I’ll be damned …

Well, well, well – this early, what a year it has already been.

Starting with Venezuela and then Ms Machado giving away her Nobel Peace Prize.

The Nobel adjudicators say winners can do anything they want with their medals – throw them into the toilet if they choose – but a medal remains the singular honour of the original winner wherever it ends up, Oval Office or not.

Eyes on Greenland, the world’s largest island that compares in size to Africa’s own sprawling  Democratic Republic of Congo.

DRC would cover most of western Europe and its population of about 110 million compares to Greenland’s 57,000 ice-hardened people.

Some Americans have been calling their man Taco, after the Mexican tortilla sandwich but this time it stand for ‘Trump always chickens out’ which isn’t quite true, given his wild, unpredictable ways

The audacious capture of dictator Nicolas Maduro killed 32 Cubans in his Caracas security detail. China, Cuba and Russia needed, in various measure, Venezuela’s ‘heavy oil’ now under American control. It has the world’s largest deposits the dark and thick stuff against the lighter oil found almost everywhere else.

Dictatorships like Zimbabwe are looking across the ocean and saying, “hands off us.”  They claim democratic rights were born out of liberation from the discredited foreign domination of the past.

In land area, Zimbabwe would fit into Greenland five times. Besides often being described as close allies with Cuba, China and Russia, we don’t have much importance in the bigger scheme of things today.

Yet tens of thousands of Chinese are running and ripping off industry and the mining of gold, lithium and ‘rare earth’ minerals. We don’t have any oil. China has a neo-colonial presence that only benefits local politicians and their elite sidekicks. (right: gold plated SUV in Dubai, the hub of international gold smuggling.)

Brave new world. Where?

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*** There are calls not to hold matches of this year’s football World Cup in the US. This competition is meant to be a world unifier through a common love of the game. (right: that ridiculous FIFA peace prize.)

Unity between Africa’s 55 countries to make the continent a strategic bloc against the  distasteful machinations of the superpowers has never been a success, largely because of the racial divide between North and South. When Senegal gloriously won the African Cup of Nations football final in Morocco this month we saw Moroccan fans hurling bananas at the Senegalese players and making rude animal gestures.

Credit for the Hitler skit: Mel Brooks.