Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

Entries Tagged as 'South Africa'

A Question of Competence

February 25th, 2013 · Comments Off on A Question of Competence

Guinea’s political opposition is none-too-pleased with the current regime’s decision to outsource the management of May’s election to Waymark, a South African information technology firm. At first glance, these objections may seem flimsy, based more on xenophobia than legitimate fear of cronyism. But if you scratch beneath the surface a bit, you can get a […]

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That’s All I Can Stands

May 7th, 2012 · Comments Off on That’s All I Can Stands

Will future historians look back upon Angela “LaGija” Dlamini as the great tea-leaf reader of Swazi politics? In recent days, her husband, the absolute monarch King Mswati III, has come under an unusual amount of fire for his profligacy—it is still tough to imagine, for example, why he merited a new $46 million jet, or […]

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Potemkin Would be Proud

November 3rd, 2011 · 3 Comments

There’s a terrific old episode of Cops—yes, Cops—in which the Miami police round up a bunch of streetwalkers in advance of Super Bowl XXIX. What’s so surprising about the operation is how up front the police are about their objective—namely, to present the game’s attendees with a prostitute-free version of the city. In the episode’s […]

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The Samurais of Sugar

October 7th, 2011 · 3 Comments

One of the main keys to writing a non-fiction book is resisting the urge to go off on non-essential research tangents. Nothing breaks your rhythm like spending a needless 25 minutes delving into the world of, say, Soviet helicopter design when you really should be focusing on character development. It is to my great discredit, […]

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Lessons from Vela

August 11th, 2010 · 9 Comments

Yesterday’s cross-country plane ride gave me the chance to catch up with Jon Lee Anderson’s sobering dispatch from Iran, which pretty much cements the notion that the Islamic Republic will never give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Not that I didn’t already know that on some level—as Anderson so eloquently puts it, Iran seems […]

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First, Do No Harm

April 28th, 2010 · Comments Off on First, Do No Harm

While we’re sensitive to the fact that millions of people trust folk cures more than modern remedies, stories like this one make us question whether shamanism deserves to survive in the post-antibiotics age: A couple in Samoa ,who perform traditional healing, have been found guilty of causing actual bodily harm, but had charges of manslaughter […]

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Fake Can Be Just as Good?

April 15th, 2010 · Comments Off on Fake Can Be Just as Good?

With the start of the World Cup less than two months away, South African cops are working hard to stem the tide of counterfeit jerseys: A Swazi man was on Saturday night arrested at the Oshoek Border gate after allegedly being found with 12,000 fake World Cup soccer shirts worth E3.6million. SAPS spokesman Colonel Vishnu […]

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Let It Grow

March 1st, 2010 · Comments Off on Let It Grow

Whenever we find ourselves wandering around a massive Chinese supermarket, we inevitably gawk at the price of dried abalone. The delicacy has never crossed our lips thanks to its exorbitant cost. But millions of Asian consumers are willing to fork over the pretty penny, in part due to the marine snail’s reputation as an aphrodisiac. […]

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The Sad Ballad of Snake Bite Jones

November 11th, 2009 · 1 Comment

The man to the right of the pelican above is Bryan Vorster, a South African animal handler who loves to edutain the kids. Under the nom de scène Snake Bite Jones, he’s long been a fixture at the Johannesburg Zoo, where he thrills audiences by trotting out a vast array beasts—including the vultures used in […]

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Nukes for Shale

October 21st, 2009 · 13 Comments

The controversy over Iran’s nuclear ambitions has sent plenty of folks scurrying back to the history books, to examine what made South Africa give up its bomb-building program. In joining the throng, though, we stumbled upon a curious factoid from the annals—an assertion, in an old (and offline) Foreign Affairs article, that South Africa initially […]

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