UEFA are demanding FIFA president Gianni Infantino resign, after he scrapped the “shabby, back-room deal” to sell stakes in the World Cup.
Infantino tried to sell a £3.1 billion stake to a group of private investors led by Josh Kushner, an extended relative of US President Donald Trump.
But his plans collapsed on Friday night and he has since made a u-turn following widespread backlash.
In a statement on Saturday morning, UEFA have declared a loss of confidence in Infantino.
“We cannot keep going on like this with secret schemes on fast-track timescales, cooked up by faceless individuals and of dubious benefit to the game. We must identify those responsible and hold them to account,” the statement read in part.
“It is right that, in the coming days and weeks, UEFA will work with its associations and in close cooperation with other confederations to reflect on how this happened and devise a plan to make sure that it cannot occur again.
“That review should be thorough and fundamental. No option should be off the table. The current FIFA leadership has not only lost UEFA’s confidence but also that of many other members of the football family.”
FIFA member nations could trigger a vote of no confidence to remove Infantino, who is seeking a fourth term in next year’s elections.
The threshold to initiate the process is 46 FIFA member associations; UEFA have 55 members.
When you understand the personality of God, it will give you a unique insight into how He moves.
Poverty is not from God, it is from the devil. God does not dry things up. He only nourishes and replenishes.
Numbers 32:10-13….. Divine Inconvenience - When the Lord decides it is time for you to move from your comfort zone to your destiny zone.
When it is time for a new season, we must have the courage to take the bold step of change and the leap of faith needed, to step into the next dimension.
Obedience to doing the Lord’s will becomes “easy” once you realize it is better to be in the hands of God than at the mercy of the devil.
There is no sense of direction without a sense of knowledge and understanding.
That sense of knowledge and understanding only comes from one source alone, the same God that had and still has a divine purpose for our lives, from the very day our seed of existence was planted.
The 2027 Nigerian Democratic Congress, NDC, presidential candidate, Peter Obi, recently met with former President Olusegun Obasanjo, amid the rising political discussions over the former Nigerian leader’s role ahead of the 2027 general election.
In a brief statement related to the meeting, Umoh wrote, “Earlier today, the presidential candidate of the NDC, Peter Obi, met with former president Olusegun Obasanjo.”
The meeting between Obi and Obasanjo on Wednesday also came days after former Political Adviser to the ex-president, Akin Osuntokun, claimed that Obasanjo was the principal force behind the alliance between Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso, ahead of the 2027 presidential election.
Speaking during an interview on Arise Television, Osuntokun dismissed suggestions that Obasanjo was secretly supporting President Bola Tinubu, insisting that the former president had instead played a leading role in bringing the opposition leaders together.
It is on record that Peter Obi left the coalition opposition, African Democratic Congress, ADC, alongside his running mate, Rabiu Kwamkwanso for the NDC, citing internal division and court cases.
—The Nigerian government must ask the current ANC led government for a full refund (with interest) of its estimated US $61 billion in total cumulative support and economic sacrifices to the anti-apartheid movement between 1960 and 1995.
This staggering figure by the way, is duly documented by institutions like the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) and encompasses direct financial grants, governmental relief funds, and extensive revenue lost by enforcing strict boycotts of the apartheid government at the helm of the racist enclave, at the time.
With regard to the recent surge of Xenophobia (actually Afrophobia) attacks on African migrants in South Africa, while the faces behind these attacks are Black, the ‘meddling’ hands behind them are White, namely AfriForum, with the financial muscle of Elon Musk and the acquiescence of the West.
This is a replacement strategy, that is geared towards increasing the White population in South Africa, as evidenced by what is transpiring in the Western Cape, where the indigenous African population is actively being replaced with immigrants from Western nations, as well as European Jews from Israel (as a result of the wars in Gaza and Iran).
The lack of visionary and decisive leadership from the ANC is solely responsible for this. The truth is Apartheid never went away. It is still alive and well in South Africa, as the minority White population (roughly 7% of the total population of South Africa) still control over 90% of household wealth and about 75% of individual-owned farmland.
With such economic disparities still persisting, three plus decades after the supposed death of Apartheid, it is easy to see why the ‘distraction’ was needed and is being actively financed by the usual suspects and their extenders within the local African population.
Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. individually-held farms and agricultural holdings
—The most important asset of a nation is its people. The reason why the United States or the West can NEVER outpace or defeat China lies in the inherent ability of the Chinese to scale (organically) at every level of institutional, socio-political, cultural and human capacity.
The nationalistic fervor of the Chinese is organic, not manufactured. A Chinese person does not need to belt out the national anthem with their hand on their proverbial chest, or worship a piece of cloth called a flag, in order to show their patriotism.
All it takes for that patriotism to rear its head is a simple call to duty. The Chinese have mastered the art of engagement, both from a micro functional and macro functional standpoint. When the Chinese decide to engage with you, besides the “when”, they already know the “what”the “why” and the “where” of that engagement, as well as the “how” of it, with the latter being the fulcrum that engenders the desired outcome.
The singular proof of this is that while the West have historically waged endless genocidal wars, mostly beyond their borders for world dominance, the Chinese have adopted a different approach.
While this approach has been aptly referred to as “Soft Power” by mostly western observers, it is in fact an “art of war” steeped in the basic tenet of interactive reciprocity.
China is not going anywhere anytime soon. The Chinese have in fact already won the AI race. How? Because they have scaled organically (as they always do) from the standpoint of cost efficiency maximization (which eliminates greed and avarice) and overall operational cadence.
Simply put, the Chinese have scaled AI from Concept, to Production, to Testing, to Implementation and Maintenance.
Fortune may favor the brave but it rewards and establishes the wise.
—What Africa has a shortage of, are people who actually know who they are. They know how to build (they are the ones building the West) but unfortunately have no idea about the following:
Again, who they are…., this is the most critical part, as a knowledge of self, births a clear vision that then engenders a directed sense of REAL purpose and ambition.
This thus allows you to use your capacity to know what to build, as well as when to build and why you must build.
How can a continent that still bows to a white Jesus (the God of their oppressors and eternal enemies) while killing in the name of another one created by the Turks and the Catholic Church truly build anything?
Look at the nations/entities that have always prospered (and still prospering) all through history, they had/have a sense of who they are - Ancient Kemit (Egypt), Cush, the great West African Empires, the old Western Region (of Nigeria), the Chinese, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore et al. Notice something peculiar about them? Their culture had/has its own spiritual center that forms their core identity and consequently their worldview.
Africa must wake up. We have the capacity. That is not and has never been the issue.
My people perish for lack of knowledge….. of self!
“More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library this past Wednesday, the first of many jarring points she made in a riveting presentation. Alexander, currently a law professor at Ohio State, had been brought in to discuss her year-old bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Interest ran so high beforehand that the organizers had to move the event to a location that could accommodate the eager attendees. That evening, more than 200 people braved the pouring rain and inevitable traffic jams to crowd into the library’s main room, with dozens more shuffled into an overflow room, and even more latecomers turned away altogether. Alexander and her topic had struck a nerve.
Growing crime rates over the past 30 years don’t explain the skyrocketing numbers of black — and increasingly brown — men caught in America’s prison system, according to Alexander, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun after attending Stanford Law. “In fact, crime rates have fluctuated over the years and are now at historical lows.”
“Most of that increase is due to the War on Drugs, a war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color,” she said, even though studies have shown that whites use and sell illegal drugs at rates equal to or above blacks. In some black inner-city communities, four of five black youth can expect to be caught up in the criminal justice system during their lifetimes.
As a consequence, a great many black men are disenfranchised, said Alexander — prevented because of their felony convictions from voting and from living in public housing, discriminated in hiring, excluded from juries, and denied educational opportunities.
“What do we expect them to do?” she asked, who researched her ground-breaking book while serving as Director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. “Well, seventy percent return to prison within two years, that’s what they do.”
Organized by the Pasadena Public Library and the Flintridge Center, with a dozen or more cosponsors, including the ACLU Pasadena/Foothills Chapter and Neighborhood Church, and the LA Progressive as the sole media sponsor, the event drew a crowd of the converted, frankly — more than two-thirds from Pasadena’s well-established black community and others drawn from activists circles. Although Alexander is a polished speaker on a deeply researched topic, little she said stunned the crowd, which, after all, was the choir. So the question is what to do about this glaring injustice.
ACLU Pasadena/Foothills President Michelle White, Author Michelle Alexander, LA Progressive Publisher Sharon Kyle, and ACLU Pasadena Past President Kris Ockershauser.Married to a federal prosecutor, Alexander briefly touched on the differing opinion in the Alexander household. “You can imagine the arguments we have,” Alexander said in relating discussions she has with her husband. “He thinks there are changes we can make within the system,” she said, agreeing that there are good people working on the issues and that improvements can be made. “But I think there has to be a revolution of some kind.”
However change is to come, a big impediment will be the massive prison-industrial system.
“If we were to return prison populations to 1970 levels, before the War on Drugs began,” she said. “More than a million people working in the system would see their jobs disappear.”
So it’s like America’s current war addiction. We have built a massive war machine — one bigger than all the other countries in the world combined — with millions of well-paid defense industry and billions of dollars at stake. With a hammer that big, every foreign policy issue looks like a nail — another bomb to drop, another country to invade, another massive weapons development project to build.
Similarly, with such a well-entrenched prison-industrial complex in place — also with a million jobs and billions of dollars at stake — every criminal justice issue also looks like a nail — another prison sentence to pass down, another third strike to enforce, another prison to build in some job-starved small town, another chance at a better life to deny.
Alexander, who drew her early inspiration from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., devotes the last part of “The New Jim Crow” to steps people can take to combat this gross injustice. In particular, she recommended supporting the Drug Policy Alliance. At the book signing afterwards, Dr. Anthony Samad recruited Michelle Alexander to appear this fall at one his Urban Issues Forums, typically at the California African American Museum next to USC.
For some of us who earn our daily bread from programming computers (I have been doing this for over 2 decades), making the connection between Ifá binary notation and programming is a no brainer.
We programmers write codes/instructions (incantations) on the cpu – made from silicon (sand) to carry out our desires.
The parallel between a Babaláwo and a computer programmer is striking. We write on sand (silicon/cpu), a Babalawo writes on Iyerosun (camwood powder). We chant/write binary codes, a Babaláwo recites Odù Ifá!
In essence, a computer code is àfọ̀ṣẹ par excellence! In Yoruba, àfọ̀ṣẹ means “oun tí a fọ̀ tí ó sì ṣẹ” – something commanded to happen.
Our incantations (computer codes) can animate the entities in the cpu (sand) and make them become whatever we want: a game console, a financial trading system, an air traffic controller, facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, Bitcoin etc.
How did this come about? Well, the Binary System makes this possible.
The Binary System of Ifá is based on the Yorùbá philosophical duality of Ibi and Ire (Evil and Good); for several millennia, the Yorùbá had been using the binary system before the German mathematician – Gottfried Leibniz formalised in 1679.
These days, the Binary Numeral System (Base 2) is well known in Mathematics and digital electronics and the system underpins how computers work by representing numeric values using just two digits – zero (0) and one (1)
In Computing, a Bit (i.e. BInary digiT) is the smallest unit of storage and can either be 1 or 0
A Nible (also called half Byte or semi-octet) is the grouping of four Bits e.g 0 1 0 1
In Ifá, Odù signatures are marked with “|” and “||”. Where “|” is the binary number “0” and “||” is “1”.
For example Ogbè (0000) has the following signature: | | | |
Ọ̀sá (1000) is represented as: || | | |
Òtúrá (0100) is marked as: | || | |
We can therefore summarise the representation of the first sixteen Odus as follows: Decimal == Nibble == Odù 00 == 0000 == Ogbè 01 == 0001 == Ògúndá 02 == 0010 == Ìrẹtẹ̀ 03 == 0011 == Ìrosùn 04 == 0100 == Òtúra 05 == 0101 == Ọ̀sẹ́ 06 == 0110 == Èdí 07 == 0111 == Ọ̀bàrà 08 == 1000 == Ọ̀sá 09 == 1001 == Ìwòrì 10 == 1010 == Ọ̀̀fún 11 == 1011 == Ìká 12 == 1100 == Ọ̀wọ́nrín 13 == 1101 == Òtúrúpọ̀n 14 == 1110 == Ọ̀kànràn 15 == 1111 == Òyẹ̀kú ́ Since Ifá speaks only in binary (Odu Èjì Ogbè says: “Èjèèji ni mo gbè, n ò gbe ọ̀kan ṣoṣo mọ́” i.e “I will only support two, I will not support one”), each Odu must be paired.
For example, after pairing the main Odu, we get the following (see graphic for the main Odu signature)
This was how programmers used to write computer programs before high level programming languages like Fortran and Lisp were created in 1957 and 1958 respectively.
For programmers, entering these patterns manually was a laborious, tedious and error-prone task. Even for a seasoned programmer, it could get dizzy and nauseating after assembling a couple of these patterns.
However, a competent Ifá priest can commit to memory 256 of these patterns without breaking a sweat and able to recite close to 4,000 Ifá verses by heart!
Effectively, the meaning of the 1s and 0s in the code above is as follows:
Store the number 0 in memory location 0.
Store the number 1 in memory location 1.
Store the value of memory location 1 in memory location 2.
Subtract the number 11 from the value in memory location 2.
If the value in memory location 2 is the number 0 continue with instruction 9.
Add the value of memory location 1 to memory location 0.
Add the number 1 to the value of memory location 1.
Continue with instruction 3.
Output the value of memory location 0.
Using names in place of numbers for memory and instruction locations, we can do the following: Set the value of “total” to 0. Set the value of “count” to 1. [loop] Set the value of “compare” to the “count” value. Subtract 11 from the value of “compare” . If “compare” is zero, continue at [end]. Add “count” to the value of “total”. Add 1 to the value of “count”. Continue at [loop]. [end] Output “total”.
In a modern programming language like Python, we can write the following:
total = 0 count = 1 while count <= 10: total = total + count count = count + 1 print total
In 2017, I wrote series of programming tutorials on this wall using the Python programming language. In the coming series of articles, I will translate the posts into Yoruba so stay tuned.
Warren Buffett told the CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that the greatest threats to the philanthropic behemoth were cockiness, red tape, and self-satisfaction. The billionaire investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO, who has gifted a total of $33 billion to the foundation and resigned as its trustee in June, has warned about those forces in the past.
Mark Suzman took charge of the Gates Foundation early last year, and promptly flew to Buffett's hometown of Omaha, Nebraska to have lunch with the investor and seek his guidance.
"He told me then that my most important job was to guard against the 'ABC' risks of decay that all very large organizations face: arrogance, bureaucracy, and complacency," Suzman wrote in a recent email to the foundation's employees.
Buffett pledged in 2006 to donate over 99% of his wealth to the Gates Foundation and four other foundations, and reached the halfway mark towards that goal in June. His advice to Suzman isn't surprising; he wrote in his 2014 letter to Berkshire shareholders that when he retires, a big part of his replacement's job will be warding off those exact threats.
"My successor will need one other particular strength: the ability to fight off the ABCs of business decay, which are arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency," Buffett said. "When these corporate cancers metastasize, even the strongest of companies can falter."
The Berkshire chief went on to highlight General Motors, IBM, Sears Roebuck, and US Steel as examples of corporate titans that once appeared to have unassailable grips on their industries. "The destructive behavior I deplored above eventually led each of them to fall to depths that their CEOs and directors had not long before thought impossible," he said.
Buffett noted in the letter that he structured his company to minimize red tape. Berkshire's decentralized web of autonomous subsidiaries, underpinned by a culture of trust, acts as the "ideal antidote to bureaucracy," he said. Berkshire also saves money and boosts efficiency by not having HR, PR, IR, legal, acquisitions, and other departments in its headquarters, he added.
"We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly – or not at all – because of a stifling bureaucracy," Buffett said.
Given Buffett's clear disdain for the ABCs, it's no surprise that he told Suzman that his primary focus should be preventing the Gates Foundation from succumbing to them.
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