Africa map – Interactive map to learn the countries in Africa

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[cal_svg_map location=”africa”]

The youngest country in the world is (the Republic of) South Sudan, which became a nation on July 9, 2011–the 54th country in Africa–after voting to separate from the northern part of Sudan after a long war which ended in a peace agreement in 2005, after which an autonomous government was formed in South Sudan. South Sudan was at peace until December 15, 2013 when a civil war broke out along the tribal lines of the two largest tribes of the country (and involving many other smaller tribes).

The oldest modern state in Africa is Ethiopia, the only country to resist the Scramble for Africa. After resisting an Egyptian invasion a generation before, in 1896 Ethiopia resisted an Italian invasion and began to be recognized as a state by European powers. We are talking here just about modern statehood, of course, as Ethiopia, Egypt, Libya, and many other regional civilizations date back much earlier than most European civilizations, as do civilizations in Sudan such as the Kingdom of Kush (although this was more northern Sudan), Meroë and Nubia.

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Time Zones Game

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[cal_eftg_tz]

Tap/click the question above to see the answer. Tap it again for the next question.

How many time zones does Europe span? The technical answer is seven, because of the Azores and the European part (west of the Ural River) of Kazakhstan, if it is included. However, if we start in the UK (UTC and UTC+1 in summer, as all EU countries do Daylight Savings) or Iceland (UTC all the time) and continue east to Armenia and Georgia (UTC+4) it’s just four time zones.

Africa also has four time zones if we’re talking just about the continent (six time zones if we include Cape Verde on the west and Mauritius and Seychelles on the east). The same four as Europe.

The U.S. spans four time zones (five counting Alaska). Canada spans five (the same four as the main U.S. ones plus a fifth on Canada’s far eastern Maritime region.

Greenwich Mean Time is based on the mean solar time in the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. Greenwich Mean Time is still the name of a time zone (Western Europe), but just that time zone. That time zone and all others are defined offsets of Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, which was originally called “railway time” and has replaced referring to all time zones in terms of an older usage of GMT. In other words, we use UTC. We only use GMT for a single time zone in UTC. That said, you’ll often see people just use “GMT,” including unfortunately our coder for some of our journalist tools (we’ll fix that when we have time).

Ideally, each time zone would be about 15 degrees of longitude, a 24-hour division of the globe. But some countries opted for a single timezone, although they span much more than 15 degrees longitude, such as China and India. Other countries use half- or quarter-hour deviations. It’s not a perfect system, but rather a decision taken by each country. Spain, Argentina and Chile chose hour-based offsets, but not necessarily those that you’d guess based on their location. Russia removed two of it’s original 11 time zones in 2010 but reinstated them in 2014.

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My Favorite Timezones Tool

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[cal_multiple_timezone total=”6″]

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After you click the ‘Generate link’ button, paste the link into your browser and you’ll see your clocks ticking away. If you then bookmark the page, you can easily check the same display later.

NOTE: To find a timezone, type the name of the capital city of the country, or the largest city in your region of the country. For example, if you’re in San Francisco, type “Los_Angeles” (use underscores for spaces). If you want Cali, Colombia, type “Bogota.”

(Abidjan is the economic capital of Côte d’Ivoire and is the same timezone as London except in summer, because London does daylight savings. Abidjan is more stable as a reference point.)

To play a Time Zones Game and practice your time zones, click here.

If you don’t know where Côte d’Ivoire is, and want to familiarize yourself with African countries, click here.

Click map to enlarge

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Vocabulary for journalists

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foreclose

  • take possession of a mortgaged property when the mortgagor fails to keep up their mortgage payments.
    “the bank was threatening to foreclose on his mortgage”
  • rule out or prevent (a course of action).
    “the decision effectively foreclosed any possibility of his early rehabilitation”

One of your central arguments revolves around the proposition that the emergence of the anti-impunity movement has established individualized “victim” and “perpetrator” categories, furthering the judicialization and individualization of post-conflict transitions. In turn, these efforts foreclose the potential for deep and pervasive social repair.

discursive

  • digressing from subject to subject.
    “students often write dull, second-hand, discursive prose”
  • (of a style of speech or writing) fluent and expansive.
    Opposite: concise
    “the short story is concentrated, whereas the novel is discursive”
  • relating to discourse or modes of discourse.
    “the attempt to transform utterances from one discursive context to another”
  • from Latin discurs-, literally ‘gone hastily to and fro’

The power of law is often in its commanding of the fiction of order and objectivity. But as this work shows, law’s power is in its discursive and imaginary force.

undergird

  • secure or fasten from the underside, especially by a rope or chain passed underneath.
    formal
  • provide support or a firm basis for.
    “that’s a philosophy that needs to undergird retailers’ business plans this year”

Native genocide is a big issue that undergirds the foundations of life here in the Americas and one that has been long debated given the ongoing legacies of slavery that continue to entrench contemporary life.

 

World Countries Game – Test your country facts

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Tap/click the question above to see the answer. Tap it again for the next question.

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How many countries are there in the world? How many square kilometers is the world? What are the three largest countries and non-countries?

 

This tool should help journalists improve their readiness to write about the roughly 195 counted independent sovereign nations and 60 dependent areas, disputed territories, etc.

The 195 number doesn’t include Taiwan. If we include Taiwan, it’s 196. Taiwan has de facto independence, but China considers Taiwan to be a province.

Hong Kong and Macau are Special Administrative Regions (SAR) of China. The Faroe Islands and Greenland are self-governing overseas administrative divisions of Denmark. French Polynesia, Guadeloupe, New Caledonia and a dozen other islands are overseas lands, departments and territories of France. Gibraltar, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the Falkland Islands are overseas territories of the UK. The British Virgin Islands are self-governing, though. The Falklands are also claimed by Argentina. The American Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and Guam are unincorporated territories of the US. Antarctica, the Spratly Islands, the West Bank, Western Sahara, and the Paracel Islands are claimed by various countries and make the news often on this basis.

The world’s youngest country is South Sudan, which became independent of the rest of Sudan in 2013.

The world is 510m square kms, of which 150m square kms is land. (We’ll use kms here because only the U.S., the UK, Myanmar and Liberia use miles.)

To understand the sizes of countries in square kms, think of Germany. You can look at it on a map to compare it in size to its neighbors here. Germany is a country of 350,000 sq km. It’s roughly the same size as Norway, Japan, the DRC, Vietnam, and Poland. However it’s less than half the size of Venezuela, Nigeria, and Pakistan. Germany is twice as large as Cambodia or Greece.

The largest country, Russia, has 16m square kms of land and 700,000 square kms of water. The next biggest country is Canada, but China and the US are of similar land size with over 9m square kms, although Canada has around 3x as much water as China or the U.S., albeit much of it in cold northern regions, a situation it shares with Russia. Brazil and Australia are only slightly smaller.

Although not a country, the continent of Antarctica is midway between Russia and Canada in land size (because it’s not a nation it doesn’t claim water off its shores).

If, while playing this game, you have some suggestions or find it’s missing something, leave us a comment.

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HK actor to give away entire $714million fortune to charity

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Chow Yun-Fat, known to the West through the 2000 blockbuster “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” has been striving for a simple life, and now he’s going to give away his entire fortune, he recently told Hong Kong movie site Jayne Stars.

“My dream is to be a happy and normal person,” Yun-fat told Jayne.  “The hardest thing in life is not about how much money you earn, but how to keep a peaceful mindset and live the rest of your life in a simple and carefree manner.”

Yun-Fat reportedly lives on around $100 per month, taking public transit a lot of the time, doing charity work, using an inexpensive phones for decades, and wearing discount store clothing.

Yun-Fat also made news in 2014 when he met with pro-democracy students who were protesting China’s takeover of Hong Kong from the UK, and made statements in which he did not support the Chinese government or their police in using force against the students. When told he was blacklisted from making films in China, he replied, “I’ll just make less [films in China] then.”