Wellington

By Paul Rhys in Asia on October 6th, 2011
England's Tom Wood will be hoping to surf into the semi-finals

On Sunday morning, 60 men will wake up in their hotel rooms, pack their XL shirts into their suitcases, and say goodbye to their dreams.

Sixty more will do the same on Monday, at about the time that some of the first batch are arriving home.

This weekend is the quarter-finals of the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand. The eight squads that remain have slugged it through the group stages, but now this is knockout. And even the best can be knocked out.

To say it doesn't get any bigger than this would obviously be a farce. There are two semi-finals and a final to come.

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on April 11th, 2011
Women embrace during funerals for 12 children killed in school shooting, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil [Associated Press]

After a school shooting, there are usually three distinct phases: First the immediate shock of how anybody could do such a thing, followed by grief of young lives ended too soon, and finally the inevitable calls for more gun control.

Brazil is a country still very much grieving, and for good reason. It was last Thursday, just before 9am, when a 24-year-old mentally ill man named Wellington Menezes de Oliveira walked into a packed middle school classroom in the working class neighbourhood of Realengo in Rio de Janeiro and starting executing students who were barely teenagers.

According to eyewitnesses, he had a 38 calibre pistol in one hand, and a 32 calibre in the other - pulling the trigger of each as fast as his fingers would allow.

Oliveira, a former student at the school who might have been a victim of bullying, had a "speed loader" which allowed him to re-load his pistols with minimum delay to continue the killing spree.

By Paul Rhys in Africa on January 21st, 2010

In 1858, Punch magazine published a cartoon showing the figure of Death rowing along the River Thames in London, claiming the lives of cholera victims.

King Cholera no longer has a court in the English capital. But here in Luanda, an overnight thunderstorm heralded his coming as the streets were turned into a muddy quagmire.

"Streets" is something of a strong word to describe the red-dust lanes that weave through the slums of Angola's first city.

Even the main artery that links the port to the civic harbour is little more than a straight country track, paved in a few places, and today choked with cars and lorries pressing for every available bit of space on the slippery mud.

Next to the lunging vehicles, people pick their way past huge mounds of rubbish that mingle with the silt. A few wear Wellington boots. Most are in Brazilian chinelos, or flip flops.

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