On June 21, Malawi’s President Lazarus Chakwera fired the country’s chief of police, suspended several senior government officials and also took the extraordinary step of stripping his deputy, Saulos Chilima, of all powers after they were accused of receiving kickbacks from UK-based businessman Zuneth Sattar in exchange for government contracts worth more than $150m. While Chilima is the highest-ranking official in Malawi to be removed from power over alleged corruption to date, few were shocked by the accusations. After all, it was only in January that Chakwera had to dissolve the country’s cabinet after three prominent ministers – Lands Minister Kezzie Msukwa, Labour Minister Ken Kandodo and Energy Minister Newton Kambala – faced corruption charges.
Sadly, a corruption pandemic is raging in Malawi – and on the rest of the continent. Indeed, from Malawi to South Africa and Zimbabwe, from Angola to Mozambique and Namibia, in countries across Africa high-ranking civil servants and their relatives, in cahoots with industry and business leaders, seem to have long been shamelessly stealing from the long-suffering masses. South Africa, for instance, has recently been rocked by allegations that former President Jacob Zuma and a plethora of former ministers and CEOs of state-owned companies systematically planned and executed state capture to aid the wealthy Gupta family and line their pockets. On June 22, South Africa’s Chief Justice Raymond Zondo released the final instalment of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into State Capture and found that the ruling African National Congress party, under Zuma, “permitted, supported and enabled corruption and state capture”. He also criticised current President Cyril Ramaphosa, who served as vice president under Zuma, for hesitating “to act with more urgency” to resist the emergence and establishment of state capture. Beyond the Gupta scandal, South Africa is battling to recover millions of dollars it lost through dodgy contracts linked to the nationwide campaign to combat the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In Zimbabwe, Kudakwashe Tagwirei, a businessman allied to President Emmerson Mnangagwa, stands accused of amassing $90m through a shady central bank deal. In Mozambique, ex-President Armando Guebuza’s son, Ndambi, former Finance Minister Manuel Chang, and several other senior governing party members stand accused of participating in the disappearance of loans – taken out to finance maritime surveillance, fishing, and shipyard projects – worth $2.2bn. In Namibia, former Fisheries Minister Bernhardt Esau and former Justice Minister Sacky Shanghala stand accused of taking bribes worth millions of dollars from an Icelandic fishing company. In Angola, Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s former President José Eduardo dos Santos, is being accused of making billions of dollars through illicit activities.
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This is the story of the rise and fall of a slum. It was born out of a quirk of history, it exploited its unsavory reputation, and, as is the fate of all slums, it became an embarrassment before being leveled by the authorities. Is there any greater significance to its story than that? Many would argue not. But while locals and tourists now enjoy the park, some still crave the claustrophobic darkness. Theorists from the wilder shores of architecture keep returning to the idea of Kowloon. On this tiny rectangle of ground, a single community created something that had only existed before in the avant garde imagination: the “organic megastructure.” The concept of the megastructure emerged in the late 1960s, as a radical departure from the conventional idea of the city. Instead of buildings being arranged around public spaces, streets, and squares, the megastructuralists envisioned one continuous city binding citizens together in a set of modular units, capable of unlimited expansion. It was a city designed to live, evolve, and adapt, fulfilling all the needs of its people, and with the capacity to endlessly “plug in” more units to meet changing desires. Architects pushed this idea to extremes, most sensationally in the work of Alan Boutwell and Michael Mitchell, who in 1969 proposed a “continuous city for 1,000,000 human beings.” They envisaged a single, linear city, sitting on 100-meter-high pillars, running in a straight line between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America. Kowloon, in effect, was proof of concept. Within its anarchist society, argued the megastructuralists, was the kernel of an architectural utopia. Others, however, saw Kowloon not as a petri dish for urban theory, but as a model or diorama for a new kind of construction—one that did not exist in the ordinary physical plane, yet was as real as anything that could be seen or touched. The renowned American science fiction writer, William Gibson, described Kowloon, not long before its demolition, as a “hive of dream.” What Gibson saw in the unregulated, organic chaos of the City of Darkness was an embodiment of his famous concept of “cyberspace”—or, as we would call it today, the internet.
In its formative years, the internet provided the perfect environment for the establishment of multiple, self-regulating communities. Just like the Walled City, it operated outside of law or external oversight. It was post-design and post-government. Thousands, even millions of Kowloons could spring up at will in cyberspace: digital enclaves thriving on creative and political freedom, possessing an autonomous, dynamic structure that allowed them to grow at a frightening, near-exponential rate. It was also, just like the Walled City, living on borrowed time. “I’d always maintained that much of the anarchy and craziness of the early internet had a lot to do with the fact that governments just hadn’t realized it was there,” commented Gibson. “It was like this territory came into being, and there were no railroads, there were no lawmen, and people were doing whatever they wanted, but I always took it for granted that the railroads would come and there would be law west of Dodge.” Yet to Gibson’s mind, the people of Kowloon—and the megastructuralists—were groping toward the next stage in human evolution. He saw the Walled City, that accident of urban birth, as a crude, subconscious schematic of the future, a blueprint for coders and hackers, the architects of the web, to follow. In his 1996 novel Idoru, Gibson imagined a virtual Kowloon, a Walled City 2.0 recreated as an ultra-libertarian web sanctuary: “These people, the ones they say made a hole in the net, they found the data, the history of it. Maps, pictures … They built it again.” So the wrecking ball may not only have been destroying a notorious slum. Perhaps Kowloon was also the first, true, physical monument to the internet. A city that offered a glimpse into the infinite horizons, structural possibilities—and inherent amorality—of the digital realm.
2022 FORMULA 1 WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP CONSTRUCTOR STANDINGS
2022 Formula 1 World Championship Drivers' Standings
Though the Overdrive feels pretty-mid forward to me, there is a pre-mid boost. There’s a lot of utility in this control. It can help the Overdrive span more of the distance between a TS and Klon, and it can make the transition between humbuckers and single-coils easier to manage. In general, though, I found that the Overdrive sounded airiest and best able to breathe with the tone wide open and the mids scooped. Unleash the gain in this kind of setup and the Overdrive sounds pretty beastly.
FORMULA 1 LENOVO BRITISH GRAND PRIX 2022 - Race Results
Fast-food fanatics went crazy over a photo of a recently “discovered” Burger King, preserved and appearing almost blemish-free despite being a relic of the past. The old restaurant was found hidden behind a wall in a Wilmington, Delaware, mall and looked completely untouched. “A fully intact vintage Burger King was found behind a wall at the Concord Mall in Wilmington, DE. This photo was snapped by Jonathon Pruitt April of 2022,” People loved the blast from the past and commented their shock and amusement. “And the plants are still alive,” someone joked alongside a GIF reading “Gullible.” To which the original poster wrote: “What if I told you they were fake plants?” “I have experienced this mall … it was frightening,” another noted. One user reminisced about visiting the mall in their younger years in response. “It was sorta dreamy to me, post-apocalyptic and you’re walking among the ashes. Also, that old mall aesthetic kinda brings up fond memories of childhood,” they wrote. “That’s so crazy! I live here and remember [the mall],” someone else added. “[It’s] probably been closed about 15 years, I swore something took over the space. I don't go to that mall much anymore but im def going to look next time I'm nearby, I remember exactly where it was.”
Burger King recently found itself in the fryer with its Pride month campaign in Austria last month. The fast-food chain launched its “Pride whopper,” which had all of the same ingredients as the company’s regular burger except for “two equal buns.” Burger lovers were able to get their meaty sandwiches with either two top halves or two bottom parts. “The Equal Buns campaign was executed by our Burger King Austria team, in an effort to highlight equal rights and equal love — through a play on the traditional Whopper build — featuring two identical buns on the two options of the sandwich,” a BK spokesperson said in June. “Burger King Austria also serves as an Official Proud Partner and Sponsor of Vienna Pride 2022,” they continued. Customers were not happy with the meal and ran to Twitter to slam the company’s poor choice of Pride products. At 9:20 am on January 14, 1987, 400 officials from the Hong Kong Housing Department erected cordons around the 83 streets and alleys leading into and out of the Walled City. Then they entered the city on a mission to contact and survey every single resident. Earlier that morning, it had been announced that the city was to be cleared and redeveloped as a public park—just as the Hong Kong Government had intended over half a century before. Except this time, there was to be no Chinese resistance. Two years earlier, on December 19, 1984, the governments of China and Great Britain had signed a joint declaration to transfer sovereignty of Hong Kong back to China on July 1, 1997. The Chinese Foreign Ministry had always used Kowloon as a political pawn to remind the British and the world of their claim over the land granted to Britain in 1898. The 99 years were almost up. The plans for clearance and demolition were kept secret. Compensation was a key element of the eviction process, so there was the danger of a sudden influx of people looking to take a slice of government money. For six months, the Housing Department kept Kowloon under surveillance to gather evidence of population numbers. The compensation package for residents and business owners totaled $2.76 billion. On average, residents received around $380,000 for their individual flats. Negotiations progressed over several years, and by November 1991, only 457 households were still to agree terms. By that time, most of the 33,000 residents had moved out. Some, however, clung on to the end, and on July 2, 1992, riot police entered the city and forced out the last remaining residents. A tall wire fence was erected to encircle the whole site—following almost exactly the line once marked out by the city’s original granite wall. On March 23, 1993, a wrecker’s ball smashed into the side of an eight-story tower block on the edge of the Walled City. This was a solitary, ceremonial swing. The real work of demolishing Kowloon, piece by piece, would begin several weeks later. The moment was applauded by a crowd of invited guests and dignitaries. It was also greeted with shouts of anger from former residents who had gathered for one last, futile protest. It took almost exactly a year to reduce the rest of the city to dust and rubble.Remarkably, from within the modern wreckage, fragments of the original city emerged. There were two granite plaques, each marked with Chinese characters: One read “South Gate,” and the other “Kowloon Walled City.” Once the ruins of the tower blocks had been cleared away, developers uncovered segments of the foundations of the original wall, along with three of the iron cannons that had once bristled from the city’s ramparts. A solitary building still stood at the center of Kowloon, the one structure to have survived throughout its whole turbulent history—the office of the Mandarin. Over the course of the next year, the ruins began their rapid conversion into a landscaped park, modeled on the famous 17th-century Jiangnan gardens built by the Qing Dynasty. The paths running through these new gardens were named after the streets and buildings of the demolished slum. The Kowloon Walled City Park was officially opened on December 22, 1995, by the British Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten. It had taken some six decades, but at last Kowloon was transformed into the “place of popular resort” envisaged by Sir William Peel, the Governor of Hong Kong in 1934: six-and-a half acres of ornate bamboo pavilions, pretty water features, and vibrant greenery.
FORMULA 1 LENOVO BRITISH GRAND PRIX 2022 - Qualifying Results
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