Category: News
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The House of Death
The Observer: These documents, which form a dossier several inches thick, are the main source for the facts in this article. They suggest that while the eyes of the world have been largely averted, America’s ‘war on drugs’ has moved to a new phase of cynicism and amorality, in which the loss of human life…
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Man furious with bystanders who aborted his suicide bid
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…
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If he gives you V.D?
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…
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Chased by Gang Violence, Residents Flee Kenyan Slum
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…
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In Online Mourning, Don’t Speak Ill of the Dead
NYT: Some of the snubs are blunt. “Everyone gets their due,” a former client writes of an embezzling accountant. Or, “I sincerely hope the Lord has more mercy on him than he had on me during my years reporting to him at the Welfare Department.” Others are subtler: “She never took the time to meet…
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Why does Allah allow planes to crash?
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…
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Taking the Fight to the Taliban
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…
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Death in Brescia
Ed Vulliamy, in The Observer: Within 17 days, another six people had been killed across the city, some murders so savage as to defy the imagination. A 23-year-old woman was strangled to death in a church by the sacristan, from Sri Lanka, while trying to light a candle to the Madonna – her corpse hidden…
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Taking Terror Fight to N. Africa Leads U.S. to Unlikely Alliances
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…
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A Look Into the Vault
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.…
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Australian Muslim leader compares uncovered women to exposed meat
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…
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In the Land of the Taliban
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…
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Museum Explores Peru's Shining Path
Washington Post: Wooden miniatures celebrate the start of Shining Path’s war with the burning of ballot boxes in 1980, as Peru returned to democracy after more than a decade of military dictatorship. A pair of Abimael Guzman’s thick, trademark spectacles and his collection of lapel pins of China’s Communist leader Mao Zedong, Shining Path’s inspiration,…
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Do it with Lights on or off?
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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Kool-Aid, Craziness and Utopian Yearning
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…
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Ultranationalists Gear Up for March
The Moscow Times: Bringing Rogozin and other high-profile figures on board was meant to lend legitimacy to the Russian March, Belov said. “We had to show this wasn’t some small-time event organized by a bunch of vocational school students from the Moscow suburbs,” he said. Last year’s march through Moscow’s center included skinheads touting banners…
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9 Violent Psychiatric Patients Flee Hospital
The Moscow Times: Moskovsky Komsomolets reported Tuesday that the patients became upset when the nurse on duty Thursday night barred them from watching a televised football game. The patients stormed the nurse’s station, threatened her with a sharp object and fled with the building keys, the newspaper reported. The patients, all men aged 17-20, made…
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Kenya pressed on Rwandan genocide suspect
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…
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Europe Raising Its Voice Over Radical Islam
LA Times: “It’s a fear of brutality, and you submit to that brutality,” said Henryk M. Broder, whose book “Hurray, We Capitulate” is a polemic on what he sees as Europe’s submission to Islamists. “It’s surrender to an enemy you’re deathly afraid of…. Europe is like a little dog on his back begging for mercy…
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For God and Country
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.…