Chinese poster from 1987 promoting one-child policy. Text reads, “Fewer and better births revitalize China”. Provided by IISG, via Flickr. January 8 2019 – It has to be easy to imagine the smiles on faces of millions of Chinese men and women over this great piece of news: the Chinese government has decided to reverse the one-child policy and to allow families to have more than one child, which has…...
Pardon me if I’ve already told you this one, but it’s a favourite of mine from a film I watched as a young man. It was based on Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King”, and starred Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Two young English adventurers arrive at the gate of some Western Asian town, probably occupied by the Pashtun. This is an area forever in thrall to the…...
January 21 2016 At last this newspaper is once again circulating in Tanzania a government-imposed ban that kept it out of the country’s market for a good twelvemonth. The official reason given for the ban in January last year was that the paper had been circulating in Tanzania without proper registration. Which, of course, was an exercise in extreme officious silliness, seeing as the East African had been on sale…...