Trying to survive under Robert Mugabe: When an elephant dies of old age in a Zimbabwe national park, hundreds of starving villagers fight and stab each other for its meat:
Photographer David Chancellor said: ‘Just after dawn a villager spotted the carcass as he passed on a bicycle.
‘It was in the middle of nowhere, but within 15 minutes hundreds of people had arrived from all directions.
‘The women formed a ring around the elephant and the men stood inside, fighting and stabbing each other to get to the meat.’
He added: ‘The meat was taken back to homes. Some was eaten immediately but most was dried on washing lines and stored to eat later.
‘There were celebrations in the surrounding villages for the next two nights.’
Look at the photo. This is what Zimbabweans should do with Mugabe.
Haiti six days after the quake: looters in knife fights with other looters, piles of bodies being dumped into mass graves, doctors amputating legs with hacksaws, and looters stealing bags from other looters killed by police. And a man renting cell-phone chargers by the hour:
The blurred spot in the photo is the head of a man who is being stoned to death for adultery in Somalia as villagers are forced to watch. A wonderful Islamic custom whose beauty we are too inveterate in our cultural imperialism to appreciate, I am sure.
Obama refused, but he’s still there in an older photo (he’s actually right next to Kenya’s odious Prime Minister Raila Odinga who says he is Obama’s first cousin).
When you click on a photo, you can listen to the photographer saying a few words about his model. Do click on Mugabe (the black face in the rightmost column) and listen to the audio. Ahmadinejad and Qaddafi, too. Very interesting.
The story read like a sensation until it became clear that these people were Gypsies. From what I know about Eastern European Gypsies, it’s nothing out of the ordinary for them. The girl’s grandmother says that much:
‘It’s normal for our girls to have babies young. It’s our tradition. But I didn’t want it for my Kordeza – I felt she was too young.’
The girl obviously had a different opinion, as it appears from the report that she pursued the man deliberately.
While other two-year-olds are discovering the joy of playgrounds, Oscar Wrigley would rather be learning about wildlife or the history of Ancient Rome.
He has recently taken to conducting classical music as he listens in the back of the car and identifies the different instruments.
So his parents were not surprised when, at the ripe old age of two years, five months and 11 days, he became the youngest boy in Britain to be accepted by Mensa.
With an IQ of at least 160, he has the same score as the likes of Einstein and Stephen Hawking.
‘Oscar was recently telling my wife about the reproductive cycle of penguins,’ said his father Joe, 29, an IT specialist from Reading in Berkshire.
A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.
A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.
The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.
The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad’s birthplace, and the name derives from “weaver of the Sabour”, the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior.
Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad’s track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past.
Ali Nourizadeh, of the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies, said: “This aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad’s background explains a lot about him.
“Every family that converts into a different religion takes a new identity by condemning their old faith.
“By making anti-Israeli statements he is trying to shed any suspicions about his Jewish connections. He feels vulnerable in a radical Shia society.”
A London-based expert on Iranian Jewry said that “jian” ending to the name specifically showed the family had been practising Jews. . . .
The Iranian leader has not denied his name was changed when his family moved to Tehran in the 1950s. But he has never revealed what it was change from or directly addressed the reason for the switch.
Relatives have previously said a mixture of religious reasons and economic pressures forced his blacksmith father Ahmad to change when Mr Ahmadinejad was aged four.
The owners of the Empire State celebrated the 60th anniversary of the communist takeover of China by illuminating the top of the building in red and yellow for two consecutive nights. I wonder if any landmark buildings in China ever celebrate the 4th of July.
