Nick Wadhams

Sad Days in Russia

Russia's crackdown on the free press (and assassination of its practitioners) under Vladimir Putin and his successor, Dimitry Medvedev, is well-known. Today, I learn of what, for me, is the death blow: The eXile, the brilliant, hilarious and often profane English-language tabloid, looks like it's done.

The eXile reached great heights around 2000, skewering pretty much everyone and starting Matt Taibbi's reporting career. It also did some great pranks.

Taibbi has gone on to write some brilliant stories for Rolling Stone, but my favorite of his is this one from his eXile days, when he went undercover to lay bricks in the tiny Russian town of Meleyuz.

It raises the question: Is my esteemed former employer, The Vladivostok News, next on the list?

Home again, home again

We have returned home at long last. As everyone else seems to say, the thing that struck me most about the United States, of course, was the wealth. The easiest way for me to quantify this was the road network. An insignificant exit on Interstate 95 on the East Coast involved the kinds of civil engineering, bridgework and columns that would be considered a major city project in Kenya.

Then, in the U.S. and Europe, looking out across the masses of people and knowing that the airport baggage handlers, the passport checkers, the construction workers, the pizza delivery men were all earning enough to make them middle class. When we returned to Nairobi, I watched a young guy diligently unloading bags at the airport, and guessed he was probably earning about $100 a month, if that. Sad.

So, back to work. Lots has happened since we left, but the story that got the most interest from anyone I spoke to was the killing of 11 alleged witches late last month. That merited a brief story in a lot of local papers. I never saw a scrap of reporting about Somalia or Sudan or Congo. That kind of remark is made so often about Africa that I almost feel embarrassed repeating it.