Magic Statistics

A pastor was arrested at Entebbe Airport after he tried to get through security with a machine he claimed was essential to his work as an evangelist.  The device is worn like a corset and delivers a mild electric shock to those touched by the person wearing it.  I can’t imagine why security officials found that suspicious.

“Pastor" Obiri Konjo Yeboah on July 5 failed to convince Aviation Police officers why he needed this machine to do God's work. He is now facing serious charges including fraud and false pretence," Police Spokesman Asan Kasingye told Sunday Monitor yesterday.
. . .
"When [he] touches his flock, they fall down [thinking] he is using super natural powers," Mr Asan Kasingye said. The machine is placed on any part of the body and gives a pleasant electric shock to whoever touches you.
. . .
The Yigal Mesika Company in Los angels [sic] America manufactures the machine known for freaking people's minds.

That’s freaky all right.

And there’s this: Pastor Yeboah’s father is Obiri Yeboah, “the controversial pioneer of miracle healing in Uganda.”  Controversial is putting it mildly.  Another pastor quoted in the story calls the elder Yeboah “a witch, magician”.

h/t: Pearcey Report

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Mugabe’s threat to nationalise "profiteering" firms supports the theory that the price reduction campaign is merely a means to take over the country’s private business sector in the same way that productive farms were seized and urban poor were driven out.

THE current government drive against soaring prices is the same template of harassment, bullying and threats the State unleashed against commercial farmers in 2000 under the guise of land reform.

When commercial farmers and opposition supporters were being hounded off their land, commerce and industry remained silent. When opposition politicians, their supporters and civic society activists were brutalised and even killed, industry and commerce stood by and watched in silence.

In May 2005 the government unleashed its anti-people Operation Murambatsvina, a terror campaign unimaginable in this day and age. The sense among commerce and industry was always that they would remain untouched and unaffected. It was always someone else's problem.

But the declaration by Christopher Mushohwe, the Minister of Transport and Communications, in Nyanga last year that the government would be going for the manufacturing sector next was the clearest signal that, as in the case of the Nazis, Zanu PF's outrage had exhausted its other victims and would soon be targeting the business sector.

It’s the old strategy: Divide and conquer.  Perhaps Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous poem could be re-written for Zimbabwe:

First, they came for the white farmers
and I did not speak out
because I was neither white nor a farmer . . .

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• Mass arrests, internal dissension over Zimbabwe’s price rollback
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Robert Mugabe is deploying heavy artillery to enforce his order to cut prices in half.  Armed police are searching stores and business premises for overpriced or "hoarded" products.

Over 1300 businessmen and women, including 33 senior company executives, have been arrested and charged.  The shop owners have been fined and released, but the executives remain in custody awaiting court appearances.

The price rollback was ordered as Zimbabwe's inflation rate continues into the stratosphere and economic production falls ever lower.

A major driving force behind Zimbabwe's hyperinflation has been the central bank's printing vast quantities of currency with reckless abandon.  In a surprising development, Gideon Gono, Governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and a hitherto-dependable Mugabe partisan, has publicly disagreed with the president over price controls.

[I]n his first act of open defiance since his appointment more than four years ago, Gono opposed the campaign which has resulted in empty shop shelves across the country.

Gono is a fierce Mugabe loyalist and the president's personal banker. Up until the past week's rift, which has left the ageing Mugabe increasingly isolated, Gono was one of a few people in the country who still had direct access to the president and was touted by some as Mugabe's choice as heir apparent.

Gono last week warned Mugabe that the price war, which is politically motivated and aimed at wooing voters in next year's critical elections, will drive the final nail in the coffin of Zimbabwe's already crumbling economy.

If Mugabe fires Gono, whatever confidence Zimbabwe retains among foreign investors would be destroyed.

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A British court has convicted a woman after she entered a civil partnership with a woman while still being married to her husband.  The Daily Mail refers to Suzanne Mitchell as “the country's first lesbian 'bigamist'”, but it would appear that she is really a bisexual.  Also, she was not charged with bigamy because the law only applies when an individual is a spouse in two heterosexual marriages at the same time.

The mother of five admitted making a false statement to the registrar at her civil partnership ceremony by failing to mention she was already married.

The bizarre saga started when Mrs Mitchell's marriage hit the rocks two years ago.

She began a relationship with a younger woman she met at a bus stop, moved her girlfriend into the family home and then 'married' her in a civil partnership ceremony.

Meanwhile, her husband Charles was forced to sleep on the sofa downstairs.

Mr Mitchell, 46, was not in court yesterday. But in a bizarre twist, he has taken his cheating wife back and the pair are living together again.

Bizarre is right.  The Mitchells have young children who were presumably living at home while that nonsense was going on.

Sentence has yet to be pronounced, but jail time is a possibility. 

Mr and Mrs Mitchell want to renew their wedding vows—after she has “divorced” her lesbian partner.  Welcome to the new world of “gay” “marriage”.

Previous related post: Married woman charged after entering civil partnership