Today, we salute and honor the #Veterans of the #OperationDesertStorm. Listen as SFC (Ret.) Fred W. Brown Jr. recounts his experience from thirty years ago.

Let's celebrate their service! Share a photo or a story or your favorite #DesertStorm Vet.

#ArmyHistory

President Muhammadu Buhari’s romance with Niger Republic has become an affront to the national interest of Nigeria. When he was sworn-in as an elected president in 2015 he went to Mamadou Issoufou’s presidential palace in Niamey, Niger Republic, to celebrate.

They gave him the reception of a conquering Fulani warlord: a white horse and sword.
I found that curious. How can a Nigerian leader celebrate his electoral victory in a foreign country and not Daura, his supposed hometown in Nigeria?

Answer has since been provided through Buhari’s policy actions in the past 5+ years. We have since learnt that Buhari is a first-generation Nigerian whose father, Ardo Adamu Buhari, a duck seller, had migrated from Niger, settled in Nigeria and married a Nigerian woman, Zulaihat.

The borders defined by the European colonial masters mean nothing to typical Northerners. When you hear that Nigerian borders are porous, what it really means is that there is no intention in the minds of Northern Nigerians and their elite to create an effective barrier between..

them and their kith and kin in the neighbouring countries of Niger, Chad and Northern Cameroun. Meanwhile, the Southern borders are strictly monitored (within the limits permitted by the selfish interests of corrupt Customs and Immigration officials).

Today in pulp I look back at the world of Soviet women's fashion!

It's not all berets, but it mostly is...

Now you may think that fashion and the Soviet Union go together like Groucho Marx and Friedrich Engels. However that is to misunderstand the nature of the Commad Economy: if she commands it, you'd better buy it for her!

So there is a rich history of fashion and fun (along with the tractor factories and endless ballet performances) in the old USSR. Let's take a sashay along it...

At the start of the Soviet years women's fashion, let's face it, tended towards the functional. Red was popular, as were headscarves, hobnail boots and the ability to field strip a 3-line rifle.

But all that was about to change...

...because Russia had a new fashionista in charge: Stalin! He hated the peasant look of War Communism because it made socialism seem synonymous with poverty. He ordered Soviet Woman to spruce herself up.

In more Securing Democracy at #enigma2021, @ChrFolini talking about "THE ADVENTUROUS TALE OF ONLINE VOTING IN

Switzerland is a direct democracy where citizens get to vote at least 4x/year, with a lot of mail-in voting. We have a long history of online voting.

Disclaimer: THIS IS NOT SWEDEN.

[I get the picture that @ChrFolini has had to explain the difference several times.]

Process around mail-in ballots.

[tl;dr it's very complicated and wasn't threat-modeled until recently]

But the in-person ballots are complicated, too!

Most security folks don't think that we can't make a secure online voting system.

@ChrFolini says this is because of encryption
[Note: this is not the main reason that a lot of people cite -- we're more worried about things like malware but it's complicated]

TEXT OF THE PRESS CONFERENCE ADDRESSED BY THE HON. MINISTER OF INFORMATION AND CULTURE, ALHAJI LAI MOHAMMED,ON THE ONGOING APC MEMBERSHIP REGISTRATION EXERCISE ...IN ORO, KWARA STATE, ON MONDAY, FEB. 15TH 2021

#Thread 👇

Good morning gentlemen of the press.

2. As you are aware, the All Progressives Congress (@OfficialAPCNg ) membership registration started in Kwara State on Feb. 9th 2021.

Ahead of my registration this morning at my polling unit, PU 006, Oro Ward 2, we had sent out our people to monitor the process to ensure compliance with the guidelines stipulated by the party.

The reports from our monitoring teams are out, and I wish to inform you, gentlemen, that sadly, the whole exercise did not comply with the stipulated guidelines.

3. The guidelines stipulate consultation with all stakeholders by the Registration Officials from Abuja. After the botched attempt to have a meeting of stakeholders, due to orchestrated violence...

1/ By far, the biggest Ponzi scheme I've discovered until now was the diamonds one. In 2014, two years before other media and 3 years before prosecutors, I wrote stories about physical diamonds sold by 2 brokers through banks to tens of thousands of Italian investors.

2 / Diamonds were sold at constantly rising prices in a sort of linear progression, which wasn't related to real market prices. The prices were produced by the two brokers themselves, Intermarket Diamond Business (Idb) and Diamond Private Investment (Dpi), then published monthly

3/They published monthly table of their prices in markets pages on my newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy's highest-selling financial daily. Then the 2 diamonds brokers cut the price tables from the pages and presented them to the public as "Il Sole 24 Ore records" but they weren't

4 / People were lured into the scheme with the promise of constantly revaluating physical luxury assets, easy to be hidden (a lot of diamonds were sold to tax evaders and probably gangsters). For just connecting their clients to the 2 brokers, banks earned 15-20% fees.

5 / The business throve thanks to a hole in Italy's financial regulations: diamonds weren't overseen neither by Bank authority Bank of Italy nor financial authority Consob. In two decades, the 2 brokers sold diamonds for 2/3 billion € proceeds.