"Mountain" Disappears in Sinoe, No Comment from Superintendent

A report from July, bylined O. Testiomeny Zeongar in the Heritage Newspaper, as reprinted in AllAfrica (emphasis added, as always):

Reports gathered from the South Eastern Liberian County of Sinoe say a rather strange occurrence has taken place in that part of the country.

According to the reports, a mountain approximately 30 feet high, has suddenly disappeared from the land space it had previously occupied for several years, and is no longer visible in the area. The mountain, named Tarjue, which was situated between Tarjuewon and Gbarzohn Districts, the reports divulged, recently vanished in thin air, leaving many persons in Sinoe County in a state of bewilderment. 

The reports further divulged that the Tarjue Mountain, which is believed to be rich in the mineral resource of bauxite, vanished when preparations for mining activities by the Valley Exploration Company heightened. Prior to its reported disappearance, the ownership of Tarjue Mountain was heavily contested by Sinoe citizens from Tarjuewon and Ggbarzohn Districts, the reports intimated. 

Meanwhile, authorities of the county, including Superintendent J. Milton Teajay are yet to comment on the reported mysterious disappearance of the mountain in question.

 (Is a pile of possible-minerals the height of a 2-story house really a mountain?)

Liberia's Arrow Points Backwards

Reposted from the October 2 article in The Economist online, citing a recent report by the World Bank, which compares the increase in GDP per capita with rates of urbanization in Asian Tigers (and China) with sub-Saharan African countries. Strikingly, the African economies do not correlate GDP growth with increasingly urbanized populations, as is markedly the case in the major ASEAN economies and China. Only Ethiopia and Ghana show any similarity, with tiny Guinea-Bissau joining Cameroon and Kenya only slightly tilted in the same direction. Massive Nigeria points straight upwards, stagnating even as its cities have boomed. Zimbabwe and Madagascar actually show a decrease in GDP per capita as those states have urbanized, while the most dramatic outlier is Liberia, which saw a rapid decrease in GDP even as the country's urbanization shot up. The Civil conflict is, of course, major cause of this.

Updated: This was also posted on The Atlantic which has a link to the World Bank's Tumblr.