White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Oct. 25 said the coronavirus would not be contained in the United States and downplayed the risk of Vice President Pence’s campaigning after several of Pence’s aides tested positive. Read more: https://wapo.st/3ksSStX
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Through this remarkable year, the key place of food in our lives has been put into greater prominence than ever. Supply chains and supermarkets, health and home cooking have been among our most vital concerns. With Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University London, food and farming actionist Dee Woods and Sheila Dillon of The Food Programme.
Tim Lang is Professor of Food Policy at the Centre for Food Policy at City University of London, which he founded in 1994 and directed until 2016. For the last 25 years he has researched, written and lectured on the role of policy in shaping and responding to the food system, particularly in relation to health, environment, social justice, the political economy and consumer culture. He previously spent seven years as a hill farmer, an experience which has shaped his work ever since. His most recent book, Feeding Britain: Our Food Problems and How to Fix Them, was published in March 2020 and takes stock of the UK food system: where it comes from, what we eat, its impact, fragilities and strengths.
Dee Woods is a food and farming action-ist and campaigner, who advocates for good food for all and a more just and equitable food system, challenging the systemic barriers that impact marginalised communities, farmers and food producers. Her work meets at the nexus of poverty and hunger, human rights, food sovereignty, community development, policy, research, climate and social justice. Dee is co-founder of Granville Community Kitchen in South Kilburn. A previous BBC Food and Farming Awards winner, Dee sits on the GLA London Food Board, the steering group of People Food Power and is a co-editor of A People’s Food Policy. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at CAWR, Coventry University, member of the Food Ethics Council and the coordinating group of the Landworkers Alliance, co-chair of the Independent Food Aid Network, (IFAN) and a trustee of Sustain.
Sheila Dillon has been a food journalist for more than three decades. She has worked on BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme, first as a reporter, then producer and now presenter. In her early days on the programme she produced groundbreaking editions on BSE – mad cow disease and its connections to our desire for cheap food, the rise of GM foods, the growth of the organic movement from muck and magic to multi-million pound business, and the birth of the World Trade Organization. All at a time when those subjects were not widely covered in the media and certainly not covered by ‘food’ programmes’. Recent programmes on childhood poverty, a look at the world in 2030 when Carolyn Steel, author of Sitopia, is Prime Minister, the glory of British pies, diet and cancer, and the inadequacies of medical training when doctors are faced every day with diet-induced diseases, carry on the tradition. In 2000 she helped set up the BBC Food & Farming Awards which judge shops, food producers, campaigners, cooks in public organisations, and policy makers – not only for the quality of their food but the difference they make to their communities, as well as local and national economies. She’s won numerous awards for her journalism, including the Glaxo science prize and honorary doctorates from Harper Adams University, University of Chester and City, University of London for her work, which, the City citation said, ‘has changed the way in which we think about food’.
Food Season supported by KitchenAid
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The Rev. William Barber and founder of Public Square Strategies, Michael Wear, discuss how Christians will vote in the coming election along with the president’s pick for the Supreme Court. Aired on 10/19/2020.
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US President Donald Trump has slammed Lesley Stahl from 60 minutes and has abruptly ended an interview with her after being asked tough questions.
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Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen doubts that there will be a peaceful transition of power, if the president loses the 2020 election to Democratic candidate, former VP Joe Biden. Cohen also states that in his view Trump’s current personal attorney Rudy Giuliani is a ‘moron,’ in conversation with María Teresa Kumar.
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Donald Trump has signed an executive order enabling him to fire a class of federal employees that includes Dr. Anthony Fauci at will, in addition to leaders at the CDC. Pandemic expert Laurie Garrett joins María Teresa Kumar to discuss.»
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[Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University
Libraries. (1606). Guineae nova descriptio., Retrieved from https://dc.library.northwestern.edu/items/5a7042d6-89a1-4ac5-b765-cd6d43baa18c]
It is sometimes thought that the early trade along the African coast in the 16th and 17th centuries under first Portuguese and then Dutch dominance was just a smaller or “reduced scale” version of what it became when the British and the French came to dominate the trade in the 18th and 19th centuries before the anxiety for territorial control led to the “scramble” for territory at the end of the 19th century.
The trouble is that there is interesting evidence that this assumption represents an a-historical mistake. Trade under the Portuguese and the Dutch appears to have differed not only in the volume of traffic, but in the sum and substance of the trade itself and particularly in the evolution and character of those engaged in it.
Some of the early maps reflect of the trade at the turn of the 17th century make this clear enough. While there is the customary pre-occupation with off-short islands and particular named trading points on the mainland, there is also a very interesting representation of an indigenous trading population (a trading class?) engaged in canoe traffic on the oceans along with the intruding European ocean-going vessels.
See for example the detail of this early map showing the European ship somewhat clumsily firing a cannon from its stern, while a canoe fitted with a sail seems to be making its way merrily down the coast, with the current and a favorable wind:
You can note many important details “hidden” in plain sight on these early maps if you consult “expanded” versions of these original maps, thanks now to the digitization and enlargements now possible.
Numerous research questions emerge from the recognition that the Dutch displaced the Portuguese primarily because of their ascendency in the Asia trade with their commercial colony and plantations in Batavia and the Spice Islands. This was a trans-oceanic link that brought much to West Africa which is as yet not fully documented or understood, but among other things, the trade with Asia brought in both new foodstuffs (including Asian yam varieties and Asian rice) and Asian textiles and textile manufacturing technology, expertise and processing techniques involved in indigo tie and wax dying.
By the 19th century when the French & the British have come to dominate things, the imagery depicting the trade has changed considerably. Blacks are caricatured and presented as drunken and slovenly. The classic stereotypes are present in this print of the Ashanti buying muskets for gold at Assini in the Ivory Coast…. Adults are acting like children and the classic “Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (ATF)” trade of the mercantile “frontier” is depicted, as the adults giving up there gold for muskets is being laughed at by the artist who depicts the gold-weighing in the left-hand-side of the picture.
All the while, however, in the background behind the gold-dust weighing, there are tall stacks of textiles. This is clearly not a photograph, but it does seem to make an effort to show the different aspects of trade all crammed into one scene.
It may well be that the coastal trade in cloth — maintained by canoe traffic all through the slave-trade period — is pictured here —- not because it was a dominant European pre-occupation, but perhaps simply because it persisted and remained important for many communities from Sierra Leone (where Yoruba weaving is highly esteemed to this day) all the way down to Benin and Calibar.
The work of Marion Johnson and Anthony Hopkins highlighted in their published material decades ago the importance of trading classes along the coast prior to the domination of European commercial firms during the era of steam-driven commerce, but it would seem that more research could be done on these early maps in close collaboration with economic historians of the region in the 16th and 17th centuries when new plants and novel textiles were introduced on a massive scale in the Dutch period of West African trade.
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The Civilian JTF militia is hunting ‘Death’, aka Boko Haram – the most violent terrorist group in Sub-Saharan Africa. Ordinary African hunters have organised vigilante groups to take up arms and protect locals from the jihadists, who have killed thousands of people and taken hundreds hostage. Watch the hunters catching Boko Haram members and see how locals live in this dangerous situation.
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The US in the 2020 election year is a country deep in crisis. It’s been torn apart by the debate on racism, and millions have been infected with the coronavirus. On top of that, its president is pouring oil on the flames with his Twitter tirades.
At the beginning of the year, things were looking good for Donald Trump: the economy was doing well, unemployment figures were at a 50-year low, his job approval rating was rising, and the Democrats were preoccupied with themselves. But then came the coronavirus, a hazard that the president initially made light of, saying it would miraculously disappear. Instead of a miracle, the crisis hit the United States harder than any other country. The economy is in the doldrums. And COVID-19 is making the shortcomings of the health care system glaringly obvious.
Black Americans have been hit harder by the coronavirus than most. A higher proportion of them work in low-wage jobs that offer little protection against the virus, and they are less likely to have health insurance. The rage expressed in demonstrations against racism is being fuelled by the corona crisis and the mass unemployment it has triggered across the US.
It is hard to imagine that the economy will recover quickly – despite the trillions of dollars Trump is giving to companies. It is also hard to imagine that the millions of unemployed will have jobs again by the time the election is held.
Filmmakers Claudia Buckenmaier and Marion Schmickler traveled through the swing states of Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan and asked people how the economic and health crisis is affecting them. What hopes do voters have going into November’s election? The bitter dispute between Republicans and Democrats and Donald Trump’s divisive style of government has brought democracy in the US to brink of the abyss. The distrust is so great that the Democrats even expect that Trump will reject the election result if he loses. Unimaginable? The Democrats seem to be preparing for exactly this scenario.
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Transition Studies 