Category: News

Daily Sun, Nigeria’s King of the Tabloids:

“My mind told me, ‘my friend, bring out your camera’. I just brought out my camera. The moment he was climbing a tree, I snapped him. He was trying to tie the knots of the string he was holding to the tree. People were just wondering, what is this? Some people were just wondering, is he trying to stage a play? Not until the man put the rope on his neck and tried to throw himself off the tree that two of them ran towards the tree. One tried to push him up, the other climbed the top of the tree to unknot the rope.

“All of a sudden the man fell and hit his right eyelid on the hard concrete of the gutter edge. There was a cut and blood started coming out. The man was crying, “why don’t you leave me to die?” He was not happy with his rescuers. He was seriously crying. All of a sudden, before you know it, crowd of people started gathering to know what was happening. People were wondering, what kind of thing is this? How can this happen? As for me, I could not believe it, as old as I am, because since I have been moving around, I have never seen somebody trying to take his life in broad daylight. It is amazing. That’s the way I see it”.

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Daily Sun, Nigeria’s King of the Tabloids:

Titi Ebenezer-Fola
What did you say? Ah, that will not be my portion in Jesus name. I reject it! I would not marry such a man in Jesus name. Any man that has VD, it means he has been patronizing prostitutes. God forbid bad thing. The God I serve will never allow my man to contract veneral disease. My husband and I will forever be covered by the blood of Jesus.

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NYT:

On Sunday, violence erupted between the gangs fighting for control of this impoverished turf. One gang is the Mungiki, a secretive, quasi-religious sect whose members cut out their enemies’ navels and worship a leader who says he came from a ball of shining stars. The other is a band of vigilantes who call themselves the Taliban, even though they are Christian and have nothing to do with the original Taliban group that imposed a harsh brand of Islam in Afghanistan.

“They just wanted a name that sounded tough,” said George Wambugu, a youth counselor for a soccer league in Mathare. The Mungiki and the Taliban have clashed before, but not like this. According to residents, the Mungiki tried to impose a higher tax on brewers of chang’aa, an outlawed homemade liquor with a kick stronger than that of vodka.

The brewers resisted and enlisted the help of the Taliban to fight back. That led to a cycle of street rumbles, shanty burnings and reprisal killings. Most victims were hacked to death with machetes, though some apparently were shot.

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Daily Sun, Nigeria’s King of the Tabloids:

Please understand that Allaah sends trials upon people so as to distinguish between them, so that it will be known who will bear it with patience and the hope of reward from Allaah, and who will be filled with despair and will resent the decree of Allaah. So those who are patient will be rewarded with Paradise and those who despair will be punished with torment, grief and pain in this world, before the Hereafter.
The plane crash which you mentioned is of this nature.

The people on board were either committed Muslims, so this disaster is an expiation for their sins and will raise their status, as it is a kind of martyrdom (shahaadah) for which they will be rewarded, and their families will be rewarded if they bear their loss with patience; or they were kuffaar and evildoers who did not obey their Lord, so the accident was a punishment from Allaah and vengeance from Him.

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NYT Magazine:

As we rambled back down under the noonday sun, exhausted and thirsty, plucking apricots, almonds and mulberries off the trees, I remembered the Afghans I’d met complaining about Americans pillaging their harvest. It wasn’t hard to see how a few apricots could transmute into theft or how speaking to a woman after you have rounded up all the men could transmute into “Americans are abusing our women.” One afternoon, I had a car accident in Zabul. Within minutes, some 100 men pulled over and began heaving the wreck out of the ditch. As I crouched in the dirt wrapped in a tentlike Kuchi shawl, not a single man glanced my way. Rather, they asked my wounded translator if his wife was O.K. Someone must have sensed a foreigner, however, because 10 minutes after we left for the hospital, the Taliban showed up. They pummeled the driver, demanding to know what happened to the foreigner. He lied and saved his life. But that moment, when not one person glanced my way, offered a window into how seriously they abide by rules that are utterly alien to a 19-year-old American soldier. Sturek constantly struggled with pushing “cultural sensitivity” down the chain of command. It was nearly impossible.

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Washington Post:

Locked in a prison here, for now, is a desert bandit dubbed the “Bin Laden of the Sahara,” whose capture was secretly orchestrated by U.S. forces after a long chase across some of the most forbidding terrain on Earth.

Amari Saifi, 37, a former Algerian army paratrooper, was caught in 2004 after he and a band of rebel fighters kidnapped 32 European tourists in the Algerian Sahara and ransomed them for about $6 million.

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The Moscow Times:

Sosnina said she had been particularly intrigued by the bottle of Yuzhny, or Southern, cologne sent to Stalin in 1949 by a resident of Kherson province in Ukraine. Now dried up to a thick sediment, but still fragrant when opened, the perfume was carefully stored in the Russian Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg. It was sent to Stalin with a message full of spelling mistakes, written with a sort of ink pencil that had to be licked in order to keep writing.

Sosnina speculated that the giver must have thought that Stalin would like the perfume and “maybe he would dab some on.”

She also expressed amazement at the way the humble present was treated by museum workers. “They didn’t burn it, they didn’t throw it away. They preserved it all these years,” she said.

So why did people send gifts to a faraway leader? “There are very few things that you could say were made under orders,” Ssorin-Chaikov said. “They are voluntary gifts, on the one hand. On the other hand, a lot of people were specifically thinking about a return gift.”

Among the gift-givers who had self-interested motives, few were as blatant as one Moscow hairdresser named Grigory Borukhov. In the early 1930s, Borukhov collected hair from his clients and used it to make a portrait of Lenin. After donating it to the Institute of Marx, Engels and Lenin, he began corresponding with Kliment Voroshilov, a member of the Party’s Central Committee, about his invention of portraiture using human hair.

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Guardian:

Sheik Taj Aldin al-Hilali delivered his comments in a religious address on adultery to around 500 worshippers in Sydney last month, but they only came to the attention of the wider public when they were published in the Australian paper today.

Sheik Hilali was quoted as saying: “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside … without cover, and the cats come to eat it … whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat’s? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab [the headdress worn by some Muslim women], no problem would have occurred.”

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NYT Magazine:

With the Americans on their way out and the NATO force not yet in control, the Kandahar Police were left on the front line: underfinanced, underequipped, untrained — and often stoned. Which is perhaps what made them so brave. One afternoon I ran into a group who said their friends had just been killed when a Talib posing as a policeman served them poisoned tea. A shaggy-haired officer in a black tunic was standing by his pickup, freshly ripped up by a barrage of bullets, and staring at my feet. “I envy your shoes,” he said, looking back at his own torn rubber sandals. “I envy your Toyota,” he said and laughed. And then looking at my pen and notebook, he said, “I envy you can read and write.” It’s not too late, I offered feebly, but he tapped his temple and shook his head. “It doesn’t work anymore,” he said. “I smoke hash. I smoke opium. I’m drinking because we’re always thinking and nervous.” He was 35. He had been fighting for 20 years. Four of his friends had been killed in the fighting the other night. He had to support children, a wife and parents on a salary of about $100 a month. And, he said, “we haven’t been paid in four months.” No wonder, then, that the population complained that the police were all thieves.

At Kandahar’s hospital I met a 17-year-old policeman (who had been with the police since he was 14) tending to his wounded friend. He was in a jovial mood, amazed he wasn’t dead. He said they had been given an order to cut the Taliban’s escape route. Instead they were ambushed by the Taliban, ran out of bullets and had no phones to call for backup. “We ran away,” he said with a nervous giggle. “The Taliban chased us, shouting: ‘Hey, sons of Bush! Where are you going? We want to kill you.”’

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Daily Sun, Nigeria’s King of the Tabloids:

What did I hear you say? This guy, you are very funny o! Kemi, come and hear. Repeat what you just said. He wants to know if you make love with that your whitie guy under bright light or in the dark (laughter). Tell him now, yeye girl.

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NYT:

“Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple”

Two of the five Jonestown residents who resisted Mr. Jones’s call and escaped into the jungles of Guyana after their loved ones died in their arms offer moment-by-moment accounts of this orgy of self-annihilation. The movie includes an audiotape of Mr. Jones urging them to “die with a degree of dignity” rather than “lie down in tears and agony.”

Death, he argued, was not that big a deal; it was just crossing a line. He heralded communal self-destruction as “an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”

This is a movie to make you shudder. How many of us are so desperate for a charismatic leader claiming to have the answers that we will surrender our basic instincts for survival, along with our reason? This film paints a portrait of Mr. Jones, who died with his flock in Guyana, as a man with two faces. The appealing one was that of a trained Pentecostal minister, an idealist with polished oratorical skills. Growing up poor in Indiana, Mr. Jones was sensitive to the plight of African-Americans, and preached racial equality. His son Jim Jones Jr., who appears in the film, boasts of being the first black child adopted by a Caucasian in the state of Indiana.

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Guardian:

Felicien Kabuga was indicted in 1997 by the international criminal tribunal for genocide and other crimes against humanity as the “main financier” of extremist Hutu political groups and their armed militias which led the massacre of an estimated 800,000 Tutsis.

The US has placed a $5m (£2.7m) reward on his head. Mr Kabuga is accused of supplying machetes and other weapons used in the genocide and of transporting the killers in his company’s vehicles. The wealthy businessman is also accused of funding the notorious Radio Mille Collines which incited Hutus to murder.

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Former US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, in the NYT Magazine:

Have you ever smoked a cigarette?

No. I puffed on a cigar one time, and it just made my mouth feel like someone had shot a cobweb all inside my mouth.

If you felt temptation for another woman, what would you do?

Call my wife.

In addition to songwriting, you dabble in the visual arts. What sort of work do you do?

I make barbed-wire sculpture.

Why barbed wire?

Because there was a surplus of it on my farm.

Well, thank you for making time for this interview.

I just hope that in meeting people, they’ll understand that I am not as bad as they thought I was.

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