Poor Nigeria. The government there launched a major rebranding campaign back in March, attempting to improve its reputation for corruption and annoying email scams, but so far cooperation from outside the country has been hard to come by. Two of the latest obstacles? A Sony PlayStation commercial that made a crack about those aforementioned email scams, and the sci-fi movie “District 9,” which apparently portrays its Nigerian characters as “gangsters, cannibals, pimps and prostitutes.” Ouch.

The renowned author of Things Fall Apart returned to his home country recently to deliver a lecture, after almost two decades spent overseas. As This Day Online notes, “all previous efforts to bring Achebe home, who was highly critical of the Olusegun Obasanjo government, had failed until now.” (Via The Book Bench)

This image of Manila comes from a Forbes special on the most densely populated, congested cities on earth. With a total population of 10 million in the metropolitan area, Manila may not be the largest city on earth, but its city center squeezes a staggering 41,000 people into each square kilometer. In comparison, Mumbai, which has become virtually synonymous with urban density, has just under 30,000 people per km squared by Forbes’ reckoning, and doesn’t make the list of the most congested cities. They are, in descending order: Cairo, Lagos, Macau, Seoul, Dhaka, Buenos Aires, Jakarta, Kaohsiung and Santo Domingo. Attempt driving in any of them at your own risk.