🎬A new Sheriff in town

Good morning. This one’s for our vegetarian readers. If you’re used to losing all your pro-animal life arguments, here’s a comeback for you. The most valuable piece of the cow doesn’t have any meat to it. In fact, traders are willing to pay as much as $200,000 for one kilogram of cattle gallstones, twice the price of gold, due to their importance in traditional Chinese medicine.

Only downside is, you’d still have to kill the cow to get them.

— Edna Akanni, Chibuike Uzor.

CURRENCIES

SECURITY
Congolese people take to the streets following rebel invasion

In the absence of an official response following Sunday’s takeover of the eastern city of Goma by M23 rebels, thousands of Congolese residents, young people from civil society organizations, grassroots movements, and other pressure groups flooded the streets across the country on Monday morning to denounce the complicity and silence of the international community.

The President of the Civil Society march group in South Kivu, Nene Bintu expressed disappointment saying that she was “disappointed that the extraordinary meeting of the UN Security Council did not result in a binding resolution.”

‘Not so’ United Nations

On Sunday evening, the UN held an emergency Security Council meeting to discuss the impending takeover of eastern DRC by the Rwandan-backed rebel group M23. Despite multiple calls by the Congolese foreign minister, Therese Wagner, for Rwanda to be sanctioned, the hearing reached a stalemate after Rwanda’s ambassador to the UN, Ernest Rwamucyo, accused the DRC in turn of sponsoring other rebel groups into Rwandan territory.

The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres on Sunday urged Rwandan troops to leave the DRC and cease aiding M23 rebels nearing Goma.

Meanwhile…dozens of Congolese army soldiers fled into the Rwandan border town of Rubavu on Monday, where they surrendered their weapons and were processed by Rwandese border officials. Some reports suggest the Congolese army still controls over 80% of the city of Goma meanwhile others point to the rebels occupying over 90% of military installations in the city. The M23 said earlier on Monday that it had taken control of the offices of Congo's national broadcaster in Goma.

Looking ahead: Despite no official comments from either president yet, Rwanda’s foreign minister, Oliver Nduhungirehe has repeatedly said they would ensure a stop to all hostilities once DRC cuts off its sponsoring for anti-Rwandan militia like the FDLR. -EA

TRENDING
A new Sheriff in town?

DeepSeek is the new AI chatbot on everybody’s lips and is currently sitting at the top of Apple’s App Store in the US and the UK. A completely free AI model built by a Chinese start-up, DeepSeek wants to make AI even more accessible to the masses by offering a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1 reasoning model without a fee. This provision of the same results with fewer resources meant AI-related stocks fell harder than the Twin Towers on Monday.

Nvidia, a leading maker of the computer chips that power AI models, was overtaken by Apple as the most valuable listed company in the US after its shares fell 17%, wiping nearly $600bn off its market value. Google’s parent company lost $100bn and Microsoft $7bn. Nvidia’s fall was the biggest in US stock market history.

 SHOWER THOUGHTS

NEWS
Round the continent

• Morocco will host the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations starting in December, with its first game against Mali

• The Alliance of Sahel States met formally with ECOWAS representatives on Monday to finalize their exit from the bloc today.

• Ethiopia has made a formal repatriation request to the UK to return artifacts seized from the country 160 years ago.

• Nigeria’s Debt Management Office will auction government bonds worth 450 billion naira ($296 million) this month to fund budget shortfalls.