Wednesday, February 01, 2023

Pope Francis In Congo



This Mogul Lost Tens of Billions of Dollars in Days. What Happened? Gautam Adani is facing perhaps his biggest challenge yet as a small U.S. investment firm accuses his Indian conglomerate of fraud and stock manipulation. ....... Last week, Hindenburg Research, a small investment firm in New York, accused Mr. Adani’s company of “brazen accounting fraud, stock manipulation and money laundering.” The Adani Group has rejected the claims from Hindenburg, which stands to profit if the conglomerate’s shares fall. ......... Since the report, the Adani Group has shed tens of billions of dollars in market value in less than a week. ......... Mr. Adani started a polymers import-export business in the 1980s and gradually expanded into infrastructure. ....... In the last decade, he secured one of his biggest international deals — the Carmichael project in Australia, one of the largest open-pit coal mining operations in the world. ......... The Adani conglomerate’s success in some ways paralleled the growing Indian economy, which is now the fifth largest in the world. Mr. Adani, 60, has styled himself as an industrialist who is helping to address his country’s lack of infrastructure........... Mr. Modi, like Mr. Adani, is from Gujarat, and when Mr. Modi became prime minister in 2014, he flew to New Delhi on an Adani plane. Mr. Adani’s relationship with Mr. Modi has created a widespread perception in India that Mr. Adani can strike any deal he wants, creating an uneven playing field. .......... Mr. Adani has rejected claims of preferential treatment. The foundations of his business, he said in a recent interview, were laid in the 1980s, when the Indian government relaxed trade restrictions. ....... He is a follower of the Jain religion, which emphasizes asceticism, and he and his family tightly control his conglomerate. (Hindenburg has criticized the ownership structure of his company.) ......... Months before Hindenburg made its allegations, the dizzying rise of an Adani subsidiary’s shares drew scrutiny. Much of the trading activity in the subsidiary, Adani Enterprises, was traced to holding companies based in tax havens, leading to speculation that the stock — which had helped propel Mr. Adani’s personal wealth — was being manipulated. Shares in Adani’s seven subsidiaries have soared more than 800 percent in the past three years, according to Hindenburg. ........... “The big issue is that Adani has spent the last four years in raising debt on Wall Street,” Mr. Buckley said. “If you raise money in America, you have to play by America’s rules.” .......... Named after the famous doomed airship, Hindenburg is what is known as an activist short seller on Wall Street. The firm hunts for frauds and other irregularities in public markets, exposes the wrongdoing and makes money while doing so. It profits when its target, often a publicly traded company, sees a drop in its share price. ........... The shorts say they are helping police the market. ........ Hindenburg, which is only a few years old, has targeted about 30 companies and made its name by taking down Nikola, the electric vehicle maker. .......... In the Adani Group, Hindenburg’s founder, Nathan Anderson, has taken on a goliath. Hindenburg said it had researched Mr. Adani’s businesses for two years before publishing its report on Jan. 24. The Adani Group has threatened to sue Hindenburg, which responded by saying it would welcome a suit in the United States, where it could demand Adani documents as part of legal discovery. .......... Among Hindenburg’s allegations are that offshore shell companies run by Mr. Adani’s older brother, Vinod Adani, helped the conglomerate manipulate its share prices. The shell companies are also used to launder money from private Adani companies to the publicly listed ones, Hindenburg said, “to maintain the appearance of financial health and solvency.” ........ Highlighting what it called “obvious accounting irregularities and sketchy dealings,” Hindenburg said the fact that the listed Adani companies did not have long-serving chief financial officers was a red flag. The short seller also called into question the quality of the independent auditor for two subsidiaries, Adani Enterprises and Adani Gas. Employees of the auditor were “essentially fresh out of school, hardly in a position to scrutinize and hold to account the financials of some of the largest companies in the country.” ............ Hindenburg went on to say that even if its allegations were ignored, the Adani Group companies were so overvalued that their stocks could fall 85 percent. The group, Hindenburg added, is also overburdened by debt. ................ The Adani Group has called Hindenburg’s allegations an attack on India and its “growth story and ambition.” Hindenburg has countered by saying, “India’s future is being held back by the Adani Group, which has draped itself in the Indian flag while systematically looting the nation.”

Bon Voyage, Boeing 747. You Really Did Change Everything. It quickly made global air travel more affordable than it had ever been, fulfilling Trippe’s vision of a world where plumbers and schoolteachers, not just the well-heeled, could think about taking their families to London or Rio de Janeiro or Tokyo. .......... the 747 created a worldwide web long before there was a World Wide Web. ........ The 747 was nearly three times the size and capacity of any jet airliner at the time ........ Some professional pilots said the plane was so big and so heavy that it would never get off the ground — literally. It did fly, of course ......... All told, 747s have carried more than six billion passengers about 60 billion nautical miles, the rough equivalent of 144,000 trips to the moon and back. ............ In bringing air travel to the masses, it further shrank our world and allowed for a degree of human connection that was simply unthinkable for prior generations. ......... it gave the human appetite wider choices, be it just-picked kiwis from New Zealand or fresh Copper River salmon from Alaska. Unhelpfully, it also helped viruses to travel with ease across the globe. ......... Hawaii had just 171,367 visitors in 1958, the year before Pan Am started flying the 707 to Honolulu. By 1970, the 747’s inaugural year, that figure was up to 1.75 million ......... it was the 747 that brought worldwide travel within reach for hundreds of millions of people. Today, air travel is a victim of its own success, and most of us hardly give more thought to flying on an airplane than we do to taking a bus; we may even consider the former a more miserable experience. .......... overall air travel today remains something of a miracle. Whether you need to get to Paris or Pasco, you can usually do so in a matter of hours, at a price that allows you to think about taking such a trip in the first place and with an astonishing degree of confidence that you’ll get there safely. ......... Aviation takes a frightful environmental toll, and for most of us, the single most significant thing we could do to fight climate change is simply to stop flying. ........... aviation remains one of the most difficult activities to decarbonize

It’s Not Going Well for Britain’s New Prime Minister “We will halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce debt, cut waiting lists and stop the boats,” he intoned. ........ entered office with a mountain to climb. The cost-of-living crisis is just the start: Wherever you turn, strife seems to rise to meet you. ....... there’s the health care crisis, the housing crisis (both ownership and rental), the education crisis, the child care crisis, the transport crisis, the climate crisis and, not least, the constitutional crisis threatening the end of the union with Scotland. In Britain, it’s far easier to document what isn’t teetering on the brink of collapse. ......... Even a great statesman would need more than three months to make headway on such deep-rooted social ills. ........ merely maintains a failing system. ........ British households are in the midst of the biggest fall in living standards since the 1950s ......... a leader both misfiring and weak. ........ Even Margaret Thatcher handed public sector workers a 25 percent pay rise upon her arrival in office in 1979, to end rolling strike action. Discontent with Mr. Sunak’s approach has earned him a rare rebuke from the monarchy. The freshly minted King Charles III used his Christmas Day address to praise the “health and social care professionals and teachers and indeed all those working in public service.” .......... The first three months of his tenure, though, have been a disappointment. For Mr. Sunak, facing an unhappy country, a restive party and an opposition leading in the polls, it looks like a long year ahead.

Are French People Just Lazy? France has been gripped recently by a wave of strikes and demonstrations — protesters old and young, rural and urban, progressive and conservative, blue and white collar, all taking to the streets to protest their government’s effort to nudge the retirement age from 62 to 64. ......... Are the French, as the stereotype goes, being just lazy? ........ Though the aggregate productivity of French workers is slightly lower than that of American workers, it is dramatically higher than that of their European peers. In fact, it is higher than the G7 average. ......... the French give the lie to popular tropes — and their country’s legally mandated 35-hour workweek — by working more hours per week than do their famously industrious German counterparts. .......... Yes, the French are also lazy. It’s just not in the way we lazily think. ......... Michel de Montaigne, who in 1571 ........ He went on to invent an entirely new kind of writing — the essay ......... For the man who transformed our way of reading and writing, he was seriously unserious. “If I encounter difficulties in reading, I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there.” He added: “I do nothing without gaiety.” ........... The radical thinker Paul Lafargue is famous today for a pamphlet published in 1880: “The Right to be Lazy.” Not surprisingly, then, that he depended on the financial support of someone else: Friedrich Engels, who did the same for Lafargue’s father-in-law, Karl Marx. ............ Our natural state, he argued, is leisure. Yet industrialists and ideologues, to enjoy lives of ease, had inculcated in the rest of us the belief in the “right to work.” ......... Mr. Lordon was a guiding spirit to the “rise up at night” protests in 2016, when demonstrators occupied public places across France to oppose the labor reforms proposed by the then-Socialist government. One of their demands was the creation of a universal basic income. This would, in effect, subsidize laziness — or, more accurately, a certain kind of laziness. While la paresse is a common word for laziness in French, so too is l’oisiveté. Deriving from the Latin otium, it means focused calm or even spiritual elevation, so very different from negotium, the sort of work that gets in life’s way.

It’s Time to Stop Living the American Scam I advocated idling, daydreaming, hanging out and goofing off. My conclusion: “Life is too short to be busy.” ........ “The Colbert Report” even called, but I was unreachable in the Idaho panhandle at my friend Carolyn’s anniversary party, for which my agent has never really forgiven me. (Meg, I am sorry; Carolyn, I blame you; Mr. Colbert, I am still available.) .......... A new generation has grown to adulthood that’s never known capitalism as a functioning economic system. ........ My generation, X, was the first postwar cohort to be downwardly mobile, but millennials were the first to know it going in. Our country’s oligarchs forgot to maintain the crucial Horatio Alger fiction that anyone can get ahead with hard work .......... Through the internet, we could peer enviously at our neighbors in civilized countries, who get monthlong vacations, don’t have to devote decades to paying for their college degrees, and aren’t terrified of going broke if they get sick. To young people, America seems less like a country than an inescapable web of scams, and “hard work” less like a virtue than a propaganda slogan, inane as “Just say no.” .......... The pandemic was the bomb cyclone of our discontents ........ We learned that nurses, cashiers, truckers and delivery people (who’ve always been too busy to brag about it) actually ran the world and the rest of us were mostly useless supernumeraries. The brutal hierarchies of work shifted, for the first time in recent memory, in favor of labor, and the outraged whines of former social Darwinists were a pleasure to savor. ......... Of course, everyone is still busy — worse than busy, exhausted, too wiped at the end of the day to do more than stress-eat, binge-watch and doomscroll — but no one’s calling it anything other than what it is anymore:

an endless, frantic hamster wheel for survival

. ........... “the C-minus lifestyle.” And it’s no longer just a subcultural rumble: Companies in Britain are now experimenting with a four-day workweek. ......... American conservatism, which is demographically terminal and knows it, is acting like a moribund billionaire adding sadistic codicils to his will. ......... “It’s pretty funny that the world is ending and we all just have to keep going to our little jobs lol.” .......... Midcentury science fiction writers assumed that the increased productivity brought on by mechanization would give workers an oppressive amount of leisure time, that our greatest threats would be boredom and ennui. But these authors’ prodigious imaginations were hobbled by their humanity and rationality; they’d forgotten that the world is ordered not by reason or decency but by rapacious avarice. .......... In the actual dystopian future we now inhabit, the oligarchs have realized they can work everyone harder, pay them less, eliminate benefits, turn every human institution from medicine to corrections into a racket, charge far more for basic rights and services than people in any other nation would stand for without revolting, and get rich beyond the penny ante dreams of a Carnegie or Astor. ........ In the past few decades, capitalism has exponentially increased the creation of wealth for the already incredibly wealthy at the negligible expense of the well-being, dignity and happiness of most of humanity, plus the nominal cost of a mass extinction and the destruction of the biosphere — like cutting out the inefficient business of digestion and metabolism by pouring a fine bottle of wine directly into the toilet, thereby eliminating the middleman of you. ............. I still hope to make it to my grave without ever getting a job job — showing up for eight or more hours a day to a place with fluorescent lighting where I’m expected to feign bushido devotion to a company that could fire me tomorrow and someone’s allowed to yell at you but you’re not allowed to yell back. ............. And I don’t believe most people are lazy. They would love to be fully, deeply engaged in something worthwhile, something that actually mattered, instead of forfeiting their limited hours on Earth to make a little more money for men they’d rather throw fruit at as they pass by in tumbrels. ......... It’s no coincidence that so many social movements arose during the enforced idleness of quarantine. One important function of jobs is to keep you too preoccupied and tired to do anything else. Grade school teachers called it “busywork” — pointless, time-wasting tasks to keep you from acting up and bothering them. ......... And there is too much that urgently needs to be done: a republic to salvage, a civilization to reimagine and its infrastructure to reinvent, innumerable species to save, a world to restore and millions who are impoverished, imprisoned, illiterate, sick or starving. All while we waste our time at work.

‘Depression Rooms’ and ‘Doom Piles’: Why Clearing the Clutter Can Feel Impossible The link between messiness and mental health is real. These low-lift tips for keeping a clean-enough home will help. ........ experts have long recognized the link between messiness and mental health. The clutter that can accumulate when people are experiencing a mental health crisis is neither a form of hoarding, nor the result of laziness. The culprit is extreme fatigue ........... People are “oftentimes just so mentally and physically exhausted that they don’t feel like they have the energy to take care of themselves or their surroundings,” Dr. Schmidt said. “They just don’t have the capacity to engage with housecleaning and upkeep that they probably once did.” .......... A messy home can also contribute to feelings of overwhelm, stress and shame, making you feel worse than you already do. And while decluttering will not cure your depression, it can give you a mood boost. If you are struggling and it feels impossible to keep your surroundings tidy, here are a few tips on how to clean strategically to optimize your energy and your space. .......... While she worked to declutter her home, Ms. Davis started posting videos of her progress on TikTok, where she now has 1.5 million followers. ......... focus on having a livable space, not a spotless one. ........ One of her most popular strategies is “five things tidying,” the idea that there are only five things in any room: trash, dishes, laundry, things with a place and things without a place. ........ Once your space is cleanish and relatively decluttered, try to take a few minutes each day to keep it that way. Ms. Davis recommended setting a timer for five or 10 minutes and getting as much taken care of as you can during that time.

Salman Rushdie’s Miracle City His new novel is about a kingdom that is founded on pluralism but fails to live up to its ideals.

Our Favorite Ad Blockers and Browser Extensions to Protect Privacy Everything you do online—from browsing to shopping to using social networks—is tracked, typically as behavioral or advertising data.

Ukraine Carries Out Wide Anticorruption Raids Ahead of Visit From E.U. Leaders uncovered a plan to embezzle more than $1 billion at the state-owned Ukrnafta oil company and an oil-refining company through tax evasion and other tactics.

Pope, in Congo, Urges an End to the Country’s Cycle of Violence Francis began the second day of his visit to Africa with a direct appeal to the warring groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo to put down their weapons and forgive one another. ......... On his second day in Congo, part of a six-day trip that will also take him to South Sudan, Pope Francis focused on what he called a “forgotten genocide” in the Congo, seeking to bring a measure of peace to an overwhelmingly Christian country that has known little of it. ....... Sitting beside Francis in the National Palace on Tuesday, the country’s president, Félix Tshisekedi, accused the world of forgetting Congo, of plundering its natural resources and of engaging in complicity in the atrocities of the east through “inaction and silence.” ........ “In addition to armed groups,” he said, “foreign powers eager for the minerals in our subsoil commit cruel atrocities with the direct and cowardly support of our neighbor Rwanda, making security the first and greatest challenge for the government.” ........ Ladislas Kambale Kombi, 16, from Eringeti, recounted how men in fatigues hacked his father to death in front of him, putting his head in a basket, and how his brother too was murdered and armed men carried his mother away. “I can’t sleep at night,” he said, saying it was hard to understand the “almost animalistic brutality.” ........ Through a friend who spoke French, Bijoux Mukumbi Kamala, 17, from Goma, stood before the pope and recounted how rebels took her into a forest and offered her to their commander, who raped her multiple times a day “like an animal” for more than a year and a half before she could finally escape. ........ The M23 has intensified its attacks against the Congolese government for failing to honor a 2009 agreement that would have integrated them into the army and for marginalizing people who speak Kinyarwanda, Rwanda’s official language. ......... Many fear the rising threat of an all-out war in the Great Lakes region of Africa. ........ he excoriated “a war unleashed by an insatiable greed for raw materials and money that fuels a weaponized economy and requires instability and corruption.” ........ only forgiveness can open the door to the future, for it opens the door to a new justice that, without ever forgetting, puts an end to the vicious cycle of revenge.”



What ‘No’ on F-16 Fighter Jets Might Mean for Ukraine If the usual script plays out, the Biden administration’s reluctance to provide the planes could be temporary, officials say. ........... First, Kyiv asks for an advanced weapons system. The Biden administration says no, and quietly suggests that Ukraine could get the same type of weapon from its European neighbors, in half the time. But NATO countries in Europe, still smarting from President Donald J. Trump’s oft-spoken wish to break up the alliance, refuse to commit to sending anything to Ukraine that would provoke Russia unless the United States is right in there with them. So, after months of hemming and hawing, the Biden administration says yes, and the gates to more weapons open. ........... Almost 50 years later, American Air Force pilots are still flying the F-16, as are pilots in a host of U.S. partner nations. .......... A Ukrainian military that is fortified by fighter jets and tanks in perhaps a year would be able to mount counteroffensives to take back territory seized by Moscow. ....... called the fighter the “most maneuverable ever built, with the exception of the F-22” — another fighter jet.

Dissecting Elon Musk’s Tweets: Memes, Rants, Private Parts and an Echo Chamber Mr. Musk’s Twitter feed is often an echo chamber. He regularly sees, likes and replies to messages that are about him or are posted from accounts that often act as his cheerleaders ........ “The purchasing of Twitter was a power move, politically,” said Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard. “He is one of the richest men in the world buying a social media company in a move that is expressly about politics and influence on culture and on media.” .......... Often, his updates are limited to just memes — joking images or videos that are copied and widely shared. Many have origins on fringe sites or cryptocurrency message boards that are popular with his followers. ......... The use of memes, Ms. Donovan said, is a way for Mr. Musk to signal to his followers that he is “in the know and keeping up with internet culture.” ......... Mr. Musk has tweeted many memes about taking the “red-pill,” a reference to the movie “The Matrix” that has been adopted by far-right groups as a way to condemn liberal ideology. ......... At Twitter, as with many of his other companies, Mr. Musk has no traditional press team. Instead, he tweets. ........ His activity increasingly consists of replying to users who have mentioned him.

The War Between the Catholic Cardinals

The Yale Library That’s a Temple to Learning … and a Portal to Hell In “Hell Bent,” Leigh Bardugo continues the fantastical journey she began in “Ninth House.” ...... Sterling Memorial Library, a Gothic temple to learning (and to hell, it turns out) that looms in the middle of campus. ........ Just like its predecessor, this novel conjures a Yale swirling with all manner of magic — by turns frivolous, self-enriching, reckless, amusing and very dark indeed. Much of it is concentrated in the university’s real-life senior societies, whose fictional versions each traffic in a single arcane magical specialty. (Skull and Bones, for instance, uses human entrails to make stock market predictions for influential alumni; St. Elmo conjures storms; Book and Snake can reanimate the dead.) A shadowy regulatory body known as Lethe presides over the societies’ supernatural rituals and polices their use of magic, like a fantastical version of OSHA.

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