flickering pictures

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 guerilla groups and [...]

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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 [...]

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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 not a [...]

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Okay, maybe unofficially. On June 6, the National Post reported that “It’s a sad day when those that can afford to buy a loaf of bread need to cart 600-million Zimbabwean dollars to the store.” Less than two months later, a sad day has turned downright miserable: you could trudge to that same store with [...]

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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 it [...]

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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 see [...]

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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 [...]

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