The butchers of Nigeria – How a corrupt nation bred Boko Haram, the Islamic sect terrorizing the country’s Christians. 

By Wole Soyinka (via Newsweek)
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MBEKI GEARING UP TO RETAKE POSITION?

- By Max du Preez (via The Mercury)

Come back, Thabo, all is forgiven (well, almost all).

There cannot be a more telling indictment of the leadership of President Jacob Zuma than the sudden excitement at the possibility of Thabo Mbeki making a comeback.

I must confess I feel excited about the prospect too and, yes, I am mildly embarrassed to have to admit this.One of the wisest and most admirable things our former president had done in his long career was to stay out of public politics since he was unceremoniously fired as president in September 2008.

It must have been hard. The man has a strong sense of his own intellectual prowess and a known disdain for that of his successor.

Read the full opinion here.

BBC News – Many people have the impression that British children are increasingly troubled, but the truth is different, writes researcher Paul Flatters. Read more here.

The Mail & Guardian - If the latest Twitter spat about racism in Cape Town is anything to go by, the postcard-perfect Mother City is proving to be a locus for a discussion that South Africans are desperately in need of having — but terribly ill-equipped to do,” writes The Mail & Guardian’s VERASHNI PILLAY.

Read the full opinion here.

“The Iowa caucuses, the curious political ritual that will open yet another race for the White House on Tuesday, have a knack for turning second-place finishes into victories,” Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times noted this week.

And they are just as likely to produce losers — or deal surprises — as they are to coronate a clear-cut winner. According to Zeleny and Rutenberg, the outcome of the Iowa caucuses will set the tone for the race after a yearlong prelude that has been off the charts in its unpredictability.

Read the full story here.

“Hamleys, which is London’s 251-year-old version of F.A.O. Schwarz, recently dismantled its pink “girls” and blue “boys” sections in favor of a gender-neutral store with red-and-white signage.”

That free-to-be gesture was offset by Lego, whose Friends collection, aimed at girls, will hit stores this month with the goal of becoming a holiday must-have by the fall.

In light of Hamleys’ new in-store branding strategy, New York Times contributor Peggy Orenstein asks: “Should gender be systematically expunged from playthings? Or is Lego merely being realistic, earnestly meeting girls halfway in an attempt to stoke their interest in engineering?”

Read the full story here.

Gareth Cliff, via The Daily Maverick

“Religion requires submission, the supposition that faith is more meritorious than rational thought, and the awkward juxtaposition of canon law and common law.”

In his first opinion column for the Daily Maverick, Gareth Cliff  discusses Judge Mogeong Mogeong’s divine calling and the dangers of blurring the lines between religion and rational thought.

“This is not another attack on general organised religion, or on this individual’s strongly-held beliefs,” Cliff wrote this morning. “But it is a matter of great concern when the man at the apex of the judiciary is credulous and arrogant enough to assume divine providence is (at least one) of the reasons for his elevation.”

Read more here.

In defence of the protests: Women have seized the word ‘slut’ to reclaim their right to wear what they want, writes Gillian Schutte

In 2008, hundreds of South African women donned their miniskirts and protested at the taxi rank where a young girl was brutally accosted by taxi drivers and hawkers for wearing a short denim skirt.

Read the full article here (via Times Live)

We’re in the midst of strike season, and Samwu leadership got its industrial action wrong.

In fact, they’re getting it so spectacularly, superlatively wrong that they’ve inspired PAUL BERKOWITZ to write a primer on how not to go about striking. Other unions: take note. Do NOT try this in your union.

Read the full article here (via The Daily Maverick)

Doyle MacManus – It’s possible that the president will get a boost in the polls if Moammar Kadafi is captured, but it’s not likely to help him much in 2012.

In recent decades, victories abroad haven’t mattered all that much in elections at home. So, while it’s possible that President Obama will get a bounce in the polls if Moammar Kadafi is captured and taken off in chains, it’s not likely to help him much in 2012.

Read the full story here (via LA Times)

The amount of white whining that ensued after Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s call for a wealth tax made me proud.

I was starting to worry that white people were finally falling behind black people in the great race to prove conclusively that the best way to deal with an uncomfortable truth is to entirely misunderstand the issues. Now I see that democracy has worked in our country. We are truly all equally stupid and greedy.

Read the full story here (via Mail & Guardian)

Much has been made of SlutWalk, the march taking place in a number of countries to promote women’s right to be safe.

Some women have taken exception to the name, refusing to be associated with the derogatory meaning of the term “slut”.

Read the full story here (via Times Live)

“My whites work for me.”

That’s one of the many risqué lines Surf used  in a brave ad campaign that recently saturated the Daily Sun, and poked  fun at the medium and SA’s racial divide. But when a cringe-worthy  release from Surf’s agency JWT started appearing on local news sites,  Unilever was not amused. After carrying the story for a few days, a  couple of news sites hit delete when JWT asked them to expunge all  record of the story.

Read the full story here (via The Daily Maverick)

In late 1979, a twenty-four-year-old entrepreneur paid a visit to a research  center in Silicon Valley called Xerox PARC.

He was the co-founder of a small computer startup down the road, in Cupertino.  His name was Steve Jobs.

Read the rest of this article here (via The New York Times)

The first time I remember hearing the question “is it real?” was when I went as a young boy to see a traveling show put on by “professional wrestlers” one summer evening in the gym of the Forks River Elementary School in Elmwood, Tennessee.

Read the rest of the article here. (via Rolling Stone.)

Government officials refer to it blandly as the “SSE,” or Sensitive Site Exploitation.

That’s their oblique term for the extraordinary cache of evidence that was carried away from Osama bin Laden’s compound the night the al-Qaeda leader was killed. With the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks a few weeks away, it’s possible to use this evidence to sketch a vivid portrait of al-Qaeda, drawing on material contained in more than 100 computer storage devices, including thumb drives, DVDs and CDs, and more than a dozen computers or hard drives — all collected during the May 2 raid.

Read the rest of this article here (via The Washington Post)

The White House is scrambling to fix its mensaje and timing problem with Latino voters as demonstrated Thursday by a significant immigration policy change.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that approximately 300,000 undocumented immigrants facing deportation will have their cases individually reviewed, and if classified “low priority” can apply for work permits and stay in the U.S. indefinitely.

Read the rest of this article here (via The Huffington Post)

Do you know what wilfing is? Have you heard of keitai shosetsus? Sam Leith on what to expect if the Kindle really does kill off the printed book.

Certainly, electronic books have overcome their technological obstacles. Page turns are fast enough, battery life is long enough, and screens are legible in sunlight. Digital sales now account for 14% of Penguin’s business.

Read the rest of this article here (via The Guardian)

What does the rebel advance in Libya have to do with us?

In obvious ways, a  great deal: our sympathy, our common aspirations, our sense of what makes for a  saner and safer world all involve us. It is good to see dictators fall, and  people dancing about freedom. But how about in a practical sense? “We  hear NATO aircraft in the sky,” Richard Engel, the NBC  correspondent, said. “We’ve been feeling the effects of them.” So is this our  war?

Read the rest of this article here. (via The New Yorker)

As rebels swept into Tripoli overnight, the SA government said on Monday it had not yet recognised Libya’s transitional national council.

South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Maite Nkoana-Mashabane told reporters in Johannesburg that the government did not want to create a “state within a state”, in Libya.

Read the rest of this article here. (via The Mail & Guardian)