Africa

Nicaragua: abortion-ban extended to cover all cases (including rape, incest, life-threatening situation to mother), and also US meddled with elections by threatening to block all remittances from Nicaraguans working in the US. "In a last-ditch effort to undermine Ortega, Cong. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), chairman of the House's International Relations Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, sent a letter on October 27 to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Rohrabacher enjoined Chertoff “to prepare in accordance with U.S. law, contingency plans to block any further money remittances from being sent to Nicaragua in the event that the FSLN enters government.”"

Speaking of remittances, World Bank reminds "In 2005 migrant workers from Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) sent a total of $48.3 billion back to their home countries. In 2004, remittances represented about 70 percent of foreign direct investment (FDI) in LAC and were 500 percent larger than Official Development Assistance to the region."

Now that the Bush administration has made the US safer since Sept 11, 2001 , it's time to focus on weaponizing space. "October 2006 saw a near-unanimous vote at the General Assembly when 166 nations voted for a resolution to prevent an arms race in outer space. Only one country abstrained, Israel, while only one voted against such a resolution, the United States of America."

Before classes started in Cambridge, our cohort visited the British Parliament. The system had recently been turned on its head as the right of peerage which had been a right inherited from father-on-down for generations, had been swiftly and peacefully replaced by a more meritocratic system. Asked about this, our class director simply answered "it was no longer justifiable".
I was struck by those words. How many things after all do we encounter which are no longer tenable, but only survive as proof of corruption, nefarious heritage, or social injustice?
Somehow these same words came back to mind when I read "Will our system of constitutional democracy survive?" - Fear and Voting in the USA.

AFRICA.
Worldbank's financial Development Indicators show improvement.
Leila Ahmed's biography speaks movingly of the Islam she knows - a women's Islam far different from and holding contempt for the official Islam of the clerics. She also goes back repeatedly over the history of Egypt - when did it become Arab, she asks; why and for which political purposes, she uncovers.

I've been thinking about that wrt Africa. We don't think of Asia as a homogeneous group, nor of any other continent. Then why the liberty to group "Africa" so commonly together?

I am moved by accounts of US descendants of slaves who proudly wear a bracelet in the shape of the African continent, because they know not which region to zoom into to locate their ancestors.
Wikipedia tells me etymologically it shares its root with Nefertiti, and means "good", "beautiful", "perfection" or "noble".
But I cannot shake the thought that the "Africa" grouping is too convenient, and too accepted to be free of political intent. Is it to better cast it aside, and say with ease, "It's all messed up; it's full of corruption; it's AIDS-ridden; there's no hope in Africa"? Who coined the term Africa, and why are we so keen on using it so profusely to refer to realities so dramatically different from one another?