Global News Blog
A sign is shown at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., in this December file photo. (Paul Sakuma/AP)
Zen and the art of Facebooking
• A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.
Walk down the tiny, colorful streets of Mcleod Ganj, also known as Upper Dharamsala – home to Tibet’s spiritual leader, the exiled 14th Dalai Lama, and thousands of his Buddhist followers – and one glimpse reveals what 21st-century Buddhism is all about.
Internet cafes sprinkled around the Indian Himalayan town are filled with new Web users sitting hours every day trolling Facebook and other social networks while dressed in red robes. With Buddhism’s embrace of the Internet, lamas and monks are increasingly “adding” friends and family to their Facebook account, posting images, sharing videos, and “liking” Web pages.
RELATED: The Dalai Lama's career
In this town where monks perform daily religious duties, joining Facebook has become a phenomenon among young Buddhist monks. Hundreds are discovering new ways to communicate with the world while others use the network to join monastic Facebook groups.
Among those is Geshe Lobsang Wodsal Norbu, a Tibetan lama and an active Facebook user who believes “being on Facebook is not only about public self-expression or tagging friends but, from a modern Buddhist way of life, it is also how my spirituality intersects with science.”
“You add me and I will poke you,” smiles Lama Norbu, while checking Facebook at an Internet cafe.
RELATED: The Dalai Lama's career
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Chinese women, one wearing a mask, ride on an electric bike crossing a street as the city skyline is shrouded by haze in Beijing, Tuesday. (Andy Wong/AP)
Beijing's air: like standing downwind from a forest fire
I knew when I drew my bedroom curtains open this morning that I should not even have gotten up.
Drawing the curtains had no visible effect on the amount of light coming through the window. I could not see the buildings on the other side of the road because the grey fog of pollution was so thick.
A quick visit to the US embassy’s Twitter page, which posts hourly readings of Beijing’s pollution levels, confirmed what my eyes and nose had already told me. The reading was “Beyond Index,” off the charts, seven times worse than US standards for acceptable air quality.
Beijing airport shut down, so poor was the visibility.
For perspective, one way an American could breathe air like Beijing’s 20 million citizens were breathing all morning would be to stand downwind from a forest fire.
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Everybody who lives here could see and feel how bad it was, but the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center was saying on its website that the air quality was “good.”
That will soon change, the government has promised. By the end of this month Beijing will become the first Chinese city to publish hourly official data revealing the level of minute particles smaller than 2.5 microns, which is what the US embassy does.
Until now, Chinese statistics have measured only particles above 10 microns in size, giving a consistently rosier picture of the situation than the embassy's PM2.5 figures do. Official readings regularly declare “blue sky days” in Beijing when the US embassy is warning its Twitter followers that the air is “very unhealthy,” or worse.
Today was officially a “blue sky day,” according to Beijing official data for example, even though the sky was invisible this morning. There were no clouds – I could stare directly at the silver disc that was the rising sun – but the air was an acrid, pale gray soup.
The government had earlier said that municipalities would not be obliged to reveal PM2.5 figures until 2016, but a string of ghastly days over the past few weeks and an online campaign by environmental activists appear to have changed the authorities’ mind.
Telling people the truth, of course, is only the first step toward more breathable air. Now the government has to do something about the cause of the pollution, but until then it can at least pray for windy weather.
Around noon a breeze began to blow in Beijing. I looked out of my bedroom window again; where I had been able to see less than 50 yards at dawn, now I could see the Fragrant Hills, more than 20 miles away. And the sky was azure blue.
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Pride in a humble pie in Scotland
• A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.
Bakers of the humble “Forfar bridie,” a short-crust pastry filled with beef and onions, are not fond of imitators.
The horseshoe-shaped meat parcel is a local delicacy loved by people who live in the region and beyond, famous in Scotland as much for its meaty goodness as the town for which it is named.
The Forfar locals are so proud of the pastry pie – said to have been conceived in the area early in the 19th century – they want it to join an exclusive culinary club in Europe that protects the regional authenticity when labeling products like Parma ham and Champagne. This means only bakers in the Forfar area could use the town’s name when selling their bridies.
The sensitivities run deep. When a baker from the nearby town of Broughty Ferry recently opened a new branch in Forfar, the owners made a very public proclamation that they would not be calling their out-of-town-made bridies “Forfar bridies.”
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Parliament to 'Booze Britain': Try temperance – at least twice a week
It is nice to hear that the British Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee today recommended that Brits lay off the drink twice a week, even if that solution might seem a little like trying to bail out a brewery with a thimble.
A number of establishments in Britain, no doubt, will respond to the report with hearty agreement followed by toasts all around.
But the prevalence of a drinking problem in what the report calls “booze Britain” is so manifest that the members of Parliament felt it incumbent to take an official look at what “sensible drinking" might mean.
British media have howled about the negative effects of destructive binge drinking among youth for years, without much result. Brits are notorious in Europe for taking cheap flights en masse to Krakow or the Spanish shore or the Canary Islands – to spend 48 hours getting smashed and irritating the locals. And that is just the beginning on the long list of heavy drinking excesses.
The report was issued the same day as a Daily Mail report that binges and weekend blowouts are now so acceptable and regularized in Britain that, “Two-day hangovers have become the norm for office workers as staff relieve stress … with marathon alcohol binges, which start on Thursday night and continue until Sunday evening.” The new normal for a hangover is one that doesn’t dissipate until Tuesday afternoon, the piece continues.
So it is not surprising to find a government body arguing for moderation, which is certainly a better concept of “sensible.” The findings of the study urge men and women to cut back from previous recommended “maximum drinking” levels, and the report recommends that women in particular reduce their totals, and that pregnant women abstain.
But some alcohol and drinking support groups, and even the report itself, questions whether the idea that one should cut drinking two days a week and adhere to daily totals actually promotes the idea of regular drinking, and is confusing.
A public health professor, Alan Maryon-Davis, told the BBC that "Broadly speaking [alcohol guidelines] are fit for purpose, but they need a bit of clarification. The word 'daily' I would object to. It gives the impression that it is a good idea to drink every day, which clearly it isn't."
The members of the parliamentary committee argue at the outset of the guidelines that, “There is a lack of consensus amongst experts over the health benefits of alcohol, but it is not clear from the current evidence base how the benefits of drinking alcohol at low quantities compare to those of lifelong abstention.”
It might be interesting to one day clarify that question. But as pastors, doctors, Alcoholics Anonymous, and many others who have seen the negative effects of drinking and other drugs have argued for many years (and often without being sanctimonious), addressing the causes of use or abuse are the most salutary measures.
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People protest following the removal of a fuel subsidy by the Nigerian government in Lagos, Jan. 9. Labor unions began a paralyzing national strike Monday in oil-rich Nigeria, angered by soaring fuel prices and decades of engrained government corruption in Africa's most populous nation. (Sunday Alamba/AP)
Nigeria's double trouble: nationwide fuel strike and 'ban' on Christians
With terrorist attacks against Christians in the north by an apparent Islamist militant group and the beginning of a nationwide protest against soaring fuel prices, Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan is faced with a double challenge.
President Jonathan declared a state of emergency last week after the Islamist militant group Boko Haram killed some 29 people in the northern state of Adamawa (click for map). More than 500 people have been killed by Boko Haram – whose name means “Western education is a sin” – in the past year. But equally dangerous is the possibility of nationwide strikes called by labor unions and a nebulous “Occupy Nigeria” movement after Jonathan’s Jan. 1 decision to remove a government fuel subsidy paid to fuel importers.
Most of Nigeria’s 150 million citizens survive on less than $2 a day, and the removal of the subsidy will have the effect of instantly raising the cost of a liter of gasoline from 41 cents to 89 cents. Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil-producing nation, but because its refineries have not been well maintained, Nigeria imports more than 75 percent of its fuel from outside the country.
In a televised speech, quoted by Nigeria’s Vanguard newspaper, Jonathan said he understood the anger of citizens over the cut in the fuel subsidy, but said the step was necessary, since the subsidy absorbs nearly 25 percent of the country’s yearly budget.
“If I were not here to lead the process of national renewal, if I were in your shoes at this moment, I probably would have reacted in the same manner as some of our compatriots, or hold the same critical views about government…. My fellow Nigerians, the truth is … either we deregulate and survive economically, or we continue with a subsidy regime that will continue to undermine our economy and potential for growth, and face serious consequences,” Jonathan said.
As for the religious violence of Boko Haram, Jonathan told citizens in a televised address that the Boko Haram attacks are "worse than the civil war" of the 1960s. "During the civil war, we knew and we could even predict where the enemy was coming from," he said. "But the challenge we have today is more complicated."
Fuel-subsidy protests thus far have been mostly peaceful, but there are unconfirmed reports that the Lagos police department’s Rapid Response Force reportedly killed one protester in the Ogba area of Lagos. In Abuja, protesters pushed their way through a police cordon during a protest march.
In a declaration reputed to have been released by “Occupy Nigeria,” protesters asked why the government chose to cut the subsidy and impose hardship on ordinary Nigerians, rather than going after the corrupt Nigerian bureaucrats and political leaders who had allowed the oil-refining sector to become dilapidated in the first place.
“If the Federal Government honestly intended to raise funds for development, would it not have cut its own excessive spending? From the Legislative arm to the Executive, their salaries are even higher than that of developed countries, their allowances are ridiculous and looks like figures picked out from a science-fiction movie. Could they not have cut down on their own cost? From food allowances to travel, to clothing to even Newspapers? The only answer is that our Government is selfish and cares only for itself, the Government has failed in the implementation of the budget throughout its existence.”
Prominent Nigerian artists such as playwright Wole Soyinka and novelist Chinua Achebe threw their support behind the protesters with a signed statement, quoted by the Vanguard newspaper over the weekend.
President Jonathan’s decision to remove fuel subsidies in the country at this time was ill-advised. Coming at the advent of the New Year, and barely a week after the gruesome Christmas Day attacks on worshippers, the policy has forced many Nigerian citizens to perceive his leadership as one that is both insensitive and possibly contemptuous of the mood of its people.
We stand with the Nigerian people who are protesting the removal of oil subsidy which has placed an unbearable economic weight on their lives.
Meanwhile, up north, violence continued to take lives as gunmen thought to be from Boko Haram sprayed bullets into a crowd of Christians playing poker in the town of Biu, in the northern state of Borno.
Roman Catholic Cardinal Anthony Olobunmi Okogie in Lagos said in an interview with Vatican Insider website that the violence was not religious per se, but rather an attempt to break up the Nigerian federation for economic gain.
"There is no religious war in Nigeria, but fierce persecution driven by ambitions for power and economic causes," Cardinal Anthony Olobunmi Okogie said in an interview published on the Vatican Insider website. "With true Muslims there are no actual coexistence issues. The terrorists are exploiting religion for the sole purpose of power. Unfortunately the authorities have obviously failed to protect Christian citizens of the North.”
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Hungarian forints notes are seen in this photo illustration taken in Budapest, Friday. Analysts warn that Hungary's economy is approaching "meltdown" contributing to the downward spiral of the forint. (Laszlo Balogh/Reuters)
As economies teeter, leaders in Europe warn against extreme populism
Hungary's economy is approaching "meltdown," analysts warn, adding another financial crisis within Europe and raising concerns about more extreme populist moods gaining ground.
The forint, Hungary's currency, has been spiraling downward. The European Commission says the nation is expected to have the lowest growth and highest debt in 2012 among the former Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe.
But a deeper concern among European leaders familiar with the continent's history is the effect of prolonged low wages – or no wages at all – on ordinary people. Such conditions breed unrest, populism, extreme nationalism, and hatreds. The effect can be an undermining of social and democratic health, especially in states or regions of Europe like Hungary with a relatively shallow history of rule of law.
Always in the continental shadows is the memory of the 1930s, when economic chaos and popular frustration in Germany led to the rise of the Nazi party and fascism.
“Our worst enemy right now is populism,” said Italy’s minister of economic development, Corrado Passero, at a conference of top European leaders and economists on Friday at the French ministry of economics. Mr. Passero was responding to a question on Hungary's status that other elites and officials felt was too sensitive to approach. “When the pace of economic growth is too slow for too long,” he said, “and fears about the future become too high, we are entering dangerous territory.”
A European crossroads
Hungary is an EU member but not part of the 17 member eurozone. The former Soviet satellite is situated in something of a European crossroads: It borders Austria in the north and Serbia in the south, two cultural opposites in Europe.
While Hungary has veered sharply to the political right – in 2010 elections the neo-fascist Jobbik party won a substantial 17 percent – it retains a center-right government elected by a 53 percent margin.
Yet the combination of economic chaos, and recent authoritarian moves by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, are causing worry about its overall direction, including a rising far right, reports of beatings of minorities including gypsies and Roma, and nationalism.
Mr. Orban pushed for a new constitution that appears to hard-wire the country into one-party rule, prompting tens of thousands to protest last week outside the Budapest Opera House. Orban has also refused to guarantee the independence of the Central Bank, causing the IMF and EU to walk out of loan meetings in December that Hungary desperately needs.
Downgraded to 'junk'
Ratings agency Fitch on Friday put Hungary’s bonds in the “junk” status, meaning that now all three top ratings agencies have lost faith in Hungary’s value. The country must repay $26 billion in loans from the crisis of 2008, along with other loans, but a bond last sale week yielded only $140 million.
The EU may not have much leverage to counter a constitution that is derided by legal experts. But it does have rules about politicians not dominating the head of a Central Bank.
The Wall St. Journal on Saturday reported that Orban may be now willing to discuss the independence of the Central Bank, though he wishes to delay a decision.
Passero in Paris Friday said that austerity and responsible management are important principles for debt-ridden Europe, but added that growth and integration policies are an antidote to extreme populism. Unemployment in Europe is “higher and more serious than what we believe," he said, explaining that adding the underemployed and discouraged to the totals of unemployed workers would top 50 percent of the overall population in some countries.
Hungary under Orban has been shifting away from democratic norms, critics both inside and outside the former Soviet satellite say, with the ruling Fidesz party grabbing spoils and ensuring its perpetuation. The nation faces isolation in Europe, which itself can work to populist and nationalist ends, analysts say.
Mr. Orban is now “a lonely rider [in Europe],” says Peter Balazs, a former Hungarian foreign minister. “He has very few visitors from abroad, and is not received in many places.
"We [Hungary] are moving toward a one-party ruling system in which the prime minister and his little circle are trying to sell 19th-century romantic nationalism,” Balazs added. “Many people are buying that. It is true that normal national ideas were missing during the communist period. But the prime minister is now misusing the national card.”
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Police in China say a business tycoon died when he ate a dish of prized cat soup (not pictured). (Photo illustration: Matthew Mead/AP/File)
In China, cat soup to die for?
Serves him right, you might think, for tucking into Mittens.
Police in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong say that local business tycoon Long Liyuan died when he ate a dish of deliberately poisoned cat soup.
Diners in Guangdong, known in English as Canton, are well known for their exotic culinary tastes. They boast that they will eat “everything on the table except the legs.”
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That habit can have tragic consequences – and not just for the snakes, rats, monkeys, and scaly anteaters that get tossed into Cantonese pots. The SARS outbreak in 2003 that killed 321 people in mainland China is thought to have started when someone in Guangdong ate a civet cat carrying the disease.
But it wasn’t the cat that killed Mr. Long, according to police. It was the extract of Gelsemium elegans, a poisonous creeper known as “heartbreak grass,” that local official Huang Guang put in the cat hotpot.
Mr. Huang owed Long money and could not pay it back, according to the Legal Daily newspaper, so he invited his creditor to lunch with another man, and poisoned the food. The third man found his cat soup “more bitter” than usual and ate only a little, according to media reports. Huang himself – presumably so as not to arouse suspicion – ate a healthy portion and almost went blind, while Long went into cardiac arrest and died.
Huang confessed to the murder after a lengthy interrogation, according to the Legal Daily.
Cat meat is prized in Guangdong not so much for its taste as for its symbolism. Cats are a stand-in for tigers, in the same way that chickens represent the phoenix and snakes do duty at the table for dragons.
Tigers, phoenix birds, and dragons are powerful animals in Chinese iconography, though what they taste like, I have no idea.
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Sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS George Washington man the rails as the ship pulls out of Hong Kong after a five-day port visit in this November 14, 2011 file photo. President Obama unveiled a defense strategy on Thursday that would expand the US military presence in Asia but shrink the overall size of the force as the Pentagon seeks to reduce spending by nearly half a trillion dollars after a decade of war. (Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Erin Devenberg/U.S. Navy/Reuters/File)
World reacts to Obama's new military focus on Asia
Was that a collective sigh, or a gasp?
President Obama and his Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced yesterday that the US military would essentially go on a diet, after one of the largest ramp-ups in military spending since World War II.
Reaction across the world thus far has been muted, and in the case of China – the country Mr. Panetta identified as an emerging threat in November – there has been no official reaction at all, as the Monitor's Peter Ford points out today.
In addition to ending its military presence in Iraq, and drawing down forces over the next few years in Afghanistan, the US military will also reduce its massive presence in Europe – a legacy of the cold war – and shift more of its assets to the Asia-Pacific region to counterbalance the growing economic and military strength of China.
In Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere on the globe, the US will “use innovative methods to sustain US presence, maintaining key military-to-military relations and pursuing new security partnerships as needed,” Mr. Panetta told reporters in Washington.
Reuters news agency reported that neither the Chinese Defense Ministry nor the Foreign Ministry responded to faxed inquiries today. But the Global Times, a strongly nationalist newspaper based in Beijing, urged China to continue to assert itself and develop "long-range strike abilities."
China should come up with countermeasures. It should strengthen its long-range strike abilities and put more deterrence on the US. The US must realize that it cannot stop the rise of China and that being friendly to China is in its utmost interests.
It’s a plan that is both ambitious, and rather less innovative than it might at first appear to be. Many of the cost savings and “smaller footprint” ideas announced by Mr. Obama and Panetta were first broached by defense officials in the Clinton and Bush administrations, most notable former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Ron Matthews, from the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore, told Al Jazeera that much of the Obama plan has been “progressing over the last two or three decades.”
"What we're looking at now is the recognition of the difficulty of financing war on a global scale, and rationalising down-sizing their forces."
Regarding the US focus on Asia Pacific, he said: "What you'll be looking at is the Americans seeking to expand the technology gap which they have and enjoy already against China, and other emerging nations, that also are seeking to pursue this new type of doctrinal warfare.”
Reducing the size of the US military will almost certainly bring a strong reaction at home with American conservatives – especially in an election year.
Bloomberg quoted an e-mail from US Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon of California, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
“An honest and valid strategy for national defense can’t be founded on the premise that we must do more with less, or even less with less,” he said in an e-mailed statement.
But Obama anticipated this criticism in his speech yesterday.
"I think it’s important for all Americans to remember, over the past 10 years, since 9/11, our defense budget grew at an extraordinary pace. Over the next 10 years the growth in the defense budget will slow, but the fact of the matter is this: It will still grow because we have global responsibilities that demand our leadership."
The new strategy, he added, would still maintain a defense budget “larger than roughly the next 10 countries combined."
Australia welcomed the new US strategy, a reflection of the US’s growing partnership in the Asian Pacific region. India, too, was identified as a “strategic partner” in the Indian Ocean, as both the US and India share parallel concerns about how to counter the growth in regional terror and piracy networks.
"The United States is investing in a long-term strategic partnership with India to support its ability to serve as a regional economic anchor and provider of security in the broader Indian Ocean region," said the strategy document.
What this means for Africa
In Africa, the new strategy drives home the point that the US will remain engaged with its bilateral partners on common issues of concern, including how to counter the growth of militant groups using terrorist tactics, from Al Shabab in Somalia to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Mali, Niger, and Mauritania, and Boko Haram in Nigeria.
Under the Africa Command, based in Frankfurt, Germany, US military trainers are deployed on a rotating basis, in small numbers, training soldiers across the semi-arid African Sahel region to conduct counterterrorism operations. A small number of US special forces have also been deployed in Uganda and the Central African Republic to locate and neutralize the Lord’s Resistance Army – a deployment, again, that is officially a training and advisory mission. And an estimated 3,000 US troops are based at the French military base of Camp Lemonier in Djibouti – a tiny country located next to Somalia in the Horn of Africa – primarily a logistics and training base for operations in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.
As Mike Pflanz reported in the Telegraph, Panetta told US soldiers on a recent trip to Djibouti that their efforts were crucial in confronting regional terror threats.
"Djibouti is a central location for continuing the efforts against terrorism," he said in a speech to around 500 US soldiers at the Camp Lemonier military base.
"Al-Qaeda started this war. We have made the commitment that we are going to track these guys wherever they go and make sure that they have no place to hide ... whether it is in Yemen, whether it is in Somalia, or anyplace else."
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Egyptian anti-Mubarak protesters demonstrate outside a courtroom in Cairo, Thursday. The prosecutor in the Mubarak trial demanded the death penalty on Thursday for the ousted Egyptian leader on charges of complicity in the killing of protesters during last year's uprising against his rule. (Khalil Hamra/AP)
Death penalty for Egypt's Mubarak: How will that play with the tin-pot despot set?
Egypt’s long-ruling former President Hosni Mubarak may face the death penalty if found guilty in his ongoing trial in Cairo. Mr. Mubarak is accused of ordering the killing of protesters during the Tahrir Square demonstrations that ultimately led to the downfall of his government in February.
Sending Mubarak to the gallows may feel like a good signal to send to strong-man leaders – that their misdeeds in office will be judged, and judged harshly, in courts of law.
But history shows that hard sentencing for bad leaders can sometimes backfire.
For every leader who steps down peacefully after a few terms in office on the African continent, there are many others who take the president-for-life package. Some, especially those who rose to power by leading armed independence movements, remember the brutal death of late Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, and plan to stay in power as a way to stay alive. Others look at the prosecution of former Liberian President Charles Taylor and the expected trial of former Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo on human rights charges at The Hague, and worry that they too could face a lifetime in prison.
According to leaked diplomatic cables posted by Wikileaks, Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe “genuinely fears ‘hanging’ if he leaves office,” and thus has little incentive to withdraw from politics. Mr. Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe for 32 years.
In December 2010, the Monitor reported that investigators had discovered evidence that supporters of Kenya’s former Higher Education Minister William Ruto planned a fresh wave of organized mass violence to prevent their leader from being arrested for his alleged role in orchestrating post-election violence in 2008. The 2008 round of violence played out along ethnic lines, and killed some 1,300 people and displaced 300,000. Mr. Ruto, along with five other prominent Kenyans, have now been formally charged and await trial at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, Netherlands.
Most African leaders have nothing to worry about, having served their countries capably and in some cases admirably. Sudanese cell-phone billionaire Mo Ibrahim has even created a prize for those African leaders who perform well, and who step down after two terms in office, and Boston University has set up an African Leaders president-in-residence program, to allow retiring African presidents with a graceful departure from office.
But in a continent where power has all too often been obtained from the barrel of a gun, there are plenty of leaders who would appear to have reason to fret about the nosy intervention of international courts. Some leaders – like former Ethiopian President Mengistu, now in exile in Zimbabwe, and Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir, who is facing an ICC arrest warrant for genocide but can travel throughout much of Africa – rely on the kindness of fellow African leaders who resent The Hague’s interference. Others, like Charles Taylor or Chad's former President Hissene Habre, are abandoned by their counterparts, perhaps when their usefulness has run out.
What’s the solution? Some Africans argue that leaders should face justice at home. Others, including a majority of Kenyans, place greater trust in international courts than their own domestic ones, which they regard as either inadequate to the task or hopelessly compromised and corrupt.
What this means is that each of Africa’s 54 countries will have to come up with its own solution. And if African leaders continue to remain in power, disregarding the opinion of their own citizens, they will have to hope that their own people are kinder to them in their final days than the Libyan people were to Muammar Qaddafi.
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Heirloom ink evangelist travels the US with an old fashioned letter press
• A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.
In a white, repurposed step-up van, Kyle Durrie travels the country visiting art schools, craft fairs, and even tattoo parlors to enlighten people about old-fashioned letterpress printing.
Ms. Durrie owns Power and Light Press in Portland, Ore., and calls her nomadic project “Moveable Type.” Since the summer, she has logged more than 100 stops in the United States. She will travel for another four months in the Type Truck that has a bunk, road maps, a heater, and an 1873 Golding Official No. 3 tabletop platen press.
“I find that letterpress is a counterpoint to digital media,” says Durrie, who has a loyal Internet following that initially helped fund the project.
On a cold night outside Electric Heart Tattoos, people lined up to create an old-school letterpress poster in the van – free of charge. For the Millennial Generation, the letterpress is a mythical contraption used decades ago for making posters, business cards, and greeting cards.
Each guest learns to ink the type blocks and place the sketch paper properly in the 1950s printer before rolling the heavy press. A Wisconsin museum donated the press, once used by Sears, to Durrie, who has become a letterpress evangelist.
“This kind of printing offers a very different hands-on experience,” Durrie says. “It connects with various areas – artistic, literary, historical, and industry.”
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