There’s no limit to the lengths that Anas Aremeyaw Anas, a crime reporter based in Ghana, will go to in his efforts to file a story.
This by way of numerous disguises, where he has variously masqueraded as an assembly line worker, a parent with a (fake) baby, a sheikh, a vagrant, a woman, and, best of all perhaps, a rock.
Anas has succeeded in digging up the dirt on all manner of criminals, undertakings that have often resulted in their arrests.
Of Anas’s many faces, there’s one in which he doesn’t have a face at all — just two small eyeholes cut into what looks like an enormous, crinkled paper bag. Silly? Maybe. But his impression of a giant rock is also effective: In 2010, Anas used the disguise near a border post at the Ghana-Côte d’Ivoire crossing to spy on trucks from the roadside. As it turned out, the trucks were smuggling cocoa beans across the border. Anas’s report helped the police build a rock-solid case.
Originally published Tuesday 21 July 2015, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.
NASA’s New Horizons space probe will probably be skimming, mere thousands of kilometres, passed Pluto around about now. That means the photos it sends in the next few days will doubtless be far sharper than the above image of Pluto and Charon, taken from a distance of approximately twenty million kilometres.
While it’s been known for sometime Pluto is reddish-brown in colour, I didn’t realise it was referred to as the solar system’s “other red planet”, with Mars being, I guess, the red planet. While both have reddish hues, their colouring comes about in quite different ways:
What color is Pluto? The answer, revealed in the first maps made from New Horizons data, turns out to be shades of reddish brown. Although this is reminiscent of Mars, the cause is almost certainly very different. On Mars the coloring agent is iron oxide, commonly known as rust. On the dwarf planet Pluto, the reddish color is likely caused by hydrocarbon molecules that are formed when cosmic rays and solar ultraviolet light interact with methane in Pluto’s atmosphere and on its surface.
Also, isn’t referring to Pluto as “other red planet”, with the operative word being planet, likely to start all sorts of arguments?
Originally published Tuesday 14 July 2015.
