Life Can Be Awful

Life Can Be Awful gives a few examples of the honest reporting The Economist provides:

• In the provinces of Afghanistan, where virtually no modern medical care is available, girls usually get engaged at ten, are usually married at 12, and usually start giving birth at 14. These girl/women have the highest rates of maternal mortality ever recorded — 500 times higher than the rate in developed countries. Superstition and bizarre traditions run rampant. Midwives refuse to tie off umbilical cords; babies are born into bowls of dirt; and one way people have of trying to cure a woman's infections is by placing dead mice in her vagina.


• The country of Congo has had a five year war, in which over 3 million people have perished.


• Canaan Banana, the first president of Zimbabwe, just died. He was a mere figurehead, apparently, with a light workload that left him "plenty of time for his hobby, which was raping his male attendants."


• Kenya's legal system has long been a joke, even to Kenyans. In the late 1980s, a chief justice "took his trousers off, balanced a shoe on his head and goose-stepped around the high-court car park chanting pro-government slogans." Justice comes at a literal price: "$250 to escape a rape charge, and $500 for murder." One investigation concluded that "only three of the country's 310 judges were neither corrupt nor incompetent."