From 🇪🇺: One of the three German politicians vying to lead Merkel’s CDU party became the first major European voice to link today’s mass arrests in Hong Kong with the EU-China investment deal.

My Notes on Democracy Part 1

MANUFACTURING Dl55ENT AND MODI'S RESPONSE - AN ANALYSIS

DlS5ENT is allowed in a democracy. Any democratic leader or government will uphold - and MUST uphold its citizens's right to DlS5ENT.

This thread analyses the recent Indian experience.

Some years ago, a western country displayed a movie on India in their visitor centre. Showed @Narendramodi the then Gujarat CM as a devil incarnate drinking the blood of MU5LlM.

A tough battle with the authorities resulted in taking down this video.

Lesson - this obscure country which Modi never visited till date has little to do with Indian politics. Yet, there is this need to stop Modi in his tracks of becoming the future PM by smearing him.

Most of you may have noticed Modi as a potential PM in the last decade.

But the Break India F0rces saw this before 2000. It was no surprise as he was the architect of BJP win in the state. This explains why Godhra, the best managed riot turned into a career-defining event for Modi-Shah.

Who are these people and what is their connection to the topic?

C0MMUNl5T5. As most of us know, Political C'sm is but a surface body of an underground larger body. It has many voices, resources, money, and massive techniques in social sciences, economics, and government machinery.

Almost all 'isms' are products of C'sm.

What will it take to go after ISWAP enclaves in the Lake Chad region? These guys are building a freaking army !!. If we seriously want this war to end we have to create a buffer, isolate Boko Haram and keep them from having outside reinforcement of any kind.

No amount of appeasement will force the Chadian government or their French overlords from denying ISWAP the use of their territory as a staging ground. They are just not interested in doing that. Not because they cant, but because it goes against their interest,

Think about it. In February 2019 a series of French airstrikes targeted a group of “mercenaries and terrorists” from Libya. French Mirage fighters struck a column of 40 vehicles that crossed into Chad from southern Libya.

French military said it got involved at the Chadian government’s request. Think about this for a minute. They obliterated a convoy of 40 pickup trucks of an armed group that had travelled from Libya and was “penetrating deep into Chadian territory.

I implore you to look up a map and see the incredible amount of distance required to carry out such an undertaken. The fighter jets, based at the N’Djamena, first carried out a “show of force” flying low over the convoy. The awestruck militants would have been wondering

1 So, today we turn to early Islamic Beirut. what do we know of the earliest times of #Beirut under early Islamic rule, starting with the #conquest. How and when did Beirut enter the emerging Muslim empire? -rm

2 Let’s start with traditional sources for the early Islamic period. Of those, only al-Balādhurī (d. ca. 892), the Abbasid scholar, is informative. Other Muslim and non-Muslim sources including al-Ṭabarī's Tārīkh are silent on the matter.-rm

3 In his small tome, Futūḥ al-Buldān, al-Balādhurī tells his readers: “After the conquest of Damascus, Yazīd came to Sidon, ʿArqa, Byblos, and Beirut which lie on the sea coast with his brother Muʿāwiya leading the van of the army.”-rm

4 Hence, the men who conquered Beirut were Yazīd b. Abī Sufyān (d. 639) and his half-brother and future caliph Mu‘āwiya (r. 661-680). The date of the conquest of the coast falls between 636 and 639 at the latest, the date of the death of Yazīd in the plague of Emmaus. -rm

5 Yazīd and the Muslim army likely took the coastal road to Beirut, a path taken by numerous armies before. They would have either swung from Damascus to Baalbek through the Hims gap to ‘Arqa, then Byblos, crossed the Dog River, and arrived at the eastern side of Beirut.

There hv been concerted efforts by members of the Oyo APC to rewrite history. They repeat so often the lie that Ibadan was a peaceful place bfr Seyi Makinde took over office on May 29, 2019. It has become a case of, repeat a lie often enough, & it begins to sound like the truth.

Immediately after he took over the government in May 2011, a violent clash erupted. The bloody clash described as "a recurring decimal" in the state saw one dead and about 10 injured.

By June 2012, there was another clash. This time between the NURTW and the PDP. The story was that the NURTW were angry that PDP members were singing Arikesola's praises. You can read the report for yourself.

May 2013 - Violence erupted on Thursday in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, when known members of the ACN and the NURTW made to disrupt a political gathering put together by the leader of Accord Party, Senator Rashidi Ladoja.

August 2013- No fewer than eleven herdsmen have been killed in the last six weeks in some parts of Oke Ogun area; Otu, Ikomu, Igbo-Ora, Iwere-Ile, Iganna, Ilaju and Ado-Awaye.

1/ By far, the biggest Ponzi scheme I've discovered until now was the diamonds one. In 2014, two years before other media and 3 years before prosecutors, I wrote stories about physical diamonds sold by 2 brokers through banks to tens of thousands of Italian investors.

2 / Diamonds were sold at constantly rising prices in a sort of linear progression, which wasn't related to real market prices. The prices were produced by the two brokers themselves, Intermarket Diamond Business (Idb) and Diamond Private Investment (Dpi), then published monthly

3/They published monthly table of their prices in markets pages on my newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy's highest-selling financial daily. Then the 2 diamonds brokers cut the price tables from the pages and presented them to the public as "Il Sole 24 Ore records" but they weren't

4 / People were lured into the scheme with the promise of constantly revaluating physical luxury assets, easy to be hidden (a lot of diamonds were sold to tax evaders and probably gangsters). For just connecting their clients to the 2 brokers, banks earned 15-20% fees.

5 / The business throve thanks to a hole in Italy's financial regulations: diamonds weren't overseen neither by Bank authority Bank of Italy nor financial authority Consob. In two decades, the 2 brokers sold diamonds for 2/3 billion € proceeds.