Cultivating the nutritious bugs means families can raise livestock and enrich their own food, while lowering pressures on the land

A few minutes’ walk from his home in the Kyaka II refugee settlement, Kanane Bikanyale feeds black soldier fly larvae to chickens in a coop above a fishpond. The larvae disappear in a scrum of chickens. Nearby, more larvae grow in modified jerrycans, while adult flies are kept in netted boxes.

Bikanyale kept chickens before he fled to Uganda from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). But the cost of conventional feed and shortages of ingredients made them increasingly difficult to raise – a widespread pressure for millions of smallholder farmers whose margins are tight.

Kanane Bikanyale tends to his black soldier fly larvae in a rearing unit in the Kyaka II refugee camp in Uganda

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© Photograph: Umberto Diecinove

© Photograph: Umberto Diecinove

© Photograph: Umberto Diecinove

Xi's 'death watch' will become a global spectacle - "Xi will have to pick a relative unknown — all the current members of the Politburo Standing Committee are too old to step into his shoes — raising a host of troubling questions. Would a designated successor catapulted to the top be strong enough to command the loyalty of the powerful military? Could he hold the Party together?"

China now faces a period of prolonged political uncertainty. Carl Minzner, a US legal scholar and senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, predicted a "long twilight" with the economy sagging, social discontent rising, and the state using "grid management" — surveillance techniques used to maintain control over Xinjiang and other restive border areas. A succession struggle is unlikely to remain within China's borders, Tyler Jost, a professor at Brown University, and Daniel Mattingly of Yale University argued in Foreign Affairs last year, noting that Xi's prize goal is unification with Taiwan and "if he hears the succession clock ticking, he could become more willing to gamble on war." I'm betting that the end of the Xi era will look a lot less like Deng's, whose passing created hardly a ripple — by then, he'd handed over power and put in place a system to ensure smooth leadership transfers — and more like Mao's, a drama that involved a bloodless coup (the arrest of the so-called "Gang of Four" led by Mao's widow), intervention by the People's Liberation Army, and show trials. We had a foretaste of this kind of turmoil when Xi took power in 2012. A carefully constructed power transfer was upended by the arrest of Xi's main Politburo rival, and there were wild internet rumors of a military coup, tanks in the streets of the Chinese capital, and gunfire near the leadership compound. Xi has wrenched China back to an era of one-man rule. But having attained the pinnacle of power — next year he'll likely get a fourth five-year term in office — Xi now has to reckon with the consequences for his country. As Deng himself warned, "building a nation's fate on the reputation of one or two people is very unhealthy and very dangerous. --- *Notable:

• In 2025, during Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Beijing, a hot mic picked up a conversation between Putin and Xi in which the two discussed organ transplants and the possibility of living forever. Musing on such procedures, Putin told Xi (through a translator) that with modern technology organs could be transplanted again and again so that "(you can) even achieve immortality." While a largely hypothetical conversation, it hinted that staving off old age and death — maybe for eternity — is top of mind among the world's most powerful autocrats.

As America Retreats, a New Era of Autocratic Surveillance Advances [ungated] - "A crackdown in Uganda shows how new technologies, Chinese influence and America's moral retreat are making the world safer for autocrats."[1]

Ugandans have discovered that, increasingly, there is nowhere to hide. Civic life here is defined by thickening webs of state surveillance built with foreign help. Chinese cameras and facial-recognition software monitor the streets; Russian radio frequency chips implanted in license plates have been tracking cars in real time; Israeli software plunders the private contents of phones. Technology has created an intrusive eye that never blinks — a stealthy weapon for dictators keen to stifle speech and thought. Welcome to our menacing new world, a place where authoritarians — established and aspiring alike — enjoy tolerance from the international community; wield cheaper, quieter and far more powerful surveillance tools at home; and reach across borders to help one another hang on to power.

viz. @EdwardGLuce: "Another US president would be pressuring Russia to stop slaughtering innocents. Trump is instead giving them the means to kill more."

• Iran Has a Secret Weapon in Its War With America: Help From China - "Trump wants to preserve relations with Xi, but Iranian customs data show Chinese entities have made thousands of shipments of components used in drones and missiles."
• The Houthis Are Building an Advanced Missile With Chinese Parts - "New report shows how Yemeni militant group is developing medium-range weapons independently of Iran."

cf. China's growth machines - "China is not the world's largest command economy. It is a continent-sized Silicon Valley."[2]

• @RuxandraTeslo: "Chinese industrial success is... because properly incentivised local governments compete ruthlessly with each other to secure investment."
• @bswud: "Whereas many of the West's most important city governments capture only a small amount of the spillovers from successful clusters, and thus have very little reason to foster them, in China, they get a huge amount of the upside and can re-invest it in further growth."
• @kyleichan: "It's useful to think of the Chinese Party-state as a giant corporation..."

also btw... Brazil's racket society - "As Bolsonarismo outlives Bolsonaro, what does Brazil reveal about where politics everywhere is heading?" (via|previously)

As Latin America's largest economy and its most populous democracy, Brazil has long served as a bellwether for the region, and increasingly for the world. Analysts of neoliberalism have used "Brazilianization" to describe a future of informal work, fortified elites, and hollowed-out states that they see arriving in the global North. The outcome of the runoff will help decide whether Brazil holds out against a regional turn toward Trump-aligned strongmen, a wave that has already swept Argentina, Ecuador, and, most recently, Colombia. The stakes are high. Lula's third term delivered growth, rising wages, and record-low unemployment, but it was hemmed in by a hostile Congress, and household debt and the cost of living kept climbing. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has intervened with unusual openness. It has imposed punitive tariffs and sanctioned a Supreme Court justice, and it has designated Brazil's two largest criminal factions as terrorist organizations. As Benjamin Fogel wrote in Jacobin before the vote, "something deeper and more paradigmatic is going on" than ordinary frustration with an incumbent. In this conversation, editor William Shoki speaks with Fogel, the Deputy Director of the Alameda Institute, a historian of Brazil and contributing editor at Jacobin (as well as an alumnus of Africa Is a Country), to unpack the first-round results, the coalition of interests behind Flávio, and the political economy that makes it cohere. They discuss why Brazilian capital has made its peace with predation, why anti-corruption politics so often breeds cynicism, how "security slop" became the right's signature policy, and what Brazil and South Africa reveal about everyone else's future.

John Mitani spent years studying a huge community of chimpanzees in Uganda. But then things took a dark turn – and his findings stunned the scientific world

John Mitani can still remember the first time he set foot in Uganda’s Kibale national park. The old-growth east African rainforest enveloped him, its canopy stretching to heights of 40 metres. Fruit trees bowed under the weight of African star apples and bountiful Ficus mucuso figs. And then there were the chimpanzees. Furry black blobs darted through the jungle, their raucous calls often deafening.

It was the summer of 1995, and Mitani, a primatologist from northern California, had just come from working with the chimps living in the Mahale mountains of Tanzania. At the time, Mahale was home to the largest known population of chimps, with about 100 individuals. But there were rumours that this section of Kibale – only accessible via a 12-hour drive from the capital, Kampala – might host an even more unusual abundance of apes.

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© Photograph: Lauren Sarringhaus

© Photograph: Lauren Sarringhaus

© Photograph: Lauren Sarringhaus