Multipolar global trade, why Wall Street is having a bad time, Ethiopia's bid for the sea & "the" kitchen debate.
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Nalini Malani, The Rebellion of the Dead, 2017. Born in 1946 in Karachi, Malani is a pioneering video artist whose multimedia work charts experiences of the history of the Subcontinent from Partition and mass migration through sectarian violence in the 1990s.
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Where is the centre of the world?
The EU and China are more significant trading partners for most the world than the United States:
Thanks to Marc Canal Noguer for pointing me to his handy new tool from McKinsey Global Institute
US energy history animated
This is a Sankey diagram, available here. On the history of Sankey diagrams, this Wikipedia page is interesting.
Climate reparations (sort of)
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A cliff edge in China
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Where China has stakes in ports
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Nalini Malani, Games of War, 2009
Migrating homicides
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Sea access in Africa
In a jingoistic documentary aired on state television on October 13th, Ethiopia’s PM Abiy argued that landlocked Ethiopia must acquire a port on the Red Sea to break its roughly 120m people out of a “geographic prison”. Turning to history, he quoted a 19th-century Ethiopian warrior who had proclaimed that the Red Sea was the country’s “natural boundary”… Ethiopia, Abiy noted, had indeed been a sea power with a navy and two ports, Massawa and Assab. It lost these along with the rest of its coastline in 1993, when Eritrea seceded to form a new country.
Source: The Economist
Myanmar’s brutal war
In the small southeastern state of Kayah … 60 airstrikes were carried out in the first nine months of 2023 — more than five times in all of 2022 — and at least 11 struck camps where civilians were taking refuge, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. Kayah sits close to the capital, Naypyidaw, and is a vital channel connecting resistance groups in the south and the north, according to an analysis by the Singapore-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. Within months of the coup, as much as 80 percent of the state’s urban population was forced to flee because of clashes between resistance fighters and the military, said local aid groups.
Source: Washington Post
The Kitchen Debate
Hard to imagine Sino-American banter of a similar kind today!
Nalini Malani’s Memory: Record/Erase, 1996 is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s story follows a poverty-stricken family during the German depression, as the central character, Frau Hausmann, is forced to impersonate her late husband to procure his job as a nightwatchman to support her two children. Despite her exceptional performance during the job, and even after receiving public commendation for catching a thief, when eventually her identity is discovered during a factory accident she is forced into a precarious existence where she resorts to selling herself to get by. Source: Kadist.