yewb dar

Mahmoud Darwish.

The leaders of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will gather on Monday to sign a deal designed to kick-start the break-up of the United Kingdom, The Telegraph can disclose. 🔗: telegraph.co.uk/politics/202…

“ከወታደሮቹም አንዱ በጦር ጎኑን ወጋው፤ ወዲያውም ደምና ውኃ ወጣ።” — ዮሐንስ 19፥34 በኢትዮጵያ ኦርቶዶክስ ትውፊት በአለ ሩፋኤል የተመሰረተው እንዲህ ነው 🧵

Very surprised that @DigitalINVEA has been abruptly shut down for providing Ethiopian diaspora services. Now, an Ethio citizen in Los Angeles has no way to renew their passport or Ethio Origin ID without flying 6 hours to Washington DC. A ridiculous step backwards.

Andy Burnham's register of interests, reflecting donations for the last year, were released last night. They make for very dispiriting reading. They will do little to dispel fears he is simply a continuity Labour Together/Starmer candidate and I think they raise serious issues with his judgment. Burnham took over £350k in donations in cash and kind over the last year. Most was taken to pay for his Labour leadership campaign in June and July this year. This includes £25k from Gary Lubner, one of the biggest donors to Labour Together and Starmer's Labour from 2021. He also took £22k from ThinkLabour (the new name of Labour Together after it was disgraced by repeated scandal, including reporting me and other journalists to the security services after I investigated Morgan McSweeney and LT's unlawfully undeclared donations). ThinkLabour gave him staff and IT services, so it was basically embedded in his campaign. He also took £164k from Lord Sainsbury, another big historical donor to Labour Together. I think this reflects very poorly on Burnham'sjudgmen. He should have sought funding and support from other sources not so closely associated with Labour Together. I'm sure he could have raised money from other sources. Many of his MPs and the Speaker of the House have called for an inquiry into Labour Together and APCO Worldwide. Will Burnham agree to institute an inquiry into LT now if he's funded by the think-tank and it's biggest donors? It also suggests ThinkLabour might have lots of influence over Burnham's government. That will mean some form of re-heated marketing and polling driven strategy that is basically Blue Labour with a smile. That's not good enough for our moment of polycrises and I really don't it is sufficient to beat Reform. Deeply disappointing.

Reform UK has promised to ban “foreign students” from accessing student loans and said it will end public subsidies for “woke nonsense” degrees #highered #studentloans timeshighereducation.com/new…

Exclusive: The MP who oversaw moves to remove the names of parliamentary staff from the public record was forced to apologise for failing to declare that he was employing his own wife. Alberto Costa, chairman of the Commons Standards Committee, failed to declare his wife’s employment while speaking in a debate about the staff register. Six months later, the committee he chairs agreed that staff names should no longer be published - a move critics warn will make it harder to expose conflicts of interest, lobbying and foreign influence in Westminster. The row comes at an awkward time for Costa’s committee, which is responsible for judging whether MPs have broken Parliament’s rules and could ultimately be called on to rule on whether Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has done so. For a body charged with holding other MPs to the highest standards, the credibility of its own chairman is likely to come under particular scrutiny. Story 👇

Taiwan solved tax evasion in 1951 with a trick so cheap it should embarrass every tax authority on the planet. The problem was an all-cash economy full of small shops. A merchant pockets the cash, skips the receipt, and the sale never existed. Auditors can't catch what was never recorded, and hiring enough of them to watch every noodle stand costs more than the missing tax. So finance chief Ren Xianqun flipped the incentive. Print a lottery number on every receipt. Draw winners every two months on live TV. Top prize today: NT$10 million, about $310K. Suddenly the customer and the shopkeeper want opposite things. The merchant wants the sale off the books. The customer wants the ticket. And there are millions more customers than merchants. Every transaction now carries a built-in witness demanding the paper trail. Year one, reported tax revenue jumped 75%, from NT$29 million to NT$51 million. Seventy-five years later, roughly 70% of Taiwanese still play. Convenience stores redeem the smallest NT$200 prizes at the register, so even a coffee receipt feels like a scratch card. The elegant part is what the audit force costs. The prize pool runs about NT$7 billion a year, roughly $20 million. In exchange, the government gets 23 million unpaid auditors working every checkout line in the country, forever. No inspector general on earth delivers that coverage at that price. Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Slovakia all copied it. The most effective compliance tool ever built looks like a game, and that's exactly why it works.

Let me tell you how it happened. Nigeria’s ginger export hit zero from N26 billion within 3 years. The official story blames fungal blight. But here is what actually happened. When Nigerian farmers lost their indigenous seed supply, grant-aided interventions arrived with replacement seeds. An associate professor at Lagos Business School flagged publicly that some of those interventions involved GMO organisms that weakened indigenous crops and compromised soil health. That is not a conspiracy theory because it is a documented academic concern. Now that Nigeria spoke got destroyed by the GMO seedlings….what is not the result? Nigeria was forced to import ginger from China to fill domestic demand. Chinese ginger has none of the pungency, oleoresin content, or quality that made Nigerian ginger a global premium product. And the ginger now sitting in Nigerian markets tastes like wood because it essentially is wood. The two indigenous varieties that built Nigeria’s global ginger reputation, the Tafin Giwa and Yatsun Biri, had decades of soil relationship and quality built into them. Once the soil was degraded and those seed varieties were displaced, the product that returned was a pale imitation. Nigeria did not just lose a market. It lost a seed. And without a National Ginger Seed Bank, which nobody has built, it may never fully get it back.

የማይደበዝዝ ቀለም

Eulogy for Arada and the Vanished Quarters of Addis Ababa We gather here—not in a hall or a church, but in the shadow of scaffolds and bulldozers—to remember a city that has been unmade. We gather for Arada, for Piazzas and corridors of shade, for tin-roofed alleys that once hummed with laughter, for markets where the scent of berbere clung to your clothes, for teashops where old men traded proverbs as if they were gold. We gather for houses with crooked doors and peeling paint, for verandas draped in laundry, for the music that spilled into the street and never asked for a permit. We gather for the children who chased each other through labyrinths that no master plan could comprehend. Arada was never perfect—its walls carried cracks, its streets carried secrets. But it was alive. It was a city quarter with a heartbeat, where strangers could become kin over a single buna, where each corner told a story that the state could not fully own. And now— We are told this is progress. That rubble is a foundation. That displacement is opportunity. But we know that the empty spaces left behind are not vacant; they are haunted. The ghosts of shopkeepers, weavers, beggars, poets, pickpockets, and preachers linger between the glass towers that rise in their place. We mourn not only what has been lost, but the way it was lost: Without a farewell, without a choice, without the dignity that a life—yes, even a neighborhood’s life—deserves. May we remember Arada as it truly was: A home for the itinerant, the poor, the stubborn, the dreamers. A memory stubborn enough to outlive the wrecking ball. A witness to the city’s first breaths and perhaps, in its absence, a witness to its last. Rest now, Arada. Your streets may be buried under concrete, but your spirit prowls the city still—like the hyena at night—unseen but unforgotten, watching, waiting, laughing at the folly of those who think a city can be remade by erasing its soul.

Jewish Israeli teenagers ambushed and lynched an Ethiopian Israeli on Independence Day because he asked them not to spray confetti in the pizza place he worked in. Violence and war never stay outside the society that perpetrates it against others. timesofisrael.com/six-teens-…