(On my improvised workbench with tools to chop off a standard SIM card
down to the size 12x16mm of a micro SIM card to fit into an iPhone 4s:
a razor blade, a tape measure, cissors, etc.)

***

I just read a rave review of the iPhone 4s written by Joshua Topolsky
and published on The Verge back in December 2011--some16 months after
the release of one of the famed Apple's flagship series.

(mobile.theverge.com/apple/2011/10/12/2484524/iphone-4s-review)

The review was so wildly laudatory that it contained this glistening
jewel of a blurb somewhere in its middle:

"If this were a car, it would… ( Read on! )

(PHOTO: Assistant Secretary Johnnie shaking hands after finishing a
testimony to Congress on Tuesday, May 25, 2010, in Room 2072 of the
Rayburn House Office Building, in Washington, DC)

***

Tuesday, May 25, 2010, Room 2072 of the Rabyburn House Office
Building, Washington DC

[Below is the full opening statement of the testimony delivered to the
House Armed Services Committee on December 19 by Assistant Secretary
for African Affairs Johnnie Carson.

Also, there was a full page ad in the Washington Post a couple of
days ago placed by pro-Rwandan lobbies about how DRC has to step up to
the… ( Read on! )

(Congolese National Police officers on their way to Goma after M23
withdrawal, November 30, 2012)

***

Goma's police second-in-command, Major Bertin Chirumana, was gunned
down in the night of last Friday to Saturday (14 to 15 December).

Major Bertin Chirumana was an element of GEMI, the contingent of the
National Congolese Police newly deployed in Goma after the withdrawal
of M23 from the provincial capital of North Kivu.

City authorities are treating the assassination as a mere sordid crime
and have even taken into custody one "suspect."

They're also blaming the crime wave engulfing the… ( Read on! )

Photo of a TV screen during Joseph Kabila's State of the Nation
Address, Kinshasa, Saturday, December 15, 2012; picture taken at 10:53
HRS Kinshasa Time (GMT +1)

***

DRC President Joseph Kabila delivered this mid-morning a 30-minute
uncharacteristically warlike State of the Nation Address to both
houses of Parliament meeting in congress in the presence of the
diplomatic corps accredited to Kinshasa and the constituted bodies of
the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The address, carried live on state-owned radio and TV channel RTNC,
was also meant for the "residents of the Republic," to whom… ( Read on! )

A seppuku was a clean and quick lethal affair.

But in the case of Dr. Susan Rice, it seems to be a long-drawn-out
messy and botched thing.

In her opinion piece on the Washington Post about the Rice debacle,
Jennifer Rubin assumes that Susan Rice, a "political flunky to the
end," "dutifully limped away, well, after crawling out from under the
bus" where President Barack Obama had allegedly thrown her.

Rubin couldn't have been more wrong--though she rightly assesses that
Rice's "record on Africa was dreadful."

Rice isn't leaving on tiptoe, as it turns out.

In the same issue of the… ( Read on! )