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/ 2 September 2004
Slobodan Milosevic is refusing to take the medicine prescribed for his high blood pressure by United Nations doctors at his cell, jeopardising his trial for war crimes in what prosecutors said on Wednesday was a calculated attempt to delay the trial still further.
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/ 2 September 2004
Iran has told United Nations nuclear inspectors that it is about to process dozens of tonnes of raw uranium into the gas which centrifuges can turn into nuclear bomb material, a disclosure certain to reinforce US arguments that Tehran has embarked on a secret atomic weapons programme.
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/ 2 September 2004
The fate of two French journalists kidnapped in Iraq remained unclear on Wednesday night as a deadline passed with no word on their fate, while an Iraqi militant group said it had freed seven truck drivers seized more than a month ago. The drivers — from India, Kenya and Egypt — were on their way back to Kuwait on Wednesday after the firm that employs them announced it had agreed to the kidnappers’ demands to pull out of Iraq.
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/ 2 September 2004
The United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, called for a substantial and speedy expansion of the international forces in Darfur after reporting that the Sudanese government had failed to stop attacks on civilians. He was delivering his verdict on Khartoum after the security council’s deadline.
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/ 2 September 2004
Heavily armed militants, many strapped with explosives, held more than 350 hostages including children through the night at a provincial Russian school as the crisis stretched toward its second day on Thursday. Crowds of distraught relatives and townspeople waited helplessly for news of their neighbours and loved ones, their distress sharpened by the sporadic rattle of gunfire from the cordoned-off crisis site.
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/ 2 September 2004
On a bright, festive opening day of school, the first sign of the brutality to come was a solitary balloon drifting skyward. Diana Kubalova (14) felt the first trickle of fear when the smaller children in the front row of the school parade let go of their party balloons out of shock. ”At this moment I saw people in masks,” she said.
Hostage crisis drags into second day
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/ 2 September 2004
South Africa has all the trappings for clean, graft-free government. There is a public protector, a forthcoming anti-corruption law, and a Register of Members’ Interests in which all MPs are supposed to disclose their assets. But for a confidential section, the register is a public document and the latest edition was opened up for public scrutiny last week.
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/ 2 September 2004
It’s not as if men are conspicuous by their absence at Countdown 2015: Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights for All: quite a few have braved the meeting, even though it must be disheartening to hear the shortcomings of their gender so thoroughly dissected. The same cannot be said of the extent to which men feature in sexual and reproductive health programmes, however.
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/ 2 September 2004
"There’s the smell of revolution in the air this week, both to the north of us as well as over in the United States, where the Republican Party reptiles are gathering in New York. And this past week saw the closing down of the only apparent opposition party in Zimbabwe. Was the Movement for Democratic Change a bona fide opposition party, or simply a ‘cut-out’?" Web crawler extraordinaire Ian Fraser ponders the political.
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/ 2 September 2004
It is only too easy to argue that Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change did the right thing in deciding last week to suspend any further participation in polls until President Robert Mugabe’s government adheres to the Southern African Development Community’s electoral standards. It is more difficult to say the party did the wrong thing. But it is beginning to look like that, argues Iden Wetherell.