Monk

MARIKANA, South Africa — South African police fired on machete-wielding workers engaged in a wildcat strike at a platinum mine here Thursday, leaving a field strewn with bodies and a deepening fault line between the governing African National Congress and a nation that, 18 years after the end of apartheid, is increasingly impatient with deep poverty, rampant unemployment and yawning inequality. [...]

The strike and the government’s iron-fisted response are emblematic of the frustration with the slow pace of transforming South Africa’s largely white-owned business establishment and the growing perception that the A.N.C. and its allies have become too cozy with big business. As a result, many people here, especially the young, have looked for more radical solutions.

-- lydia Polgreen at The New York Times

It is not easy to keep the global marketplace running smoothly. At least it is not all white policemen mowing down black laborers. Such is progress in our world.

Has the video game industry dug up its very own blood diamond?

According to a report by activist site Toward Freedom, for the past decade the search for a rare metal necessary in the manufacturing of Sony's Playstation 2 game console has fueled a brutal conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

At the center of the conflict is the unrefined metallic ore, coltan. After processing, coltan turns into a powder called tantalum, which is used extensively in a wealth of western electronic devices including cell phones, computers and, of course, game consoles.

Allegedly, the demand for coltan prompted Rwandan military groups and western mining companies to plunder hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the rare metal, often by forcing prisoners-of-war and even children to work in the country's coltan mines.

"Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms," said Ex-British Parliament Member Oona King.

-- Ben Silverman at Yahoo

Kids are perishing in the mines to satisfy the greed of African war lords. I'm sure there are other ways to manage supply-demand problems. But it is a striking relationship, if hardly unusual.

HARARE (AFP) - Zimbabwe, grappling with a record 2.2 million percent inflation, has introduced a new 100-billion-dollar bank note in a bid to tackle rampant cash shortages, the central bank said Saturday.

-- AFP

I'd hate to have to make change for that.

What's more darkly amusing, economists believe that inflation is still being grossly underestimated in Zimbabwe.

To think that Monopoly money may be more valuable.

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I blame Israel. I think we clearly need another U.N. resolution condemning Israel for this. To sound a condemnatory note on the Muslims for their genocide would of course be Islamophobic.

( Kristof )

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Finally, we’re beginning to understand what it would take to galvanize President Bush, other leaders and the American public to respond to the genocide in Sudan: a suffering puppy with big eyes and floppy ears.

That’s the implication of a series of studies by psychologists trying to understand why people — good, conscientious people — aren’t moved by genocide or famines. Time and again, we’ve seen that the human conscience just isn’t pricked by mass suffering, while an individual child (or puppy) in distress causes our hearts to flutter.

-- Nicholas D. Kristof for The New York Times

It also could be that the idea of a few more black Africans killing each other off is not necessarily such a bad thing. So long as they are not threatening the white life.

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Over the next two days, African leaders will convene in Ethiopia and choose a new head of the African Union. Incredibly, that job may go to Sudan’s blood-drenched president, Omar al-Bashir, architect of the genocide in Darfur.

The outcome is still uncertain, with Sudan campaigning furiously for the job, but it’s mind-boggling that African countries would even consider selecting as their leader a man who has systematically dispatched militias that pick out babies on the basis of tribe and skin color and throw them into bonfires.

-- Nicholas D. Kristof for The New York Times

This would seem to suggest how intractable are the problems in Africa for the time being. For all the concerns that some may feel about Western neo-colonialism, and besides the ugly history of earlier, more direct forms of colonialism, it is also true that a lot of their problems rest in their own hands.

It is amazing how some can speak of progress when madness reigns throughout the world. It still looks like a Hobbesian world to me.

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