Many fellow-grandmothers liked my article about Rubber Duckies in Taiwan yesterday. Today we cross the Taiwan Strait to the Mainland. There Fox News has sold its remaining stake in the Star network in China to the employees, maybe because of the divorce of Rupert and Wendi Murdoch.

The fox is not liked in China. Walmart got into unexpected trouble there for selling as donkey meat (a pick-me-up for winter chills) what turned out by DNA testing to be fox meat. Nobody from Arkansas would have tasted either one, I suspect.

Chinese people don't eat wolf or fox, but they certainly like dog meat. When I first visited the Guangzhou municipal market in the early 1990s I was appalled at the sight of cute little wrinkled puppies in tiny cages being sold for food. I thereafter dined exclusively in Buddhist vegetarian restaurants while in China. Whether I was secretly fed some other cute creature disguised as mushrooms I know not

Recall Oscar Wilde's definition of fox-hunting: "the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible."

Walmart is building its grocery presence in Africa where there are many wild beasts. But don't worry about the meat counters there. In African countries, wild animals may not be hunted, only poached, and they are eaten exclusively by rich foreign tourists in expensive game restaurants. Nairobi has one written up in the guidebooks, which I didn't test. How to play food in Africa is discussed for paid subscribers below.

What follows is a political rant.

The US should stop worrying about Canada's tar sands, which will be developed whether or not we allow a pipeline to cross our border. What we really need is pipelines (and storage facilities) at our shale oil sites. Then the operators would stop burning off the gas by-product, polluting the skies.

The myriad US tax breaks for oil exploration should require halting gas flaring by feeding the shale gas into pipelines. When I was a kid we converted our NYC kitchen stove to natural gas piped in to replace coal gas. The pipeline technology exists. The only obstacle is that natural gas is too cheap for them to pay off short-term.

So the US should use tax breaks to clean up. And get rid of other tax breaks to finance it. The US should encourage new energy limited partnerships so yield investors can join in the benefits or more gas pipelines.

Government policy moves LPs. Your editor owns Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, which operates pipelines, a US yield stock. Last week it bought 5 vessels from American Petroleum Tankers, controlled by several private equity funds. APT specializes in "Jones Act" ships, the only ones allowed to transport oil and its derivatives between US ports. The Jones Act was passed in 1920 to protect US inter-port shipping and US sailors from foreign competition. It is untouchable in Congress because it is backed by both unions and shipping companies.

In spite of the mini-market rout yesterday and the crashing Canadian dollar, at least one of our northern-neighbour shares rocketed up and the rise continues. More for paid subscribers from Canada, Israel, Ireland, and an Altneu stock purchase now that the wash-sale period of 30 market days has ended. I am writing about Africa because it is very cold in New York City today.

*We sold our Cameco (CCJ) for a huge tax loss last Nov. 21 and I have been kicking myself ever since. Now the wash-sale rule no longer applies and we can buy it back and we initatied a repurchase of Cameco at $20.10. Being a nuclear energy fiend, I regretted our sale at a huge loss almost as soon as I did it. But the loss was useful for 2013 where there was gold lying on the street.

CCJ mines uranium in Canada and is a buy today at $20.075, about a dollar (US) over what we sold for plus two commissions. We also lost the 10 cents dividend payable Jan. 15. It is trading above its 50-day and 200-day averages. Your editor, a long-time resident in France, believes in nuclear power and Cameco is a major uranium miner and refiner. It also owns a stake in the largest nuclear power plant in North America (located in Ontario). Its Cigar Lake (Sask.) mine is now back in business after jet boring into ore began last month and it will start industrial scale production at last in the current quarter. It will transport the ore c45 miles to Areva's McClean lake processing mill to convert it to uranium concentrate. ARVCF is a French government firm with its own problems but which is converting McClean to mill Cigar Lake ore staring in Q2.

We want to get into CCJ before it presents at CIBC's Whistler Institutional Conference Jan. 23. CCJ also has uranium mines in the US, Australia, troubled Kazakhstan, and other Asia. With nuclear energy needs growing in Japan, India, and China, CCJ is how to play higher uranium prices. For strategic reasons, there is no free market in U238. I am giving up on Germany, the only country headed by a physicist, now burning more coal (and lignite, dirty coal) to shut in its atomic power plants.

*Teva has begun the New Year with a bang, launching in 2 dose sizes the authorized generic of Detrol, tolterodine tartrate. This is a Pfizer drug for embarrassing incontinence and over-active bladders which had annual sales in the US of over $570 mn last year, according to IMS data.

*Royal Bank of Canada analysts in new coverage rate rival Bank of Nova Scotia or Scotiabank a buy. BNS.

*A bunch of Covidien insiders have sold shares, in one case cutting holdings by over a third. A total of nearly 156,000 shares were sold in Dec. by insiders with none buying, according to a www.seekingalpha.com article by Markus Aarnio. The price of COV doesn't look out of line and the stock is in a transition mode after the spinoff of Mallinckrodt last year.

Insiders sell for many reasons, like to pay for education or real estate, or to diversify their portfolios. Insiders buy for only one reason: because the expect the share price to rise. COV is trading more or less flat despite Mr. Aarnio's article.

*Our soaring stock is Canadian Solar, CSIQ.

*How do you play Africa? I hesitate to hold forth too loudly after the mess I made over Africa Opportunity Fund, AROFF, but here we go. As the African middle class (however defined) becomes more numerous, you don't want to own retailers. You want to own suppliers. Firstly, retailing in emerging markets is not just a matter of buying stuff wholesale and selling it retail with a mark up. You also have to finance sales, a high-risk business when your customers are poor and the economy faces inflationary risks.

Moreover in much of Africa modern commerce competes with a highly developed traditional marketplace, ranging from mom & pop shops to the Mama Benzes, the near-mythic and unbelievably wealthy Togolese (and other) market women who sell Mercedes cars. (They are said to be illiterate but can rapidly work out a percentage profit in their heads.)

Another risk is the heat. Food is hard to sell fast enough to avoid spoilage. And refrigeration and transport are expensive.

So here is my work-around. Here are some companies specializing in making or marketing products for upwardly-mobile emerging market consumers, not just in Africa.

Reckitt Benckiser (RBGLY), a UK-based but Indian-run maker of branded household and cleaning products, OTC drugs, and condoms RBGLY was tipped for us by Zimbabwe-born Martin Ferera. Itoperates in sub-Saharan Africa from Kenya and Nigeria to Zambia and Zimbabwe. It is not now present in the French- and Portuguese-speaking countries but moving there fast.

Our other Africa consumption play is Coca Cola Hellenic which last year went from being Greek to being a Swiss-HQ's company listed in London. HBC actually had its start in Africa some 60-odd years ago and its largest African market still is Nigeria, which accounts for 18% of sales of sparkling beverages, vastly more than Britain, Greece, and Switzerland combined. (Nigeria also accounts for 9% of non-carbonated beverage sales by CCH, like water, juice, tea, energy drinks, and other modern alternatives to Coke.) Its coke sales are growing at double-digit rates annually in Nigeria and other beverages are growing in the low teens. Nigeria includes sales across local borders to other African countries.

However CCH faces fierce competition selling water there.

African coke consumption is quite low with room for growth. And CCH has the smarts from selling in other markets where people are not as thirsty which it can use in Africa.

Traditional beer has a market hold, making it hard even to sell people Tuskers. You also don't want to sell beer in fiercely Muslim areas. But Coke is unique. Some 23% of CCH is owned by The Coca Cola Co. For 6 years it has featured on the Dow-Jones Sustainability indexes for its careful water use, the only non-alcoholic ready-to-drink bottler to win this accolade.

It is streamlining its emerging markets plants, warehouses, and distribution networks. This is not too surprising. Hellenic started as the operator of a Nigerian bottling plant. Before it became publicly listed, in 1969, CCH trucked to Ghana surplus Coke it couldn't sell in Nigeria during the Biafra war, which counted as a coup. Its African sales outside Nigeria are marginal; its main business is in Eastern Europe and the 'Stans.

Finally, don't forget marketing. Naspers Ltd, our South African media play, publishes print newspapers and magazines in many African countries full of advertisements. It also offers internet commerce and pay-TV and of course its e-commerce arm is part of the cell- and smart-phone plus text-messaging boom in developing countries. It owns Afsat the only outer space internet service provider in Africa. NPSNY.

Naspers, a successor to De Nationale Pers, still publishes its annual report in Afrikaans, having been founded in Cape Town 99 years ago. It began publishing in English in 1919, not long after. Despite the Boer connection, Naspers is participating in Black empowerment through offers of shares and coupons convertible into shares to black South Africans.

While we got into this stock because of its holdings in Tencent and mail.ru, it is bringing home to Africa ideas like comparison shopping, e-commerce, distance learning, auction sites, financial portals, consumer services, B2B, and B2C, and anything else you can think of. It first became a public company in 1990 and its ADR dates to 2002, originally on Nasdaq from which it de-listed 7 years ago,  NPSNY.