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Showing posts from March, 2015

Blood Diamonds: Corruption and Torture in Angola / Diamantes de Sangue: Corrupção e Tortura em Angola

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Today, less than a week after receiving a campaigning journalism award in London, begins the trial of Rafael Marques de Morais in Angola on charges of criminal defamation. The trial follows claims made in his book Blood Diamonds: Corruption and Torture in Angola (Portuguese version downloadable for free here ), which detailed hundreds of killings and torture cases carried out by security guards and members of the Angolan army against local people and small-scale miners in the diamond fields of the Angolan Cuango region. Shortly after publishing the book, Marques filed a lawsuit in Angola against nine Angolan army generals, accusing them of crimes against humanity. He alleged that the generals and company directors were complicit because they were reaping great profits from blood diamonds but doing nothing to stop the violence. In response, the corporations filed their own lawsuit against Marques in Portugal, Angola’s former colonial ruler and the place where the book was publ

A Beautiful Bookshop / Uma Livraria Original

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Just take a look at this wonderful bookshop I've been to this week. I found it on the web, when looking for bookshops in Brussels, in the vicinity of the area where I was travelling to for work. You can imagine how happy I was when I found this Librairie Ptyx was located just around the corner of the street where I was going to stay! I thought its name, "ptyx", was a pun with the French word "petit" ( small ) but the nice guy working there told me it was instead a word with no actual meaning, taken from a famous and mysterious sonnet from XIXth century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé , the "sonnet in x". My TBR pile now has two more books: La Place de l'étoile | Patrick Modiano , which I am currently reading Le Petit Nicolas et ses Copains | Sempé and Gosciny * * * Vejam só a livraria tão bonita onde estive esta semana. Encontrei-a na internet, quando andava, precisamente, à procura de livrarias nas imediações do bairro de Bruxelas par