Xan rice biography of williams

  • Xan Rice is the Nairobi-based correspondent for the Guardian.
  • In Timbuktu the race is on to preserve papers that document a west African golden age.
  • By Xan Rice The Financial Times The reinvention of Nigeria's commercial capital is offering a model for how African megacities can cope with.

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    One Sunday evening in January, in a high-rise apartment in the upmarket European Quarter of Brussels, Ioannis Ikonomou, who is Greek, was anxiously watching the television news. The left-wing Syriza party, which had pledged to end austerity, was poised to win the election, pushing Greece towards confrontation with its international creditors.

    He was, however, more worried about the showing of the far-right Golden Dawn, which he detests. “I’m the opposite of Odys­seus,” said Ikonomou, who looks younger than his 50 years, with close-cropped hair, a soul patch and a jawline beard. “He wanted to go home but I am always trying to open myself up to the world.”

    Ikonomou achieves this aim in two ways. First, by travelling widely and frequently, and second, and more importantly, by using his remarkable linguistic skills. During his summer holiday in Athens last year he spoke Greek to his relatives and Bengali while eating at the restaurants run by Bangladeshi immigrants near Omonoia

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    PHILIP Ngor Bol walked to Kenya. The year was , just past the mid-point of the two-decade war in Southern Sudan. Bol was fourteen years old. He was in a group of thirty people, mostly young boys and girls. They had all fled villages in Northern Bahr el Ghazal state after coming beneath attack from Arab militias. Mostly they walked at night to avoid being seen bygd the enemy. They ate mangoes and other wild fruit. The kilometre journey took three months.

    From the Kenyan border Bol’s group was taken to Kakuma, a fast-growing refugee camp about kilometres south. Bol was enrolled in school for the first time. The pain of being without his family – his mother Amel Piol, his brother Bol Bol and sister Athoi Bol, from whom he had become separated during the raid on his by – faded over time. (His father, Bol Deng, a herdsman, had died in earlier attack.) Bol learned to cope with drudgery of refugee life. Though he was free to leave the camp during the day – even

  • xan rice biography of williams

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    In , the Swiss doctor and Alpinist Edouard Wyss-Dunant established the concept of the “death zone”, the altitude above which human beings are unable to acclimatise because of the lack of oxygen. The mark is generally set at 8, metres, a height exceeded by only 14 mountains, all of them in the Himalayan or Karakoram ranges in Asia. Of these, at that time, only Annapurna had been scaled, conquered in But by the end of the decade just two of the ­eight-thousanders were still up for grabs: Shishapangma in Tibet and Nepal’s Dhaulagiri, at 8, metres the world’s highest unclimbed peak.

    Known as the “White Mountain”, and notorious for avalanches and fierce winds, Dhaulagiri had defeated seven previous expeditions before a Swiss-led attempt in The party included 13 climbers, with an average age of 30, and a handful of Nepalese sherpa guides. As was customary, the government also insisted they take along a liaison officer, in this case a year-old former soldier called Min Bahadur Sherchan.