Turkey Supplants IS.

The Middle East, being one of the very cradles of civilization, has always been a grand theater of life's contests: wondrous men putting up magnificent cities and temples and barbarous hordes from the other side of the divide thundering through endless vistas to lay waste the same monuments with relish. The good guys have been in remission of late, we all know why, what is infinitely more baffling is the profusion and smooth succession of characters all too happy to sustain the enduring tradition of destruction and pillage.
The Islamic State, of very fresh or even active memory, are not even the latest monsters: the new fiends in town have their camps in Turkey and the Genghis Khan has a reincarnate in one Mr Erdogan, a rouser of the rabble as loud and violent as they come.
Luckily, we  are in the post-internet world and we don't have to wait for a hundred or thousand years for a great historian to tickle our imagination with the chronicles of what is presently going on in Syria. Hot, immediate news are replete with Turkish troops, tanks and warplanes committing appalling atrocities on Kurdish populations and monuments on the other side of the border with Syria. It isn't peasant viewing seeing tanks of German manufacture and jets of American provenance carry out assaults on the great Hittite temple of Ain Dara, a monument famous for its huge, carved basalt lions. Islamic State terrorists at least knew which temples and statues they were rigging up with explosives, how such discrimination could be achieved by pilots flying thousands of feet above must necessarily approach rocket science; an even harder task awaits us explaining to our descendants our criminal silence over the bombing of the Ain Dara treasures, priceless structures put up in the first millennium BC. A time ancestors of Mr Trump, Angela Merkel, Theresa May were crawling on all fours in open forests. Guys who couldn't even afford sheepskin. The genes to summon courage to decisively confront Erdogan are simply not embedded anywhere, from Washington to Russia. So Mr Trump could only urge Turkey to 'de-escalate, limit its military options and avoid civillian casualties.' If this is not an echo from a pre-historic whimper, I don't know what it is. As usual, it were better if Mr Trump had not said anything at all.
More sacking and pillage await the monuments and treasures of Syria. There are just too many cowards waiting to be goaded by our collective silence and inaction in face of  of evil.

Why Federer's Win is Bad News

Like the Colossus, Federer is a wonder, a  very modern marvel. But that is where the good news end. For many enthralled by the wondrous sight of the glittering trophy of his 20th grand slam victory held aloft above that towering image, a little look below would have revealed too may underlings peeping between those storied legs.Too many young underlings. Tennis is a sport that thrives on new, young, exciting talents but at present it seems to suffer from the double fault of too many tournaments and very, very few emerging talents holding up a racquet. It was normal service resumed when Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Murray emerged to send Agassi, Hewitt and Sampras into retirement, such a prospect now seems very dim for the present masters who have gone far beyond the normal terminal tennis age. Grigor Dimitrov remains the eternal Baby Federer, Milos Raonic does not bring much beyond his huge service game and the Thiems, Nishikoris, Tomics thrive on too much muscles and baseline toils: blood, sweat and tears, when the most enduring images of tennis are those of ice-cool Federer floating over the courts like a butterfly and stinging like a bee.The Sandgrens and Edmunds might reach semi-finals now and then but many more are going to be bitten by the 'run bug', a burst of luck and energy that serve well for a tournament and then peter out for so many to come.
What tennis actually need now are not fairy tales but a Boris Becker at 17, a Federer at 23, a Nadal at 21and a Murray winning the junior boys' single. The feeder streams are presently very dry and with Djokovic and Murray set to return from injury, those who run tennis had better sit up, had better start looking for the young guns, real smoking guns, needed to bring the sport back to its service game. If it is to retain the crowds and the money  

Nigeria's Unending Comedy.

In an expected twist to the to the comedies that characterize Nigeria's dire political contests, former president Shehu Shagari is being widely quoted as querying the achievements of incumbent President Buhari. The old man is almost ninety-four, carried some ineffective grace into his office and some of this elegance might hamper him from nursing such a torrid grudge against a man who removed him from power in a coup detat. In this age of fake news, anybody living or dead can be represented as having said this or that, but in case it is true, just true, should the old man succumb to the strange urge of past African leaders deriving satisfaction from delivering obstreperous lectures on the inadequacies of their successors (mostly to remind folks they weren't all that bad in office), a little listing of his own achievements while in office might help put things in perspective.
Shagari inherited a fairly-decent economy from the regime of General Olusegun Obasanjo in 1979. By the time he was bundled out in 1983, the industries had collapsed, infrastructure had decayed beyond salvage and corruption had brought a once prosperous nation down to its knees.
In order to feed his people, Shagari was to promote rice, practically an alien crop folks ate with chicken and goat only at Christmas, to bizarre national stage. So strange was his obsession with rice that he constituted a Presidential Task Force on Rice and appointed Dr Umaru Dikko as the overall rice Czar. Imagine Donald Trump constituting a Presidential  Task Force on Pizza! But that was where the mirth ended. Dikko and his acolytes were to steal 2.2 billionn naira rice money, a hefty sum in those days. When Buhari came to power, he had to risk his name, risk Nigeria's diplomatic standing, in order to smuggle Dikko in a crate from London to face trial for his grim misdeeds in Nigeria. The attempt failed and an Israeli Mossad agent enmeshed in the plot had to go to jail in London over it. The damage, however was little compared to the destruction this rice madness inflicted on agricultural production in the country. Traditional crops like yam, cassava, sorghum were promptly abandoned and by the end of 1983, Nigerians were grappling with unprecedented hunger. I will continue with this list but please do visit my blog at myfreshanglesaddresses.blogspot.com.ng. Thanks  

Can Chimps Get a Spread?

The nutella riots in France are certainly subjects of mirth but chimps in Indonesia and Malaysia are not finding it funny. Virgin forests in these climes have been cut down with frenzy that matches those Gallic scrapes to cultivate palm trees and produce palm oil, a key ingredient of nutella. Understandably, chimps, and their lesser cousins, are a bit grumpy about this and are bound to ask: Can we get our spread too?