academy Award.

The NFB film earned its Oscars qualification by winning the Helen Hill Award for animated short at the New Orleans Film Festival.

In this Oscar-qualified short, a group of friends go on a roadtrip as their car – and their country – falls apart.

Three-time Oscar nominee Torill Kove, who won the Academy Award for her short 'The Danish Poet,' is back in the Oscars race this year with a new film about her memories of growing up in Kenya.

Artists of all levels are invited to showcase their skills and creativity.

  You can hardly find a person who doesn’t know what Instagram is. And you can barely find internet marketers who don’t use Instagram in their marketing campaigns. Instagram is very popular and some even think that it will overtake Facebook. Actually, Facebook and Instagram are now closely collaborated, which only strengthens both of them.  […]

The post Why Is Instagram Content So Important? appeared first on RSSground.com.

Now you can generate self-updating content feeds with recent pins of any Pinterest user or Pinterest board, with fresh videos of any Vimeo user or Vimeo channel, and with recent media from iTunes USA.

The post Vimeo, Pinterest and iTunes Content Sources Just Added appeared first on RSSground.com.

This is the first release note in 2020. And we are glad to introduce a new feature for our automated content posters – CONTENT RECYCLING. As you know, the main idea of RSS Ground posting services is gradual updates with unique content. Our posting campaigns functionality is built to ensure your blogs and social network […]

The post New Feature Released – Content Recycling appeared first on RSSground.com.

Meet new source of content – Telegram Feeds! Telegram is a messaging platform that is gaining more and more popularity with millions of users and businesses. And it’s not just messages. It lets you create your own public channels for broadcasting your information as an affective one-way content delivery providing great possibilities to reach large […]

The post New Content Source – Telegram Feeds appeared first on RSSground.com.

We have great news for you! RSS Ground team is about to add a new set of tools to its arsenal. Our next big milestone is to implement integration with platforms that provide cross-service automation such as IFTTT, Zapier and Integrately. You will be able to connect to hundreds of online service providers and make […]

The post Quality Content From Everywhere To Anywhere appeared first on RSSground.com.

We’re thrilled to announce that RSS Ground has been officially approved as a Zapier app! What does this mean for you, our valuable users? Get ready to turbocharge your personal feeds with near-limitless content sourcing possibilities. For those who’ve been waiting this moment, let’s explore the new doors that have just swung wide open: Introducing […]

The post Elevate Your Content Game: How Zapier Integration Can Boost Your Personal Feeds! appeared first on RSSground.com.

We're looking for a relentlessly positive, cat herding bike nerd to hold down the fort when Sarah Moore goes on maternity leave in January.
( Photos: 1 )

Gold crosses, symbols rich in spiritual depth and historical significance, have journeyed from their sacred origins to become a beacon of contemporary fashion. This transformation showcases the adaptability of religious icons, evolving from strictly spiritual objects into cherished elements of modern fashion. This article embarks on a journey to explore how gold crosses have seamlessly ... Read more

The post From Sacred to Chic: Gold Crosses in Contemporary Fashion appeared first on Star Two.

A picture of a fox cub has won a prestigious European Wildlife Photographer of the Year award.

Szuhi Attila of ITE.HU placed third in our recent Avangate Network Affiliate Wars Contest despite being relatively new to the world of affiliate marketing. We interviewed him about his affiliate marketing techniques and overall approach to creating online content.

You’ve probably attended a webinar or two (or more), but are you using them effectively as part of your overall content plan? In this blog post, we teach you the basics of hosting a webinar and how to use them effectively as you build out your content strategy and grow your business.

I’m writing this blog because of the disarray I see over the topic of context instruction and the poor instructional practice that it seems to manifest. One confusion is already well recognized, but merits some mention here. The other befuddlement usually goes without remark, and yet it, too, has unfortunate consequences for young readers.

Any complaints, queries or suggestions about content on News24 may be sent to our public editor George Claassen.

AUKUS reveals much about the new global strategic context Expert comment NCapeling 17 September 2021

The new AUKUS partnership as well as the furore in Paris surrounding its announcement says a lot about the new geopolitical landscape.

The growing diplomatic drama surrounding the announcement of the new Australia-UK-US (AUKUS) risks concealing rather than highlighting what the deal reveals about profound changes in the global strategic context. Several elements stand out.

First, Australia’s decision to break off the $66 billion contract it signed with France in 2016 to purchase a new fleet of diesel electric submarines underscores the heightened level of concern in Canberra about China’s growing naval capabilities.

Despite all the industrial, legal, and diplomatic disruption, the Australian government has decided only the stealthy nuclear-powered submarines developed by Britain with US support can provide the genuine naval capability it needs long-term.

Next, in helping Australia resolve this conundrum, the British government has revealed the versatility of its new foreign policy. Part of the reason UK prime minister Boris Johnson eschewed the concept of a formal foreign policy and security treaty in the post-Brexit deal with the European Union (EU) was to pursue freely new ventures such as the recent ‘G7-plus’ summit in Cornwall, and enhanced cooperation among the Five Eyes allies. AUKUS reveals that this approach can produce real results.

Europe or the Indo-Pacific

During this week’s Polish-British Belvedere Forum in Warsaw, one of the main Polish concerns was that this ‘tilt’ to the Indo-Pacific could overstretch Britain’s scarce resources when it should be focusing on Europe, where they are most needed.

But AUKUS does not over-extend Britain. There is no military commitment involved in the agreement. The UK also remains outside the Quad – made up of the US, India, Japan, and Australia. And the ongoing stately voyage of its new aircraft carrier from the Mediterranean into the South China Sea provides better insight into the substance of the UK’s Indo-Pacific tilt.

Much derided for not carrying enough of its own aircraft – and for depending on US and Dutch escort vessels – the UK has in fact managed to coalesce a flexible group of allies around the Queen Elizabeth while enabling it to fly the British flag in Asian waters and strengthening interoperability with its allies for future joint operations.

Despite the hype, Britain’s main defence investments and deployments remain firmly focused in Europe, as laid out by the recent Integrated Review. And the decision to draft a new NATO Strategic Concept – midwifed by Britain at the 70th anniversary NATO summit hosted in London in December 2019 and confirmed during Joe Biden’s visit to NATO headquarters in June – will give Britain’s role in European security a new purpose and focus in the coming years.

Alone on the strategic landscape

For France, of course, the cancellation of its submarine deal is a painful humiliation, and a severe blow to thousands of workers in its hi-tech defence industry. It also comes at a sensitive moment politically, with Emmanuel Macron keen to demonstrate his international standing ahead of the 2022 presidential election. Instead, France now looks rather lonely on the strategic landscape alongside the more homogeneous and collectively powerful AUKUS trio.

But, rather than take the high road, a furious French reaction has compared Biden to Donald Trump and argued that this defence industrial failure for France should drive an acceleration towards European – for which, read EU – strategic autonomy.

This implies France sees European strategic autonomy as protecting and extending its own sovereign power and industrial interests rather than as a process for EU members to achieve more together in security and foreign policy than they can alone – thereby undermining rather than enhancing its case.

The gap between European strategic rhetoric and practical action was further highlighted by the AUKUS partnership being announced the evening before the EU launched its own Indo-Pacific strategy, and on the same day as China refused to allow a German frigate its first planned port visit to Shanghai.

America is still back

There is still a long way to go before the new submarine deal becomes reality. Australia needs to extricate itself from the French deal, decide how to secure the highly enriched uranium to power its new nuclear submarines, decide with the US and UK the division of labour and technology transfer of production, and assuage the International Atomic Energy Agency’s concerns about the precedent this deal sets. The fruits of this dramatic announcement will, therefore, be a long time in coming.

But, however the details play out, 15 September 2021 was a consequential day. The AUKUS announcement showed that China’s growing hard power is now eliciting a genuinely tough and structural political-military reaction.

Across the Atlantic, it also allowed President Biden – flanked ‘virtually’ by the British and Australian prime ministers – to send the global message that America is indeed back, just three weeks after the ignominious retreat from Afghanistan and chaotic exit from Kabul. And it offered him the opportunity to remind the world that the Indo-Pacific is where the US will be putting its main effort in the future.

For many in China, AUKUS now confirms their belief that the US and its principal allies are determined to contain China’s rise in its own ‘backyard’, where it believes it has the right to flex its muscles. For others, it will confirm Xi Jinping has overreached and China is now paying the price of his more assertive strategy. Either way, the Chinese are on notice that the ambivalent nature of the Obama pivot to Asia has given way to a more determined pivot under Biden.

While the US is stepping up, the UK has shown it is in the mix, leveraging opportunities as they arise. For example, the goodwill the UK has generated in Tokyo with this new partnership with Australia could help its case as it pursues membership of the Transpacific Partnership trade area in 2022.

The EU looks like a bystander in comparison and ill-equipped for the geopolitical competition inherent in this new strategic context. It is essential, therefore, once the dust has settled from these fraught few days, that the US and UK reach out to find ways to involve France and its EU partners in a meaningful, shared transatlantic approach to the Indo-Pacific.

European Hub for Contemporary China

The European Hub for Contemporary China is a three-year project focused on original research on China.

dora.popova 10 October 2024

The European Hub for Contemporary China (EuroHub4Sino) is a three-year project, which began in October 2023, to produce original research on China. It also seeks to create an online platform that pools a wide array of European knowledge and expertise on contemporary China in one publicly accessible research platform. The project is run by a consortium of eight partners across six European states.

Find out more by visiting the project website.

EuroHub4Sino is co-funded by the European Union. UK participants in Horizon Europe Project European Hub for Contemporary China are supported by UKRI grant numbers 10108183 and 10108749.

AE Christian
Nov 1, 1997; 38:2264-2272
Articles

Review: Decolonization and its discontents The World Today mhiggins.drupal 1 August 2022

Jenna Marshall on a lively if flawed argument to find a way forward in a debate that has descended ‘into acrimony’.

Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously
Olufemi Taiwo, Hurst, £14.99

Decolonization was once heralded as a moment of potential and possibility for the formerly imperial world to chart a new way forward no longer tied to the apparatus of empire.

It marked a period of transition to nation states – and an expansion of a rights-based international community that would dispense with the morally bankrupt regime of racism, dispossession and subjugation that characterized colonialism.  
 

The descent of the decolonization debate

Half a century later, the debate surrounding decolonization has descended into acrimony. Some factions cast the issue of decolonization as a sustained attack on British and western culture writ large; other disparate voices coalesce around related social justice issues such as inequality, climate change and education. 

Decolonization has become ubiquitous in the public domain – and its ubiquity is the problem. In Against Decolonization, Olufemi Taiwo renounces a concept he conceives as having been emptied of serious study and analytical purchase; one incapable of addressing the complexities of modern global politics and more importantly, Africa’s place in it. 

Although the book attacks the inexhaustible ways in which the ‘trope of decolonization’ has been deployed, Taiwo is less bothered by the purported failures of scholars he deems ‘decolonizers’ and focuses his attention instead on the political landscape of African countries, past and present. 

Central to the book’s argument are two distinct scholarly strands on decolonization. The first, legal focus, centres on the political and economic forces of state-building. The second essays an ‘ideology’ of decolonization that rests on ‘forcing an ex-colony to forswear on pain of being forever under the yoke of colonization any and every cultural, political, intellectual, social and linguistic artefact, idea, process, institution and practice that retains even the slightest whiff of the colonial past’. 

Whether one should characterize the latter as simply a field of study or a potential set of policy arrangements remains unclear – yet what is certain is that it is too nebulous, too elastic, too open-ended to offer any substantive model or mechanism to understand postcolonial Africa. 
 

Correcting Eurocentric narcissism

 The decolonization research agenda in Africa came to prominence during the Cold War period of national liberation struggles.

The intellectual project that followed centred on dismantling Eurocentrism as colonial subjugation through its promotion of the West as the crucible of legitimate and scientific knowledge. Since then, scholars have argued that decolonization itself has become compromised by its enduringly Eurocentric gaze at the expense of the agency of African thinkers, creatives and statesmen and women. 

Taiwo seeks to correct this narcissism – and the omissions left in its wake – by introducing lesser-known Africans and pan-African scholars and cultural figures. These voices, he hopes, will illuminate issues often ignored by ‘decolonizers’ and spark a ‘renewed interest in an appreciation of the many different ways in which African thinkers have responded to the colonial experience’.
 

The decolonization of language

Taiwo challenges the decolonization of language as an oversold promise.

Romanticizing an imagined, pristine African pre-colonial past, he says, ultimately leads to nativism and atavism. As a case in point, Taiwo highlights bureaucratic instances of ‘language policy planning’ to deploy African languages in places such as Niger, Mali, Cameroon, Senegal and Nigeria that were hindered by multilingualism, education and high rates of illiteracy.

The author goes on to confront the abstract language of decolonization, which, he says, allows western scholars to unproblematically engage with the concept without any serious consideration of their own complicity in upholding systems of exclusion. It entrenches their own institutional power within the academy, amplifies their perspectives at the expense of others, and limits the possibilities for understanding the problems of world politics with deleterious effects on policy.

It is a serious claim, but there are issues to be addressed: Taiwo assumes there is coherence among scholars of decolonization, which is not the case. 

When Taiwo approaches how to foster political systems that cater to the needs of their citizens he dismantles the binary of ‘West as modern’ v ‘Africa as traditional’. Chieftaincies as traditional African governance, he points out, were the product of colonial anthropology, not Africans themselves. From the Fanti Confederation of 1871 to the Egba United Government in what is now Nigeria, Taiwo demonstrates that there has been a sustained tradition towards demands for democratic values. 

As he concedes an intellectual neglect of African philosophers that underlies the design and operations of Africa’s political institutions, Taiwo’s initial dismissal of the significance of cultural decolonization deserves another look. How should political and economic drives toward self-determination be advanced in the absence of knowledge shaped and mediated through African lived experiences?

In this respect, the tale of two decolonizations – the legal alongside the ideological – suggest an unhelpful, if not false, binary.
 

The problem of reconciling modernity and colonialism

What resonates throughout the book is the idea that Europe cannot profess to hold an exclusive intellectual claim to modernity. Its universal aspirations are open to all of humanity, allowing those who have historically been marginalized to be worldmakers. 

The idea that modernity and colonialism are irreconcilable is problematic. For instance, Taiwo argues that the curtailment of capitalism in Africa by restricting the growth of the middle classes while limiting competition between African capitalists and the metropole is the consequence of colonialism.

Yet the celebrated cultural anthropologist Sidney Mintz established an understanding that the matter for debate is not whether non-westerners were part of the modern system, but how and to what degree they were included and able to actualise its ideals. 

The emerging capitalist world economy needed non-western lands and labour, and so they were conscripted to this end. Recent abolitionist and black radical scholarship has built on this argument to maintain that capitalism not only requires inequality for it to function but that race – as a mechanism for producing ‘difference’ – enshrines it.

Acknowledging the unacknowledged

In the end, Taiwo communicates a palpable frustration at the state of academic discourses on contemporary Africa under the guise of emancipatory and radical scholarship. He offers an alternative approach whereby African students might rid themselves of a faddism that is ‘at best unsatisfactory’ and at worst produces ‘confusion, obscurantism, if not outright distortion and falsification’.

Yet out of this irritation, Taiwo’s greatest contribution in Against Decolonization might be to urge an acknowledgement of how and to what degree decolonization has become subdued and its political possibilities curtailed. He ultimately urges us to reconsider the purpose of the decolonization academic movement as an ethics to abide by rather than a social theory of the postcolonial world. 

This requires those ‘decolonizers’ on whose careers the term is built to adopt greater intellectual humility – to resist the posture of the anarchist radical scholar armed for the ‘good fight’. Instead, they should apply a scholarly curiosity to genuinely engage with those already on the battlefield, so to speak; those ‘doing the work’ in practice, but who have been unacknowledged until now.

Africa Aware: Supply chains, land contestation, conflict Audio NCapeling 30 March 2023

This episode examines relations between Ethiopia and Sudan as part of an XCEPT project mini-series.

The war in northern Ethiopia since November 2020, and subsequent conquest of disputed farmlands in Al-Fashaga by the Sudanese army on the Ethiopia-Sudan border, has brought into focus the importance of agricultural commodities such as sesame as a potential driver of land contestation and conflict. 

The panel discusses the interrelation of commodity and conflict supply chains, land contestation, and boundary disputes in the Horn of Africa, with a particular focus on the regions of Wolkait/Western Tigray in northwest Ethiopia and Al Fashaga in eastern Sudan.

This podcast was produced with support from the Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) project, funded by UK Aid from the UK government.

When you log on to the SAS Risk Governance Framework and choose a solution, the web application might fail to load the solution content. When the problem occurs, you continue to see "Loading..." on the screen, an

Adopting a Market-based Approach to Boost Energy Access in Displaced Contexts Research paper sysadmin 25 March 2019

This paper evaluates the market-based approaches adopted in the MEI projects in Kenya and Burkina Faso. It articulates how such commercial strategies can be applied to the delivery of energy in displacement settings and compares this to real world examples.

• Development of long-term energy solutions in displacement settings tends to be perceived as investment that falls outside the remit of emergency responses. In addition, when emergency energy supply measures are implemented they often result in expensive, unreliable and unhealthy energy provision for those in protracted or recurrent crises.
• There is widespread agreement among humanitarian and development experts that an effective refugee response should include long-term development solutions as well as emergency relief.
• The energy access imperative is more pronounced when considering the need for effective energy distribution in practically all camp activities and basic necessities: pumping and treatment of clean water; heating and cooling for food storage and cooking; energy for livelihood activities; and provision of light for schooling, hospitals and the prevention of violence against women and children.
• Minor shifts in household energy use to basic solar lighting options and non-wood fuels would save $303 million annually on refugee fuel costs.
• Within refugee contexts in Kenya and Burkina Faso, the MEI sought to examine opportunities to use market interventions, rather than in-kind distributions, to improve clean energy access over the long-term and test the delivery of market-based approaches.

Jean Segura became one of the Phillies' most notable offseason acquisitions, a two-time All-Star expected to give the organization its best overall production at shortstop since Jimmy Rollins left town, in part because of a little brawl he had late last season with Mariners teammate Dee Gordon.

South Africa's Economic Reform and Employment in the Context of the Coronavirus Pandemic 3 September 2020 — 3:00PM TO 4:00PM Anonymous (not verified) 26 August 2020 Online

President of COSATU, Zingiswa Losi, discusses the organization’s priorities for protecting jobs and workers, and working with other stakeholders to build a sustainable post-pandemic economy.

Employment in South Africa fell by an estimated 18 per cent between February and April 2020. The measures imposed to control the spread of COVID-19 suffocated an already weak economy and unemployment has hit a new high.

The stated aims of the government’s economic reform plans include the support of job creation in labour intensive industries, but the reform of the state and rebalancing of the economy and fiscus could lead to further job losses in state agencies and enterprises.

Protecting jobs while ensuring the health and safety of workers are dual priorities, and require the joint commitment and ‘social compact’ of labour, business and government.

Nov. 2, 2023 — Researchers from the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), the University of St. Thomas, and the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) won first place and “best workflow” […]

The post ALCF Team Wins 1st Place and Best Workflow at 2023 IEEE SciVis Contest appeared first on HPCwire.

Discover why more content isn’t solving your boredom but making it worse.