Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

Gentlemen offending each other. How amusing!

We all got more experience with that. It's now 19 years since the Opera web forum opened.

Record floods have inflicted severe damage across the Sahel region in recent weeks, leaving dozens dead and tens of thousands homeless from Sudan to Senegal.

OI don't mind OakdaleFTL's comment re me as I make allowances for where he lives!

Today I discovered that Norwegian TV's Brennpunkt is (globally?) available without obstacles. So I took a look at how Norwegian recycling works. Namely, e-waste, tyres, and cars get dumped to Africa, where locals process it to something monetisable as best as they can. The journey of the waste to Africa is illegal every step of the way, but no authority takes any responsibility to check up on anything https://tv.nrk.no/serie/brennpunkt/2019/MDDP11000819/avspiller

It's more intriguing than what you said.

And most steps on the way are actually perfectly legal, as long as questions aren't asked.

This business plan is not to relieve the retailers of their e-waste. Instead they steal the e-waste. This could be bog-standard dumpster diving, but it is heavily implied it's more organised than that. Employees complain about threats if they try to stop it. And considered as theft who are they stealing from? The consumer who returned the e-waste, the retailer, or the recycling system itself?

Likewise with the cars. The documentary makes a calculation for one of the actors (who according to records own 95 vehicles without licence plates). The cars are bought above-board and legally, paying an average of 12k NOK for them. Since cars have an implicit minimum value of 3k, which he foregoes, and it costs 9k to ship a car to Nigeria, where is the profit?

They are smuggling, and it is harder for customs officers to look into a shipped locked cars than a shipping container that is built to be opened.

The e-waste doesn't seem that profitable. Some can be reused, most goes for scrap.

Most cars stolen in Portugal go to Africa. Cars are dismantled in illegal car workshops, exported by ship and mounted at the destiny. The legal owners never recover their cars. That's why you see so many luxury cars at most African capitals.

I suppose the same happens at other european countries.

Burning wires and products for metal value is an ancient and simple method that used to be common in Europe as well as the rest of the world, but it is inefficient, unhealthy, and polluting, and thus eventually prohibited.

New and future EU regulation on repairability and recyclability will greatly reduce this problem. For now, as mentioned in the documentary, cars with spray-painted windows will no longer be shipped.

...when the sign on Emmanuel Macron’s lectern at the Algerian presidential palace last week read “Presidency of the Republic” instead of “Présidence de la République” in French (after all, Algeria was part of the French colonial empire for well over a century), diplomats and casual observers in Paris took note.

“I wasn’t surprised but I was shocked [Algeria] would do such a thing during the visit of a French president,” said France’s former ambassador to Algeria, Xavier Driencourt.

French President Emmanuel Macron's statements in Le Monde caused a diplomatic crisis between the two states. Macron accused Algeria's "political-military system" of still using colonialism to excuse its own failures. "Since 1962, the Algerian nation has been feeding off a memory that says France is the problem," Macron was quoted as saying in the French newspaper. Moreover – and this caused an outcry in Algiers – he questioned whether Algeria had ever been a nation before the colonial era.

[...]

Consequently, the government in Algiers recalled its ambassador last autumn and stopped overflight rights for French military jets over the Sahel. Macron let it be known shortly afterwards – through an advisor – that he regretted the "polemic" and the "misunderstandings". At the beginning of December last year, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian travelled to Algeria. After three months, the diplomatic crisis was over. But not a single official representative of the Algerian government took part in the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the ceasefire in the Algerian war held at the end of March. Macron called for further reconciliation between France and the former French colony.