Kira Cochrane: Rise of the naked female warriors (Guardian)
The next day she went to a hilltop overlooking Kiev, and stripped to a pair of red denim shorts, worn with heavy boots, leather gloves, and a mask to protect her eyes. The Pussy Riot verdict was due that day, and in tribute to the Russian punk activists - and to mark her opposition to all religions - Inna proceeded to chop down a 13ft wooden cross that had been there since 2005.
Lenore Skenazy: High-Tech Spying on Your Kids (Creators Syndicate)
Of course, not everyone keeps a diary, so if you didn't, think of parental stalking this way: Did you ever talk on the phone after school? Maybe for hours? How would you have felt if your parents had silently picked up the line in their bedroom and listened in? So why do today's parents think cyberstalking is any different?
George Dvorsky: How Drinking Caffeine Could Save Your Life (io9)
An Australian study has shown that long distance drivers who drink caffeinated beverages, like coffee or energy drinks, are at a decreased risk of getting into vehicle accidents compared to those who don't. And the difference isn't small. Drivers hopped up on caffeine have a 63% reduced chance of crashing.
35 Facts About Mr. Fred Rogers (Mental Floss on YouTube)
A weekly show hosted by John Green, where knowledge junkies get their fix of trivia-tastic information. This week, John discusses 35 facts about our favorite neighbor, (Mr.) Fred Rogers, who would have turned 85 years old on March 20th.
Martha (c.1885-September 1, 1914, at the Cincinnati Zoo) was the last known living passenger pigeon; she was named "Martha" in honor of Martha Washington.
Source
Jim from CA, retired to ID, said:
Martha, thought to be the world's last Passenger Pigeon, died on September
1, 1914, at the Cincinnati Zoo
Charlie wrote:
Martha, named for Martha Washington, died 1914.
The Passenger Pigeon:
In all probability, the Passenger Pigeon was once the most abundant bird on the planet. Accounts of its numbers sound like something out of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and strain our credulity today. Alexander Wilson, the father of scientific ornithology in America, estimated that one flock consisted of two billion birds. Wilson's rival, John James Audubon, watched a flock pass overhead for three days and estimated that at times more than 300 million pigeons flew by him each hour. Elongated nesting colonies several miles wide could reach a length of forty miles. In these colonies, droppings were thick enough to kill the forest understory.
Passenger Pigeons were denizens of the once great deciduous forests of the eastern United States. The birds provided an easily harvested resource for native Americans and early settlers. To obtain dinner in the nesting season one needed only to wander into a colony and pluck some of the fat squabs that had fallen or been knocked from their nests. Audubon wrote in his classic Birds of America, "The pigeons were picked up and piled in heaps, until each [hunter] had as many as he could possibly dispose of, when the hogs were let loose to feed on the remainder."
Adam answered:
Martha.
Marian responded:
Martha
Dale of Diamond Springs, Norcali (Go Bears!!) replied:
Her name was Martha. We humans wiped them out!!!
Paraphrased from Russell McClendon:
She was the final holdout of a species that went from one of the planet's most abundant birds to one of its highest-profile extinctions. And it all happened within a few decades, an early stage of what many scientists now agree is Earth's sixth mass extinction event. According to the Smithsonian Institution, there were an estimated 3 billion to 5 billion of them occupying North America.
Martha's relatives had fallen victim to a familiar duo of threats that still haunt endangered species today: overhunting and habitat loss. Because passenger pigeons flew in such big, dense flocks, it was easy for colonists and settlers to shoot them. Professional hunters began killing and netting them en masse in the early 19th century, selling their meat and feathers in city markets. At the same time, the vast Eastern forests where passenger pigeons nested were being rapidly cleared for new farms and cities, further decimating the birds. Still, no conservation laws existed to protect them.
Sally said:
On September 1, 1914, Martha, the world's last passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati Zoo - according to the Internets...
PS: My father was a damage estimator for the Department of the Navy in WWII, when the ships were docked at the Brooklyn Navy yard. He spent a lot of time at the docks. Many of the workers kept messenger pigeons, and my father had some at our home (barn) as well. Many times he took me with him to the yards, but being wartime, I had to wait in the office, off the area where pigeons were kept. Each had a cage, and when they came in, the message was removed from the leg, and the bird put in their cage. Messages were sent out in reverse. Don't know if they were "official" messages or just a hobby for the workers - to break the boredom. The room was quite noisy, with all the cooing, and bad smelling because of the waste... Being a girl, I was quite disenchanted with the birds, but endured it to be with my dad...
BttbBob answered:
Martha... in honor of Martha Washington (a notion I find, well... strange). Her taxidermied remains are somewhere within the vast collection at the Smithsonian, but not on display at this time. That's too bad. She should be, if only as a memorial to the rapaciousness of humanity...
~~~~~
Memo to JoeS: You misunderstand, friend. I hadn't a problem with the 'Jessica Fletcher' character, as such. It was, as said, the premise of the program in the given locale that I found, well, preposterous. Nay, she was, herself, endearing for all that...
~~~~~
A very 'Happy Birthday' today to:
Singer Chaka Khan (59) [ Rufus & Chaka Khan - Tell Me Something Good - YouTube ] (This tune, written by Stevie Wonder is 'The Bomb'... . So is she...)
Actress Amanda "Honey Bunny" Plummer (55) [ Pumpkin and Honey Bunny - Pulp Fiction (1/12) Movie CLIP (1994) HD - YouTube ] "Any of you fucking pricks move, and I'll execute every motherfucking last one of ya!"
Um... Yes, Ma'am...
March 23 Birthdays - Celebrities Born March 23 | Famous Birthdays
MAM wrote:
Martha (c.1885-September 1, 1914, at the Cincinnati Zoo) was the last known living passenger pigeon; she was named "Martha" in honor of Martha Washington.
And, Joe S replied:
Martha. Martha died on September 1, 1914 at the age of 29.
CBS fills yet another night with LIVE'March Madness', then pads the left coast with local crap and maybe '48 Hours'.
NBC opens the night with a FRESH'American Ninja Warrior', followed by a RERUN'Chicago Fire', then an hourlong RERUN'SNL' (Jeremy Renner/Maroon 5 from 11/17/12).
'SNL' is a RERUN, hosted by Adam Levine, music by Kendrick Lamar from 1/26/13.
ABC starts the night with a RERUN'Splash', followed by '20/20'.
The CW offers an old '2½ Men', followed by another old '2½ Men', then an old 'Family Guy', followed by another old 'Family Guy'.
Faux has 'Cops', another 'Cops', and a RERUN'The Following'.
MY has an old 'Burn Notice', followed by another old 'Burn Notice'.
AMC offers the movie 'The Fugitive', followed by the movie 'The Marine', then the movie 'The Transporter'.
BBC -
[6:00AM] RAMSAY'S KITCHEN NIGHTMARES UK - Season 1 - Ep 4 - Moore Place
[7:00AM] RAMSAY'S KITCHEN NIGHTMARES UK - Season 2 - Ep 6 - Clubway 41
[8:00AM] RAMSAY'S KITCHEN NIGHTMARES US - Season 2 - Ep 3 - Trobiano's
[9:00AM] RAMSAY'S KITCHEN NIGHTMARES US - Season 2 - Ep 6 - Hannah & Mason's
[10:00AM] RAMSAY'S KITCHEN NIGHTMARES REVISITED US - Season 4 - Ep 2 - Spanish Pavilion, Kingston Cafe, Capri, La Frite
[11:00AM] RAMSAY'S KITCHEN NIGHTMARES US - Season 1 - Ep 1 - The Secret Garden
[12:00PM] TOP GEAR - Season 6 - Episode 3
[1:00PM] TOP GEAR - Season 6 - Episode 4
[2:00PM] TOP GEAR AFRICA SPECIAL-Season 19 - Part 1
[3:00PM] TOP GEAR AFRICA SPECIAL-Season 19 - Part 2
[4:00PM] GIZMODO: THE GADGET TESTERS
[5:00PM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Season 4 - Ep 22 - Half a Life
[6:00PM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Season 4 - Ep 23 - The Host
[7:00PM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Season 4 - Ep 24 - The Mind's Eye
[8:00PM] DOCTOR WHO: THE END OF TIME
[11:00PM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Season 4 - Ep 22 - Half a Life
[12:00AM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Season 4 - Ep 23 - The Host
[1:00AM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Season 4 - Ep 24 - The Mind's Eye
[2:00AM] DOCTOR WHO: THE END OF TIME
[5:00AM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Season 4 - Ep 22 - Half a Life (ALL TIMES EST)
Bravo has 'Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills', followed by the movie 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin'.
Comedy Central has the movie 'Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay', followed by the movie 'Hot Tub Time Machine', and 'Aziz Ansari: Dangerously Delicious'.
FX has the movie 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall', followed by the movie 'Grown Ups', then the movie 'The Grown Ups'.
IFC -
[6:00AM] The Trip
[8:30AM] Out There-Springoween
[9:00AM] Out There-Frosty King
[9:30AM] The Three Stooges-No Census, No Feeling
[9:55AM] The Three Stooges-Nutty But Nice
[10:20AM] The Three Stooges-Oily to Bed, Oily to Rise
[10:45AM] The Three Stooges-Playing the Ponies
[11:10AM] The Three Stooges-Pop Goes the Easel
[11:35AM] The Three Stooges-Restless Knights
[12:00PM] The Three Stooges-Scotched in Scotland
[12:25PM] The Three Stooges-Shot in the Frontier
[12:50PM] The Three Stooges-Spooks
[1:15PM] Whitest Kids U'Know
[1:30PM] Cassandra's Dream
[3:45PM] Five Fingers
[5:30PM] O Brother, Where Art Thou?
[7:45PM] Whitest Kids U'Know
[8:00PM] Transporter 3
[10:15PM] Lethal Weapon 4
[1:00AM] Suicide Kings
[3:15AM] Lethal Weapon 4 (ALL TIMES EST)
Sundance -
[6:00A] Monsoon Wedding
[8:00A] Paris Je T'aime
[10:00A] State and Main
[11:50A] Runaway
[12:00P] Waking Life
[1:45P] The Unsinkable Henry Morgan
[2:15P] Monsoon Wedding
[4:15P] Paris Je T'aime
[6:10P] State and Main
[8:00P] Fish Tank
[10:15P] My Own Private Idaho
[12:00A] Macho
[1:25A] Bitch
[1:30A] Love Crime
[3:30A] My Own Private Idaho
[5:15A] The Necktie
[5:30A] MAN SHOPS GLOBE - Holland/Belgium (Episode 4, Season 1) (ALL TIMES EST)
SyFy has the movie 'Tasmanian Devils', followed by the movie 'Chupacabra Vs. The Alamo'.
From left, Mitch Winehouse, Janis Winehouse and singer Tony Bennett attend the 2013 Amy Winehouse Foundation Inspiration Awards and Gala on Thursday March 21, 2013, at the Waldorf Astoria Starlight Room in New York.
Photo by Andy Kropa
"Over 1,057,000 people have been killed by guns in the USA since John Lennon was shot and killed on 8 Dec 1980," Ono, the former Beatle's widow, tweeted.
Below the message she included a photo of what appears to be Lennon's blood-stained eyeglasses, perched on a ledge with the Manhattan skyline as a backdrop.
The bold text above the graphic photo is black, except for the words "Over 1,057,000" and "John Lennon," which appear in bright red.
More than three decades after actor Jack Nicholson and a friend bought a historic Victorian home in a Colorado ski town, reportedly so they could get better TV reception, the two have sold the residence for $11 million.
Nicholson and record producer Lou Adler split the cost of the nearly 5,800-square-foot home in Aspen's West End in 1980. The home was later added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.
Nicholson and Adler already had homes in Aspen when they bought the residence, according to "Five Easy Decades," Dennis McDougal's book about the actor.
But neither home could get TV reception. So they went halves on the old Judge Shaw house, a historical landmark in a section of the mountain town that had better reception, chiefly so they could go there to watch Lakers basketball, McDougal wrote.
Key Largo will celebrate the 65th anniversary of the movie "Key Largo" with a film festival honoring the movie's late star Humphrey Bogart.
Bogart was married to Lauren Bacall, who also starred in the movie. Their son Stephen Bogart is scheduled to headline several events at the Humphrey Bogart Film Festival in Key Largo May 2-5, including a May 2 cocktail reception that he will host with film critic Leonard Maltin. The reception will be followed by an outdoor waterfront screening of the movie.
The festival will feature screenings of additional Bogart films and other classics. Cruises will be offered on the original, century-old African Queen, the boat used in the Bogart film of the same name. Registered as a national historic site, the vessel was relaunched in 2012 following a $70,000 restoration.
Stephen Bogart will also host a "Casablanca"-themed Bogart ball May 4 at the Hilton Key Largo Resort with a Moroccan-themed dinner where Maltin will speak about Humphrey Bogart's contribution to the film noir genre.
Adam West poses in front of the original Batmobile at the launch event of Warner Bros. Consumer Products and Junk Food Clothing's Batman Classic TV Series-inspired product line at Meltdown Comics on Thursday, March 21, 2013 in Hollywood, CA.
Photo by Casey Rodgers
Princess Caroline of Monaco (R-Homewrecker) on Friday announced the birth of her first grandchild -- a boy born to her non-royal son Andrea Casiraghi and South American heiress Tatiana Santo Domingo.
A statement from the palace said the baby was born on Thursday and that "both the mother and the child are doing well."
Andrea is Caroline's son from her second marriage, to Stefano Casiraghi, an Italian industrial heir killed in a speed-boat racing accident in 1990.
Caroline's brother Albert is the ruler of the tiny principality and Andrea Casiraghi is second in line to the throne as Prince Albert and his wife Princess Charlene, who got married in 2011, have not had any children yet.
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, on Friday announced that he's stepping down in the "coming weeks," after a four-year tenure that's garnered mixed reviews for him and tangible progress in the industries he oversees.
The country's top telecommunications regulator told a staff meeting of his decision Friday morning. His impending departure was reported Thursday by several news outlets.
Genachowski, 50, was appointed in 2009 and has hewed a middle line between the desires of public-interest groups and the telecom industry, which hasn't enamored him to either side.
His tenure has seen continued adoption of broadband and ever higher Internet connection speeds, especially on the wireless side, but consumer groups saw the approval of Comcast's acquisition of NBC as a mistake, while AT&T Inc. suffered a severe blow when its acquisition of T-Mobile USA was blocked.
Yurts, traditional nomad felt tents, are set in front of the Khazret Sultan mosque during the Nauryz celebration in Astana March 22, 2013. Nauryz, an ancient holiday marking the spring equinox, is widely celebrated across Central Asia.
Photo by Shamil Zhumatov
After years of hope, stalled efforts and studio frustration, "Veronica Mars" creator Rob Thomas watched a long-held dream come to fruition in a sudden digital rush.
"There were a few minutes of nothing happening," he says. "Then in an hour, watching that ticker go was mesmerizing. I had an attention span of, like, four seconds because everything on my computer screen I wanted to look at at the same time. The Twitter feed was going crazy, the emails were going crazy and then watching that Kickstarter total go up."
Thomas last week launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a movie of his cult TV show, which was canceled after three seasons in 2007. It met its stated goal of raising $2 million in less than 11 hours, meaning it would be greenlit to begin shooting this summer. It's surpassed $3.7 million with more than two weeks still to go.
The resounding, immediate success of the crowd-funding campaign sent shockwaves through the movie business. Films had found much-needed financial support on Kickstarter before, but "Veronica Mars" is different. It's a studio project, owned by Warner Bros., which produced the show.
Were donating fans spurring a goliath to action, or its unwitting pawns?
A Hindu devotee looks on in a cloud of coloured powder inside a temple during "Lathmar Holi" at the village of Barsana in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh March 21, 2013. In a Holi tradition unique to Barsana and Nandgaon villages, men sing provocative songs to gain the attention of women, who then "beat" them with bamboo sticks called "lathis". Holi, also known as the Festival of Colours, heralds the beginning of spring and is celebrated all over India.
Photo by Vivek Prakash
Nobody's going to win an Emmy for a parody of the TV show "Star Trek" filmed by Internal Revenue Service employees at an agency studio in Maryland.
Instead, the IRS got a rebuke from Congress for wasting taxpayer dollars.
The agency says the video, along with a training video that parodied the TV show "Gilligan's Island," cost about $60,000. The "Star Trek" video accounted for most of the money, the agency said.
The IRS said Friday it was a mistake for employees to make the six-minute video. It was shown at the opening of a 2010 training and leadership conference but does not appear to have any training value.
But one inclusion in particular is especially controversial. The "biotech rider" would require the USDA to approve the harvest and sale of crops from genetically modified seed even if a court has ruled the environmental studies on the crop were inadequate. This aspect of the bill infuriated many sustainable food and agriculture groups, who nicknamed the bill the "Monsanto Protection Act."
If signed into law by President Obama, here's what the rider would do: It will allow farmers to plant, harvest and sell genetically engineered plants even if the crops have been ruled upon unfavorably in court. A Center for Food Safety statement called the rider "an unprecedented attack on U.S. judicial review of agency actions" and " a major violation of the separation of powers."
But perhaps more frightening, other critics say, is that the rider threatens the health and wellbeing of the public by undermining the federal courts' ability to protect farmers and the environment from potentially hazardous genetically engineered (GE) crops.
The rider was slipped into the bill while it sat in the Senate Appropriations Committee, chaired by Maryland Democrat Barbara Mikulski. According to the Center for Food Safety, the committee held no hearings on this controversial biotech rider and many Democrats were unaware of its presence in the larger bill.
Model Erin Heatherton of the U.S. presents a creation from Colcci's 2013/2014 summer collection during Sao Paulo Fashion Week March 21, 2013.
Photo by Filipe Carvalho
Famed groundhog Punxsutawney Phil might want to go back into hibernation.
Authorities in still-frigid Ohio have issued an "indictment" of the furry rodent, who predicted an early spring when he didn't see his shadow after emerging from his western Pennsylvania lair on Feb. 2.
"Punxsutawney Phil did purposely, and with prior calculation and design, cause the people to believe that spring would come early," Mike Gmoser, the prosecutor in southwestern Ohio's Butler County, wrote in an official-looking indictment.
Gmoser wrote that Punxsutawney Phil is charged with misrepresentation of spring, which constitutes a felony "against the peace and dignity of the state of Ohio."
Gmoser's indictment made no mention of a possible co-conspirator in the false prediction of early spring, Ohio's own forecasting groundhog, Buckeye Chuck.
The opening sentence was as simple, declarative and revolutionary as a line out of Hemingway:
"Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond," Chinua Achebe wrote in "Things Fall Apart."
Africans, the Nigerian author announced more than 50 years ago, had their own history, their own celebrities and reputations. Centuries of being defined by the West were about to end, a transformation led by Achebe, who continued for decades to rewrite and reclaim the history of his native country.
Achebe, the internationally celebrated Nigerian author, statesman and dissident, died at age 82 in Boston on Thursday after a brief illness. He lived through and helped define traumatic change in Nigeria, from independence to dictatorship to the disastrous war between Nigeria and the breakaway country of Biafra in the late 1960s. He knew both the prestige of serving on government commissions and the fear of being declared an enemy of the state. He spent much of his adult life in the United States but never stopped calling for democracy in Nigeria or resisting literary honors from a government he refused to accept.
In traffic today in Lagos, Nigeria's largest city, hawkers sell pirated copies of his recent memoir about the Biafra war, "There Was a Country."
"What has consistently escaped most Nigerians in this entire travesty is the fact that mediocrity destroys the very fabric of a country as surely as a war - ushering in all sorts of banality, ineptitude, corruption and debauchery," wrote Achebe, whose death was confirmed by Brown University, where he taught.
His eminence worldwide was rivaled only by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison and a handful of others. Achebe was a moral and literary model for countless Africans and a profound influence on such American-based writers as Ha Jin, Junot Diaz and Morrison, who once called Achebe's work an "education" for her and "liberating in a way nothing had been before."
His public life began in his mid-20s, when Nigeria was still under British rule. He was a resident of London when he completed his handwritten manuscript for "Things Fall Apart," a short novel about a Nigerian tribesman's downfall at the hands of British colonialists.
Turned down by several publishers, the book was finally accepted by Heinemann and released in 1958 with a first printing of 2,000. Its initial review in The New York Times ran less than 500 words, but the novel soon became among the most important books of the 20th century, a universally acknowledged starting point for postcolonial, indigenous African fiction, the prophetic union of British letters and African oral culture.
"It would be impossible to say how 'Things Fall Apart' influenced African writing," the African scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah once observed. "It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians. Achebe didn't only play the game, he invented it."
"Things Fall Apart" has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 50 languages. Achebe also was a forceful critic of Western literature about Africa, especially Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," standard reading for millions, but in Achebe's opinion, a defining example of how even a great Western mind could reduce a foreign civilization to barbarism and menace.
His first novel was intended as a trilogy and the author continued its story in "No Longer At Ease" and "Arrow of God." He also wrote short stories, poems, children's stories and a political satire, "The Anthills of Savannah," a 1987 release that was the last full-length fiction to come out in his lifetime. Achebe, who used a wheelchair in his later years, would cite his physical problems and displacement from home as stifling to his imaginative powers.
Achebe never did win the Nobel Prize, which many believed he deserved, but in 2007 he did receive the Man Booker International Prize, a $120,000 honor for lifetime achievement. Achebe, paralyzed from the waist down since a 1990 auto accident, lived for years in a cottage built for him on the campus of Bard College, a leading liberal arts school north of New York City where he was a faculty member. He joined Brown in 2009 as a professor of languages and literature.
Achebe, a native of Ogidi, Nigeria, regarded his life as a bartering between conflicting cultures. He spoke of the "two types of music" running through his mind, Ibo legends and the prose of Dickens. He was also exposed to different faiths. His father worked in a local missionary and was among the first in their village to convert to Christianity. In Achebe's memoir "There Was a Country," he wrote that his "whole artistic career was probably sparked by this tension between the Christian religion" of his parents and the "retreating, older religion" of his ancestors. He would observe the conflicts between his father and great uncle and ponder "the essence, the meaning, the worldview of both religions."
For much of his life, he had a sense that he was a person of special gifts who was part of a historic generation. Achebe was so avid a reader as a young man that his nickname was "Dictionary." At Government College Umuahia, he read Shakespeare, Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jonathan Swift among others. He placed his name alongside an extraordinary range of alumni - government and artistic leaders from Jaja Wachukwa, a future ambassador to the United Nations; to future Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka; Achebe's future wife (and mother of their four children) Christine Okoli; and the poet Christopher Okigbo, a close friend of Achebe's who was killed during the Biafra war.
After graduating from the University College of Ibadan, in 1953, Achebe was a radio producer at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corp., then moved to London and worked at the British Broadcasting Corp. He was writing stories in college and called "Things Fall Apart" an act of "atonement" for what he says was the abandonment of traditional culture. The book's title was taken from poet William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming," which includes the widely quoted line, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
His novel was nearly lost before ever seen by the public. When Achebe finished his manuscript, he sent it to a London typing service, which misplaced the package and left it lying in an office for months. The proposed book was received coolly by London publishers, who doubted the appeal of fiction from Africa. Finally, an educational adviser at Heinemann who had recently traveled to west Africa had a look and declared: "This is the best novel I have read since the war."
In mockery of all the Western books about Africa, Achebe ended "Things Fall Apart" with a colonial official observing Okonkwo's fate and imagining the book he will write: "The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger." Achebe's novel was the opening of a long argument on his country's behalf.
Achebe could be just as critical of his own country. The novels "A Man of the People" and "No Longer at Ease" were stories of corruption and collapse that anticipated the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70 and the years of mismanagement that followed. He not only supported Biafra's independence, but was a government envoy and a member of a committee that was to write up the new and short-lived country's constitution. He would flee from Nigeria and return many times and twice refused the country's second-highest award, the Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic, over the lawlessness in his home state of Anambra.
In 2011, Nigeria's presidency said Achebe's refusal "clearly flies in the face of the reality of Nigeria's current political situation." Achebe responded that "A small clique of renegades, openly boasting its connections in high places, seems determined to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom."
"I had a strong belief that we would outgrow our shortcomings under leaders committed to uniting our diverse peoples," Achebe warned.
Besides his own writing, Achebe served for years as editor of Heinemann's "African Writer Series," which published works by Nadine Gordimer, Stephen Biko and others. He also edited numerous anthologies of African stories, poems and essays. In "There Was a Country," he considered the role of the modern African writer.
Melati (L), a four year old Sumatran Tiger and Jae Jae, her five year old male companion, face off in their new 2,500 square meter enclosure at London Zoo March 22, 2013. The zoo hopes that Melati and Jae Jae, will breed in captivity.
Photo by Andrew Winning
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