Archive for the 'Africa' Category

Another blow for experts

I haven’t quite gathered my thoughts, but I found this an amazing story on so many levels:
Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts
By CELIA W. DUGGER
Published: December 2, 2007
LILONGWE, Malawi — Malawi hovered for years at the brink of famine. After a disastrous corn harvest in 2005, almost five million of its 13 million people [...]

What is a “traveling family”?

Despite the fact that we live in a vaccine age, Britain is facing an outbreak of measles, a disease can cause life long damage to its victims:
Parents were urged today to give their children the MMR jab before they returned to school after figures showed measles cases have more than trebled in the last 11 [...]

Naming names

All the early reports of the riots at Paris’ Gare de Nord train station — and most of the subsequent ones, as well — have referred to those ubiquitous “youths” as the troublemakers. (And if you’ve ever seen the movie “My Cousin Vinny,” every time you hear the word “youths,” you want to giggle.) [...]

Swords and ploughshares

Soccer Dad ruminates about the different ways in which at least one Ethiopian and all Palestinians handle the tools of war.

Biological weapons on children’s backs

My blog title is an exaggeration.  The hardline Islamists in Nigeria who are denying children polio vaccinations are not planning on creating a worldwide polio epidemic, or even a pan-African epidemic.  They are just operating on a paranoid, anti-Western intellectual model that doesn’t have a problem with sacrificing children to religion induced paranoia:
Kenya has reported [...]

Beware of peacekeepers bearing gifts

The popular image of the peacekeepers who travel to troubled regions is of a legion of selfless Mother Theresas, putting aside the comforts of their First World lives to aid those most in need.  And that image may well be true for the greater number of them. Unfortunately, one of Africa's many plagues is parasites [...]

Can this continent be saved

I don't have any conclusions to draw, or insights to offer.  I'll just offer, in no particular order, a short laundry list of some of the horrors visited upon so much of the African Continent.  

The Ethiopian famines
The slaughters in Sudan
Idi Amin
Robert Mugabe
The Civil War in the Congo
Charles Taylor and Liberia
AIDS
Malaria
Ebola
Rwanda

I'm sure if I thought about [...]