flickering pictures

Zimbabwe’s opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, announced yesterday that his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party is pulling out of the presidential run-off election, even though he won the main election held a few weeks ago. He says President Robert Mugabe’s widespread use of rape, torture, beatings and murder to intimidate opposition voters has made […]

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Human Rights Watch has just released its report on the ongoing violence in Zimbabwe, entitled “Bullets for Each of You.” The title is taken from a Zimbabwean army address to villagers in Karoi, a small city in the province of Mashonaland West:

“If you vote for MDC in the presidential runoff election, you have seen […]

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In case you’re not familiar with the original We Are the World, it’s a song written for charity by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, and sung by an all-star cast including Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Cyndi Lauper, Bette Midler, Kenny Rogers, Willie Nelson, Diana Ross, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner and, oddly, […]

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Tanzania has just appointed its first-ever albino MP — a really big deal in a country where spiritual leaders often call for the murder of albinos and the use of their body parts as ingredients in magic potions. She’s the one with the huge wonderful grin on the right. From the BBC:

Tanzania’s first albino […]

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A Chinese freighter brimming with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and three million rounds of AK-47 ammo has docked at the South African port of Durban, with Robert Mugabe’s landlocked fiefdom in Zimbabwe as its intended final destination. The shipment is especially disconcerting because Mugabe has refused to release two-week-old election results that would almost certainly […]

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Looking for hockey coverage, I came across an excellent Boston Globe feature on David Farmer, a Boston doctor who set up a free hospital in one of the Rwandan regions hardest hit by the 1994 genocide that killed 800,000 people, mostly by machete.

Farmer, who teaches at Harvard, was taken to Ruhengeri, in the country’s northwest […]

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Six Maasai warriors from the African nation of Tanzania are in England to run in today’s London Marathon, which will see 35,500 competitors run 26.2 miles (42.16 km). The Guardian chronicles one of their diaries:

Our elders told us we can do the marathon because we have been running all over, killing a lion and […]

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