RUTHFULLY YOURS

This is the tragic legacy of the post colonial movement in Africa which was called “the emerging continent” and with exceptions like Botswana, Namibia, and Kenya so many nations are riddled with tribal warfare, starvation, epidemics and genocide….and the so called “African-American” caucus in Congress and the Black Lives Matter movements do nothing and care not a whit….It is an appalling apathy…..rsk

YANGWALI, Uganda—The day Bungwile Mabuya discovered her husband’s mangled body near her house in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Kasai region, she grabbed her children and ran.

The mother of five, who found refuge in a sprawling lakeside refugee camp here, is one of roughly 1.5 million Congolese fleeing a brutal power struggle pitting President Joseph Kabila against traditional chiefs, who still administer large swaths of the vast central African nation.

Government forces and local militias have killed more than 3,300 people in Ms. Mabuya’s home region since October, according to the Catholic Church, which has had its priests count the bodies since then. On Tuesday, the United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, accused Mr. Kabila’s government of arming a new militia he said has slaughtered hundreds of villagers—including pregnant women and toddlers—in Kasai. A government spokesman has denied the allegations.

The killings reflect the unraveling of a complex network of power trading and patronage, backed by amateur fighters unchecked by the official security apparatus, that has helped secure Mr. Kabila’s rule for the past 16 years.

Ms. Mabuya said her husband, Constantine Masumbe, had stepped outside their hut one December night when she saw three men wearing army uniforms drag him away, accusing him of being a member of Kamuina Nsapu, an antigovernment militia the U.N. says is recruiting child soldiers and raping underage girls in the central Kasai region.

Ms. Mabuya, who found her husband’s body the next morning, denied that her husband belonged to Kamuina Nsapu and said he was a victim of a government crackdown that has intensified since Mr. Kabila’s official mandate expired in December. Mr. Kabila, who is barred from running again by the nation’s constitution, has put off elections, citing a lack of funds and security issues.

“We could not even hold a burial ceremony. Everyone was running,” Ms. Mabuya said.

Tensions in impoverished Kasai escalated last year, when Mr. Kabila refused to recognize Jean-Pierre Mpandi, a chief who founded Kamuina Nsapu and was friendly with Mr. Kabila’s political opponents. In August, government forces fighting Kamuina Nsapu killed Mr. Mpandi. Aid agencies say more than a dozen other traditional chiefs across five provinces have since been killed.

Traditional chiefs are selected according to local custom and perform religious ceremonies, but receive government salaries. Under Congo’s constitution they are required to be apolitical and resolve local disputes, forming a vital link between the capital Kinshasa and remote villages. CONTINUE AT SITE

Saudi Arabia has resisted modernity since its founding in 1932. But the political sands are shifting, and the change will accelerate with Wednesday’s appointment of Mohammed bin Salman as Crown Prince.

King Salman broke with decades of tradition with his royal decree that ousted his nephew, security czar Mohammed bin Nayef, in favor of Salman’s son, Mohammed bin Salman. The Saudi crown has typically passed from one octogenarian or septuagenarian brother to another, so the rise of the 31-year-old son as heir designate is a monumental development.

This is all the more remarkable given the young leader’s reformist inclinations. The Saudis face a triple challenge in falling oil prices, a youth demographic bulge and Iranian imperialism. The Crown Prince believes the answer is an assertive foreign policy that unites Sunni Arab states against Tehran, combined with domestic reform that weans the Kingdom off oil.

This regional vision took shape soon after King Salman ascended the throne in 2015. As Defense Minister (a portfolio he will retain), the Crown Prince emerged as the architect of the Saudi-led military campaign to oust the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels from Yemen.

The Yemen operation has been long and hard, but it has largely succeeded in cutting off Iranian supplies to the Houthis and boosted the confidence of Arab states. Mohammed bin Salman has also spearheaded efforts to diplomatically isolate Qatar over its two-faced policy of cooperating with the West while funding Islamist groups like Hamas.

Last year the Crown Prince launched Vision 2030, a reform program to diversify the Saudi economy and expand the role of private enterprise. The heart of the plan is to boost the private share of the economy to 65% by 2030 from about 40%, and reduce the government’s dependence on oil for revenues, now at 70%.

That’s a tall order in a Kingdom that has historically offered its citizens oil-funded, cradle-to-grave welfare in exchange for little say in politics. Many Saudis have grown up to expect high-paying government jobs that are increasingly hard to subsidize with oil at under $50 a barrel. Unleashing the private economy will also require liberating Saudi women to enter the work force—the right to drive would be a start—and that has already triggered clashes with the Wahhabi clerical establishment.

Earlier this year the government was forced to reverse a pay cut for state employees. Yet Mohammed bin Salman has made progress in other areas. A plan to offer public shares in the state-run oil company, Aramco, is moving ahead. Concerts are performed and movie theaters are opening for the first time in the Kingdom, allowing young Saudis access to entertainment and social interaction that their peers nearly everywhere else take for granted.

His appointment as Crown Prince will strengthen his hand by putting to rest competing claims to the throne from more conservative corners of the House of Saud with its 7,000 princes. A moderate and prosperous Saudi Arabia would bolster stability across the Arab world and is squarely in the U.S. national interest. Washington should support and encourage the young prince as he pursues change.

The year’s most important news story probably never made it into your news feed. Nonetheless it might change your life forever. For the first time, China has demonstrated that it is far ahead of the United States in a critical new technology, namely quantum communications. A Chinese satellite succeeded in transmitting so-called entangled photons to earth stations. That’s the high-tech equivalent of sending a message in undeveloped photographic film: If you try to read it, the light will destroy it. The Chinese breakthrough has huge implications for cryptography, and for a host of other applications.

The tortoise just overtook the hare. We haven’t woken up from a decades-long nap, and we’re at serious risk of losing the race. If we do lose, there will be a name for an American who works for a Chinese: “Employed.” This is not a drill. This is the real thing.

Chris Scott wrote Friday in Asia Times:

On Thursday, a team of Chinese scientists released findings from a breakthrough study that makes China the indisputable leader in the field of quantum communication, an achievement that could be of immense strategic importance.

The study, led by Pan Jianwei and published in Science magazine, successfully demonstrated the ability to distribute entangled photons across unprecedented distances, from space to earth, opening the door for the practical application of cutting-edge, ultra-secure communication….

Encryption methods used today are nearly, but not completely, impossible to hack, but with more advanced computing power the forms of encoding that protect information sent online will become more and more vulnerable. Quantum key distribution, however, is unique in that any measurement of the transmission by an eavesdropper disturbs the transmission, thereby alerting the parties sending information.

So much for the mantra, “The Chinese steal technology but don’t know how to innovate.” Anyone who has seen China’s tech boom up close knows how dumb this view is. Books with titles like “The Coming Collapse of China” are now in their dozenth edition, while China is surging ahead in key areas of technology. China now graduates 1.3 million STEM students from its universities each year, vs. 300,000 in the US. How good are they? As Prof. Graham Allison reports in his new book The Thucydides Trap: