Reporting News and opinions
Look at the last thing you bought: the rice, the paracetamol, the charger in your pocket. Before it reached your hand, at least six different people were paid. Not one of their names was on your receipt. You paid every single one of them, and you never knew who they were.
“Frank exchange of views” is the single most useful phrase in the diplomatic lexicon, precisely because everyone involved knows it is a lie and nobody involved will admit it. A former UK diplomat once put it plainly in a Language Log discussion: a frank exchange of views is just shouting. If the participants throw things at each other, it upgrades to a full and frank exchange of views. That is not satire. That is a professional’s working definition.
What does it mean to be a good person? Love your neighbor as yourself
Nigeria’s president is locked in a fierce reelection battle — one that is not just playing out among voters ahead of January polls, but pitting teams of lawyers and lobbyists against a lone litigant half a world away in California. Remarkably, this latter-day David just won a significant victory over Goliath.
In his memoir The Lion Awakes, Ashish Thakkar recounts how, as a young entrepreneur flogging computer parts across Africa in the 1990s, he noticed that flights within the continent took suspiciously longer than the maps suggested. Were the planes slower? No. The Mercator projection had been quietly shrinking Africa for centuries, the cartographic equivalent of …
