(Click on the title to view the whole piece)
 

Down Pansodan
 
However, it is no mere monument. In Myanmar all the old colonial structures, many over 100 years old, still serve as the scaffolding of everyday life. Official business takes place on the upper levels, real activity on the lower floors, in the basement doorways and half-submerged stairwells leading to tiny printing offices, Western Union desks, stationary provisionaries, and shadow-filled bookshops.
 
Edward Irons

 

Skin Games
 
Brian Keenan, also a teacher, had been snatched from the street just after leaving his home, not so far from where I was going. He had done nothing, other than look too British. (Keenan was Irish, but that didn't matter. On such small errata are empires built, contested and dissolved.) Britain was in bed with America, which was in bed with Israel, etc. So when a jittery man with evasive eyes drove me off at speed in a People Carrier, I had my heart in my mouth.
 
Piers Michael Smith

 

Life in the Infertility Belt
 
In the 19th century, European explorers and colonial administrators noted high levels of infertility in central Africa. Princeton researchers later documented a large area of unusually low fertility in the center of the continent, including portions of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, the Sudan, Cameroon, Niger, and our new home, Gabon.
 
Michelle Shappell Harris