Six In The Morning

On Sunday

Post-Gaddafi Libya confronts its diversity



By Steve Hendrix, Sunday, April 1, 9:50 AM
TRIPOLI, LIBYA — At the entrance to Tripoli’s main landfill, Mustafa al-Sepany stands in combat fatigues, wearing an expression that says no trash trucks will get past him. For four months, none has, leaving the country’s capital city wallowing in uncollected garbage. Sepany is one of thousands of still-armed rebel fighters who ousted Libyan despot Moammar Gaddafi in last year’s bloody uprising. Now he is one of the residents near the landfill who are exercising their newfound freedoms by declaring they don’t want Tripoli’s trash. Anywhere but here, they say. And in post-revolution Libya, not-in-my-backyard fights come with automatic weapons.

Burma goes to the polls in landmark byelection
Aung San Suu Kyi is expected to win her first public office since she launched her struggle against military rule decades ago

Associated Press in Wah Thin Kha guardian.co.uk, Sunday 1 April 2012 08.12 BST
Burma has begun a landmark election that is expected to send Aung San Suu Kyi into parliament for her first public office since she launched her decades-long struggle against the military-dominated government. Sunday's byelection, to fill a few dozen vacant seats, follows months of surprising reforms by a nominally civilian government. Aung San Suu Kyi's party and its opposition allies will have almost no say even if they win all the seats they are contesting, because the 664-seat parliament will remain dominated by the military and the military-backed ruling party.

Romania's hospital scandal: Babies left to die as doctors refuse to work without bribes
A quarter of a century after the West learned about Ceausescu's orphanages, children are again the victims, this time of endemic corruption

Sunday 01 April 2012
Dr Catalin Cirstoveanu runs a cardio unit with state-of-the-art equipment at a Bucharest children's hospital. But not a single child has been treated in the year and a half since it opened. The reason? Medical staff he needs to bring in to run the machinery would have expected bribes. So Dr Cirstoveanu has launched a lonely crusade to save babies who come to him for care. He flies them to Western Europe on budget flights so they can be treated by doctors who don't demand kickbacks. That's what he did last week for 13-day-old Catalin, who needed heart surgery

Armed and angry in the badlands
The marauding guerillas of Joseph Kony and emerging militias are fuelling an awful cycle of violence, reports Stephen Castle in Congo.

April 1, 2012
When the brother of Guillaume Sadiki Bantu was kidnapped and cut to pieces in the forest in 2008, neither the Congolese army nor the UN peacekeepers stationed here did anything to protect him, Sadiki Bantu said. When his nephew was killed in another attack last month, he said, it was the same. ''We are like orphans, without a father or a mother - we are an abandoned people,'' said Sadiki Bantu, in the hills of eastern Congo. ''So, we decided to fight.'' Around him were young men armed with knives and machetes, even a lance. They call themselves Raia Mutomboki, or Angry Villagers.

Shakespearean fools: Their modern equivalents
Shakespeare loved a fool and not just on 1 April. He used them in most of his well-known plays, but who would their equivalents be today?

By Denise Winterman BBC News Magazine
It was never about bright clothes, eccentric hats and slippers with bells on them. Shakespeare's fools were the stand-ups of their day and liked to expose the vain, mock the pompous and deliver a few home truths - however uncomfortable that might be for those on the receiving end. "Shakespearean fools, like stand-ups today, had a licence to say almost anything," says Dr Oliver Double, who teaches drama at the University of Kent and specialises in comedy. "It was an exalted position." He doesn't use just one type of fool, he uses different characters for different jobs.

The Fantastical World of Cult Novelist Karl May
Karl May, who died 100 years ago, was an impostor, a liar and a thief -- and one of Germany's most widely read authors. He embellished his own biography with as much fantasy as the scenarios in his adventure novels, and when the deceit was finally exposed, he never recovered. But his legend lives on.

By Jan Fleischhauer
Only once did he actually visit those wild, faraway countries where he had so fearlessly traveled from the safety of his desk. In April 1899, Karl May took a ship from Genoa to Port Said in Egypt, aiming to finally see the Orient. He had 50,000 marks, a tremendous amount of money at the time, to spend on lodgings for himself and his valet. He was 57, one of Germany's most famous authors and a rich man. The trip was a disaster. May couldn't tolerate the foreign food, and he was distressed by the stench, the noise and ubiquitous filth. Everything went straight to his stomach and his head. And then there were the tourists combing the sights of Cairo with their Baedeker travel books, "tightly clutching the red guide," as the author grumbled.