flickering pictures

At least in South Africa.
Frustrated with Telkom, South Africa’s biggest ISP, the cheeky staff at a South African IT company devised a race to see what would be faster: e-mailing a large file from their Pietermaritzburg offices to the city of Durban, 77 km away, or strapping a data stick to a pigeon’s leg and […]

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The constant hijackings off the Somali coast aren’t really news — or rather, they’re news that everyone else is already reporting, and I don’t usually go into that sort of thing here.
But every time I hear about one of these hijackings, I wonder why people keep sailing their tankers and transport ships into the most […]

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In case you’re not an automotive engineer, that translates to the strength of about 104 trained athletes at peak output, or 2.4 Hyundai Accents. Take that, Spock.
I’m not inclined to put much stock in this one, and I can’t find any independent verification of this anywhere, but according to this video report from Egypt’s […]

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It’s only sleeping.
A few days ago, B sent me a link to an excellent article by Stephanie Nolen, a Canadian Globe and Mail reporter who — in my opinion at least — does some of the finest journalism out there, and has for years. She opened the Globe’s South Africa bureau back in 2003, […]

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From Harper’s Weekly

A six-year-old boy and a five-year-old-girl were detained in Germany, on a train to the airport; they explained to police that they planned to fly to Africa to be married. The couple, disguised in sunglasses, had brought along several suitcases, a pink blow-up doll, swim fins, and the boy’s seven-year-old sister, who planned […]

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The BBC reports:

On Thursday, [Zimbabwe president Robert] Mugabe said a deadly cholera outbreak had been stopped, as aid workers warned it was worsening.
He said Western powers were plotting to use cholera as an excuse to invade and overthrow him.
The World Health Organization says the outbreak has not been contained and the death toll has […]

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CNN reports:

In 1993, Romeo Dallaire was full of hope for the future of Rwanda.
The Canadian lieutenant general and son of a soldier was about to take up the biggest command of his career — leading United Nations peacekeepers in the central African nation.
A year later he left Rwanda a broken man, having watched helplessly as […]

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If you didn’t know who he was, you’d swear he looked more like a merchant of used cars. Or plaid suits. Or kielbasa maybe. Anything but semi-automatic rifles, grenade launchers, helicopters, surface-to-air missiles, armour-piercing rockets, “ultra light” airplanes, unmanned aerial vehicles, anti-aircraft guns and armoured vehicles, with a client list that includes […]

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And they say there’s no such thing as climate change…
For 12 weird and wonderful hours last week, a Kenyan village turned into a winter wonderland.
From a Reuters story picked up by Yahoo! News:

A huge hailstorm turned parts of central Kenya white, thrilling residents most of whom had never experienced such conditions, officials said on Wednesday.
[…] […]

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In a powerful op-ed piece for the New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof points out something we already know but try not to think about: rape has moved from a by-product of war to a weapon of war, used coldly and calculatingly to inflict maximum pain and intimidation on an entire population. It’s […]

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