Africa

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Thirteen years ago my life changed forever.

Colin Powell, then US Secretary of State and the most credible person in George W. Bush’s cabinet, made the case for war in Iraq on February 5, 2003.

As a young military intelligence officer at the time, watching from a makeshift army base in Kuwait not far from the Iraq border.

Back then I was a true believer, trusting that the government was a force for good “making the world safe for democracy. . .”

The poaching crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is not only affecting elephants. The giraffe population has now plunged to only 38, putting the species at immediate risk of extinction there, new surveys have revealed. Sadly, giraffes in the Congo are not alone. Poaching has become a major problem for the animals wherever they are living. Their numbers throughout Africa have dropped by more than 40 percent over the past 15 years. The entire subspecies is at risk of extinction.

Submitted by Douglas Murray via The Gatestone Institute,

• Facebook is now removing speech that presumably almost everybody might decide is racist -- along with speech that only someone at Facebook decides is "racist."

Having urged "don't panic" just 4 short months ago, it appears Nigeria just did just that as the global dollar short squeeze forces the eight-month-old government of President Muhammadu Buhari to beg The World Bank and African Development Bank for $3.5bn in emergency loans to help fund a $15bn deficit in a budget heavy on public spending amid collapsing oil revenues. Just as we warned in December, the dollar shortage has arrived, perhaps now is time to panic after all.

One of the charms of the future is its powerful element of unpredictability, its ability to ambush us in lovely ways or bite us unexpectedly in the ass. Most of the futures I imagined as a boy have, for instance, come up deeply short, or else I would now be flying my individual jet pack through the spired cityscape of New York and vacationing on the moon. And who, honestly, could have imagined the Internet, no less social media and cyberspace (unless, of course, you had read William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer 30 years ago)?