Libraries grow ever more sinister, as the cute toys distributed to participants in summer-reading programs nationwide have been found to contain perilous quantities of lead. As reported by Lexington, Kentucky’s Lex18.com, the bendable cats and dogs were distributed at fourteen Kentucky libraries as well as in 36 other states whose libraries conducted similar literacy-enhancing programs. [...]
What with all the explosive news this week about faked “news” photographs from Lebanon and wire services firing the freelancers who took them, now Wired News has yanked three articles from its site amid suspicions that their writer — who is an author as well as a journalist — invented a source. “Tribal Curse Haunts Launch [...]
This year is Happy Birthday #75 for Babar the Elephant, “the fictional pachyderm decried by some as a symbol of oppression and imperialism,” reports North Korea Times: “Babar, who lives in a world reminiscent of colonial-era French settlements in Africa, is being celebrated in France with postage stamps, a marketing deal with the Environment Ministry [...]
To update you on that Zimbabwean International Book Fair that Dibs! covered yesterday … well, as if things weren’t bad enough already, its gay and lesbian section was trashed by vandals! According to South African site IOL, “The gay and lesbian stand at Zimbabwe’s International Book Fair in Harare has been destroyed. Organisers granted the [...]
You can tell by its book fair that Zimbabwe is majorly screwed-up. “Once Africa’s proudest annual literary celebration,” Zimbabwe’s Inernational Book Fair “now has only one tale to tell — the decline of a country brought to its knees by political and economic woes,” reports Qatar’s Gulf Times. Until 2002, the fair “was one of [...]
It’s book-fair time again in Damascus! As the sounds of artillery draw ever closer, “under the patronage of President Bashar al-Assad, Minister of Culture Riad Na’asan Agha opened Tuesday the 22nd session of the International Book Exhibition at al-Assad Library,” reports the Syrian Arab News Agency. Lasting from August 1 through 11, the fair is [...]
On trial now are the four Nairobi thugs who attacked Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o in 2004 and raped his wife. Ngugi’s writings lambasting colonialism and Christianity and the Kenyan government got him jailed in 1977 — he wrote his book A Devil on the Cross on prison toilet paper. A Marxist who wrote Swahili [...]