On this day in 2007, the bomb blasts in Samjhauta Express killed 68 people including 44 Pakistanis. The immediate investigations revealed irrefutable evidence about the masterminds. In this thread, I would share some Indian newspaper clips which covered the investigations.

1. Lt Col Prasad Purohit, a serving Indian army officer, was arrested for terror conspiracy in the Malegaon blast case. He was the co founder of Abhinav Bharat, a right wing Hindu organisation. He admitted that he was the mastermind.

(The Times of India, Pune, 7 November 2008)

2. Lt Col Purohit met Pragya Thakur on 5 Oct 2008 to tell her that "Our People" had carried out the killings in Orissa, burnt down two churches and also carried out the Malegaon blast.

(The Indian Express, Pune, 24 Nov 2008)

Ironically, Pragya is BJP's MP today.

3. During his narco analysis test, Lt Col Purohit told officers that Praveen Togadia was responsible for the “Samjhauta Express Blasts”. He asked me to find out from Dr Dev, how much RDX was remaining after the blast.

(Pune Mirror, 19 Nov 2008)

4. In his narco analysis test, Lt Col Purohit gave sensational information that he supplied explosives for Ajmer and Malegaon blasts at the instance of Mahant Dayanand Pandey.

(Sakal, Pune and Pudhari, Pune, both of 15 Nov 2008)

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.

Why should we be careful when talking about a “jobs bounce-back” in South Africa? - A THREAD.

You don’t get better labour market economists in South Africa than the @NIDS_CRAM team, but the main finding of an “employment bounce-back” seems counterintuitive. What’s going on? 1/n

NIDS-CRAM does NOT show a rebound to pre-COVID employment levels. They report 700,000 job lost between Feb and Oct 2020, this is massive = 3.85% fall (broad definition). The authors of the employment paper say this could be as high as 5.3% or 960,000 jobs.

The authors @joshbudlender @ihsaanbassier (+ Rocco) also show that Oct employment is normally higher than Feb employment, super roughly Oct is plausibly around 102% of Feb. This means it’s plausible 360,000 jobs would have been gained between Feb-Oct *anyway*.

This would mean - within the study parameters - it’s possible COVID has caused up to (an outer outer limit) of 1.32 million job losses when comparing Oct 2020 with what we would have expected it to be in normal times. This is a total disaster in the context of the SA economy.

This is roughly what we should expect from the StatsSA QLFS. This showed 2.2 million jobs lost in first half of 2020, and 543,000 regained in Q3, meaning a loss of just under 1.7 million jobs in first 9 months. We’d definitely expect some more jobs regained in Oct-Dec.

Iranian Reformist Front (Jebheye Eslathalabane Iran) was officially founded yesterday in Jamaran, Khomeini's historic house near Tehran.

The founding meeting elected Behzad Nabavi as an interim head since he is oldest.

And also 5 people as a committee to draft the IRF's by-laws

The five are:

1- Outspoken Tehran MP @mah_sadeghi
2- Faraj Komijani, politician with a base in an official teachers union
3- Ali Bagheri (low-key politician)
4- @MansooriAzar , noted reformist politician
5- Rouhani's ex-VP @mowlaverdi

Some more pictures of the meeting.

The next meeting of the group is on Wednesday and will be held virtually.

The top question remains whether and who (and how many candidates) to run for the coming #IranElections2021

The founding statement says the reformists will run a single candidate agreed by all reformist parties but only if elections are to be "free, legal, competitive, just and constitutional"... which is obviously not what's going to happen!

The founding statement also includes big demands like call for a referendum to revise the constitution. But as usual these big words aren't followed by any actions.

BRITSH ARMY HEADCOUNT REDUCTION (Thread)
Looking back at personnel cuts made in 2010, a reduced Army of 82,000 didn’t help Britain regain its financial strength, it simply signified a hollowing-out of our ability to defend ourselves.
(1 of 25)

It destroyed the credibility of David Cameron’s Coalition Government then and even more so in hindsight. It was military illiteracy on a grand scale. The problem wasn’t so much the reduction itself, but the fact that there was no real strategy behind it, no future plan.
(2 of 25)

Back in 2010, the UK's involvement Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t really serve our national interests (See Ben Barry’s book). If these conflicts were sub-optimal uses of the Army, they raised the important question of what the Army’s underlying raison d’être should be.
(3 of 25)

We hope the Integrated Review will provide a concrete response to this. In the meantime, the Integrated Operating Concept has been much talked about, but we have been left in the dark about what it signifies in terms of strategic priorities and a reconfigured force.
(4 of 25)

The resulting strategy will obviously be threat-driven with Russia, China, North Korea and Iran representing near-peer threats and Islamic terror groups in Africa and the Middle East posing an asymmetric threat. This suggests a mix of high-end and light forces.
(5 of 25)

Israel and Russia held intensive contacts in last few days over humanitarian issues related to Syria. Via ⁦@WallaNews⁩

2-Over last two days, talks between Netayahu and Putin, Israeli DM Gantz and Russian DM, Israeli FM Ashkenazi and Russian FM Sergey Lavrov. Israeli DM team says Gantz spoke to counterpart about "advancing humanitarian issues in the area."

3-Israel and Russia held intensive talks on Syria in last few days

4-Last Wednesday, on day of call between Gantz and Russian DM, Israeli ambassador to Russia Alex Ben Tzvi met w/Russian FM, Putin's Syria envoy Mikhail Bogdanov. IDF attache in Moscow attended. Russian MoD confirmed meeting in statement. Bogdanov and Ben Tzvi met again today

5-Meanwhile, Israeli cabinet convened today at 6:00 PM Israel time. Senior officials called meeting "urgent" to deal w/issue defined as "security-related and classified."

Welcome to a new Legislative Day in the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria!

Senate President, @DrAhmadLawan leads the Principal Officers into the Chambers, takes the official prayers and begin the day's proceedings at 10:40am.

#TodayInSenatePlenary

Senator Ibrahim Oloriegbe moves for the adoption of Votes and Proceedings for Tuesday, 15th February, 2021.

Senator Ezenwa Onyewuchi seconds.

#TodayInSenatePlenary

Senator Ayo Akinyelure presents18 petitions from the Office of the President of the Senate to the floor of the Senate.

Petitions are laid and referred to the Committee on Ethics, Privileges and Public Petitions and to report back in six weeks.

#TodayInSenatePlenary

Senator Solomon Adeola {@YAYIAdeola} cites Order 43 to inform the Senate on the demise of Alhaji Lateef Kayode Jakande, the first civilian Governor of Lagos State.

In what was United Bengal (modern day West Bengal+Bangladesh) back in 1941, Muslims were 56% of the population, and today they are approximately about 67% of the population. If you go back to the early 20th century or the late 19th century, Muslims weren't even a majority.

This

example of Bengal is what has been happening across the whole of the Indian sub-continent, albeit at a slower or faster pace as the case may be region to region, but the fact remains that the change has been unidirectional= As time goes by, the proportion of Muslims increases in

a given region and the proportion of Hindus goes down. Project the numbers out into 50 or 60 years and you have multiple states/regions of India with a Muslim plurality or outright majority. Project the numbers out to a century or so and it's difficult to argue how Hindus can

maintain cultural/political dominance in the long run. Some people like to say, "Oh well so what. Numbers don't matter, what have you achieved at 80% of the population which you're going to achieve at 90%!".

This is faulty thinking, because the direction of change itself is

the demgoraphic sense is quite critical of whether you are expanding or retreating civilisation. The more people you have relative to the enemy, the more the chances that you will adamant about taking over more territory. The less people you have relative to the enemy, the more

This thread was inspired by @PrinceGanaku. He made a legal argument pushing back against the legalization of homophobia, which some like @konkrumah have happily advocated.

I come from an academic background in social and political philosophy. I wanna make a moral argument 1/x.

Homosexuality is better defined as sexual attraction in homogeneity. The claims made against this phenomenon have been drawn anywhere from biological science to majoritarianism in democracy. I would like to pick and tackle three of these: science, religion and majoritarianism

The search for what makes one gay, sensationally-named the Gay Gene, has dominated the scientific discourse on the matter. Science is reductionist materialism

The attraction btwn man and woman is thought to have been reduced to a material cause in our being so what about gays?

But have we really reduced heterosexual attraction to its material cause in our biology? The best answer is no.

I would encourage anyone to seek this: "what is the cause of heterosexual attraction" and I would confidently tell you that the science is inconclusive

We don't know

We have no idea WHY usually, those we call male are attracted in sexual biological and neurological terms to those we call female.

We know HOW it happens. That is to say we can explain observable phenomena like hormones and receptors moving but we don't know WHY men like women.

There hv been concerted efforts by members of the Oyo APC to rewrite history. They repeat so often the lie that Ibadan was a peaceful place bfr Seyi Makinde took over office on May 29, 2019. It has become a case of, repeat a lie often enough, & it begins to sound like the truth.

Immediately after he took over the government in May 2011, a violent clash erupted. The bloody clash described as "a recurring decimal" in the state saw one dead and about 10 injured.

By June 2012, there was another clash. This time between the NURTW and the PDP. The story was that the NURTW were angry that PDP members were singing Arikesola's praises. You can read the report for yourself.

May 2013 - Violence erupted on Thursday in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, when known members of the ACN and the NURTW made to disrupt a political gathering put together by the leader of Accord Party, Senator Rashidi Ladoja.

August 2013- No fewer than eleven herdsmen have been killed in the last six weeks in some parts of Oke Ogun area; Otu, Ikomu, Igbo-Ora, Iwere-Ile, Iganna, Ilaju and Ado-Awaye.