Attack of the Goonch

Giant mutant catfish develops taste for human flesh.

Or it might just be the crocodiles as usual.

Oscar Wilde, Call Your Service

Times headline:

125,000 'lost' gorillas found in the Congo

To lose one gorilla, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose 125,000 looks like... Well, it's a bit silly, really.

What We Face

A British schoolteacher in the Sudan faces six months in jail or forty lashes for naming a teddy bear "Muhammad."

Just a little reminder of what dhimmitude looks like.

Par For The Course

A UN-African Union peacekeeper base in Darfur was overrun by "rebel forces", who grabbed every weapon and vehicle they could carry off and burned what they couldn't. At the end of the day the AU was down ten dead, seven severely injured and fifty missing-- which means that they ran like the clappers the moment the shooting started.

If it wasn't so horrifying it would be comic.

Sweet Insanity

"Campaigners" are worried that chocolate makers are indirectly funding wars in Africa and want them to print on their labels where they buy their cocoa so that consumers can make sure they're buying "conflict-free chocolate."

I'm rather glad that I have an aversion to sweets. It saves me from a good deal of silliness. If a government wishes to impose a trade embargo on a country engaged in hostilities, that is perfectly reasonable. If a pressure group wishes to boycott a company to change its purchasing policies, that is their right. But when said pressure group expects a company to participate in a boycott against itself, that is where we part brass rags.

Fruits of Macmillan's Folly

If you know anyone in Zimbabwe, tell them to get out now. The nation that was once the bread basket of Africa is now like something out of a John Christopher novel with the people living under tyranny in abject poverty. Cholera is breaking out in the capital city, inflation is at 1281 percent, and even the police and army are on the verge of collapse.

So much for the joys of decolonisation.

Winds of change, my eye.