flickering pictures

When politicians throw a party, their organizers work long and hard in the shadows to make sure people come. Usually this is easier said than done, and a good speech’s impact can be quickly deflated by a TV cameraman’s pan shot of a skimpy, scattered, ragtag-looking crowd. So for organizers, there are a […]

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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 […]

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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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Someone has dug up a very trippy poem by a 20-year-old Barack Obama, penned back in 1981:

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.

On a perhaps related note, when Obama was asked last year whether […]

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The 40,000 residents of Muskogee, Oklahoma have elected 19-year-old John Tyler Hammons as mayor. A crossover candidate if there ever was one, Hammons heads both the Young Republicans and the Young Democrats at his college. He garnered 69 per cent of the vote, beating three-time mayor Herschel McBride.

And for all you eligible young […]

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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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In spite of official recognition of Mugabe’s loss in the parliamentary vote, nearly two weeks later the government is still refusing to release the results of the all-important presidential election, even though independent observers and early official vote counts show the MDC’s Morgan Tsvangirai as the clear winner. Early fears were that Mugabe’s party, […]

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Zimbabwe’s voters may have finally put an end to Robert Mugabe’s wacky reign of terror, error and kleptocracy.
Results posted outside voting centres seemed to show a landslide win on Saturday for opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s party, but Mugabe’s government has warned that any claims of victory before the official results are released will be treated […]

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UPDATE: NPR says this speech has supplanted the usual drunken cats and Star Wars fanvids as Youtube’s most viewed video today.
As a Canadian, I really don’t have a vested interest in how the U.S. election turns out — at least, not any more than the other six billion or so people whose lives are inevitably […]

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An excellent bit of satire by the good people at The Onion - and all the more brilliant because it’s not altogether unbelievable.
Diebold, incidentally, builds electronic voting machines for U.S. elections. The machines can apparently be hacked, rigged or otherwise tampered with to ensure a candidate’s victory. Nothing satirical about that - here’s […]

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