Copyright The Economist Feb 19th 2009 TWO plane crashes bookmarked Alison Des Forges’s life. The first was nearly 15 years ago, when a luxury jet carrying two African presidents was shot down by missiles over Rwanda. The second was last week, when a cramped commuter plane crashed in icy weather ne...

Copyright The Financial Times ...Yet a huge financial crisis, together with a deep global recession, if not something far worse, is going to have much wider effects than just these. Remember what happened in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment rose to one-quarter of the labour force in i...

Copyright The Washington Post Last weekend's book section of the Financial Times contained a capsule review of Stefan Zweig's "The Post Office Girl," a novel written in the aftermath of World War I and just recently translated into English. This is an immensely good thing, but really why I mention Z...

Just another Snippet Wednesday, oh-ee-oh-oh...RetireConsidering the state of the stock market and investments, I'm happy as hell that I'm not planning to retire anytime soon. But on that topic, I did receive a rather funny mailing from one of my......

The big story here seems to be Gail Trimble, who scored two-thirds of the 1200 points her team accumulated on the way to winning a final. What no one seems to have pointed out is that: She’s 26: what is she still doing at uni? Get a job. And by no means was she the oldest competitor, this is U...

On mountain high and valley low, Up above the avian realm and down the earthen hollows; Through wilderness and misty wetlands, The barren trails and woodlands too. The places that enthrall my longing eyes I seek, In them my spirit lives. To scale the skies and trample on its clouds And once more wit...

A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Netcat - good coders code, great reuse - Netcat is often referred to as a “Swiss Army knife” utility, and for a good reason. Just like the multi-function usefulness of the venerable Swiss Army pocket knife, netcat’s functionality is as helpful....

Copyright The Economist WHEN Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, came to power in 1986 after a long bush war, he promised a sea change for his landlocked country: peace and security for all, democracy, prosperity and frugal governance. He made a point, then, of lambasting the “pathetic spectacl...

Copyright The Financial Times Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, this week told the FT it was “ridiculous� to criticise China for saving too much. If the US, UK and other westerners were foolish enough to hawk their future by spending unearned money, they need look no further than the mirror. One ca...

Sorry, but I have no clever intro right now. I'm kinda pissed right now. So let's just say it's Snippet Wednesday and be on with it.Hampshire'dYes, New Hampshire is a really beautiful state from what I've seen so far. However,......