Image is of President Hakainde Hichilema and President Xi Jinping on September 15th, from this article.
Zambia is a country of 20 million people, located in southern Africa. Breaking free from British rule in the 1960s, the new government was a one party state ruled by the socialist UNIP party with its leader Kenneth Kaunda, who was a strong supporter of the Non-Aligned Movement (and was its chairman from 1970-73). Its economy has been and remains characterised by copper exports - it is the second-largest copper exporter in Africa - and the economy deeply struggled in the 1970s due to the price of copper plunging. After the fall of the USSR, and due to violent protests, Kaunda stepped down and instituted a multiparty democracy, which has been maintained without (successful) coups to this day, though there are warnings by the leader that some are plotting a coup, given the trend right now.AA
Earlier this year, in June, Zambia struck a deal to restructure the $6.3 billion in debt that they are burdened with, of which China is the single largest creditor.Reuters Though he has typically been more West-friendly, last week, President Hichilema traveled to China for two days, meeting with various companies, and Xi Jinping himself. They elevated their relationship to that of a comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership.Xinhua He and Xi have agreed to the increased use of local currencies in trade.BB
Hichilema said Zambia thanks China for supporting the African Union's entry into the G20 and China's positive role in resolving the Zambian debt issue. The Zambian side abides by the one-China principle, highly appreciates the guiding philosophy and principles of Chinese modernization, and hopes to learn from China's development experience.
Hichilema has also said:AN
"We can do more, faster, because the needs are tremendous in Zambia. I heard some of the solutions are here. All we need to do is to combine the two together."
Check out @Othello@hexbear.net's discussion of The Wretched of the Earth!
The Country of the Week is Singapore! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The news summary for last week is here!
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week's discussion post.
Are they frequent aches? IBS?
Low fodmap diet + daily actimel (dairy free version) cleared up all of my cramps and stomach pains after getting them for years and years and years.
What this generally boils down to in practice is - no dairy, no bread (switch to gluten free breads instead of yeasty ones), and getting that probiotic. There's very little testing for "fodmap" levels in food so the easiest way to stick to low fodmaps is usually to go for gluten free variants of things.
Anyway, switching to this was literally lifechanging for me. I strongly recommend it for anyone that gets these kinds of issues.
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Yeah losing out on things you like is annoying. But I cheat from time to time and get no problems at all. I feel like it's a threshold, you can eat fodmaps to a certain extent but when you go over the threshold frequently enough in a short enough timespan you get the usual living hell from it.
For example yesterday I had some bread in a breakfast bap I ordered and that's fine for one day. Having had no other fodmap foods today really I'm not going to get any issues.
Once you get into the swing of this it's actually pretty easy to follow. I do recommend trying it as soon as you can, in just a week you could see a difference if this is what is causing your issues.
Have you had a scope done?
No they only do this in extreme cases on the nhs. Why?
Fuckin Torys. Its not urgent or anything, but a scope can diagnose/rule out lactose or gluten intolerance, and rule out other things. If there's a way to get on a waiting list or something that won't cost money, I think its worth it.
Interesting. Maybe I should ask, I've generally sort of dealt with it and up until hearing about fodmap stuff it was a constant burden. It completely changed everything for me.
Can lactose and gluten issues develop? I never had those problems before, cheese used to be one of my favourite things :(
Yeah its not that uncommon to see people diagnosed with an intolerance well into adulthood. I have a relative who developed/found out they had a gluten intolerance in their 60s. You're already cutting it out of your diet and it sounds like its working so its not that urgent to get a scope, but I feel like having that confirmation of what's going on can help with knowing exactly what you can have/can't have in your diet
The thing that throws me is that I was always fine though. Milk was always my goto drink without issues, cheese was probably 30% of my diet. Having my body change so drastically in what I can and can't eat is annoying especially when it's all things I loved.
I feel like that's probably the worst part of it, that the body can go from being perfectly fine to being unable to handle something when nothing else in your life changed to provoke it
hmmm... is it all onions period or just onions prepared in certain ways?
i eat so much frickingf bread smh
Not a problem if you don't get these kinds of cramps regularly! I didn't for a long long time, but then it became a problem. I don't really know why. If you do have IBS it might be your thing like me though.
What the hell is fodmap
That was my reaction too. It's an acronym that stands for "Fermentable Oligosaccharides, Disaccharides, Monosaccharides And Polyols." and exceeding a certain threshold of these fodmap carbohydrates is a trigger for IBS cramps, intestinal bleeding etc for some people.
This isn't kook shit either. It's a solution being used medically for the problem.
So it’s just you can eat grain or dairy food?
Pretty close. That's the bulk of it in practice. It's actually not even that since you can cheat and as long as you don't go over your personal tolerance level you won't get any problems. I think of it like a meter that I can fill up and if I overfill it then I get the IBS cramps debuff. I assume other people with IBS have different levels of tolerance.
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