Ripped From the Headlines

1.         This one I will just quote:

            “As the 2012 US presidential poll approaches, Barack Obama’s re-election chances are not promising, remarks Tony Gee.  He poses: “Do you know that since 1945, only one Democrat (Bill Clinton) has been re-elected to a second term and only one Republican (George Bush, the elder) was never re-elected?  So the omens for Obama are not that good.  But his best chance will be if the Republicans select Sarah Palin, whose IQ is low and falling . . ..”

2.         Kobe made the Kenya news with his bigoted remark to the ref.  The most telling response is that no one on either side of the world seems at all surprised by his behavior.

3.         How many issues can you spot:  On April 11, a boda boda (motorcyle) operator and his passenger in Kisii died when a lorry (truck) hit them.  When the motor cycle driver made an abrupt U-turn, his helmet fell off and he tried to pick it up while still moving without noticing the speeding truck coming at him.

4.         The same day an overloaded lorry was laboring up a road on Thika Road, a major thoroughfare in Nairobi.  It lost power before it reached the top of the slope and reversed backwards.  It crushed the car behind it, killing three and seriously injuring two others.  The driver and conductor fled.

5.         At 9 p.m. on March 29, “an axe-wielding assailant” attacked an engineering student, injuring him seriously.  The student narrowly escaped death when the axe missed his head and landed on his back.  The student is the 7th victim this semester at Moi University.  The serial hacker, still on the loose, is referred to as Mashoka by the student community (shoka is Kiswahili for axe).

6.         Crocodiles took an elderly man’s arm on April 8 in Embu, and yet another man was killed by a croc in Mbeere North on April 12.  Hundreds of Mbeere residents blocked the road for hours,calling on the government to establish a safer watering point for them.  Two brothers, ages 6 and 15, are fighting for their lives after a crocodile attack on April 12 in Mwingi.  The older brother was attacked while trying to rescue his little brother.

7.         On April 5 in Mbeere South, a primary school teacher was hacked to death in his house.  No motive has been established and apparently the attackers have not been identified.

8.         In Orlando, Florida, a Kenyan women threw a weight at her Burundian fiance; he used the weight to hit her back and killed her.

9.         After a domestic dispute with her husband in Eldoret, a woman killed two of her children on April 12 by tossing her three year old into a water filled quarry 300 feet below and then jumping in with her infant strapped to her back.  Her third child, age 8, escaped when she told her mother she would jump in by herself and then ran away.

10.       Some supermarkets are experiencing a shortage of coins to give change to their customers, so they are handing out sweets in lieu of the money.  Customers are not responding well; they are starting to insist that they should be able to pay for their groceries with their own sweets if they don’t have enough cash.

[All items from the Daily Nation.]