In the past 24 hours, police have found the bodies of at least 85 men killed by gunfire execution-style in a gruesome wave of apparent sectarian killing, the interior ministry said on Tuesday. They include at least 27 bodies stacked in a mass grave in an eastern Shi’ite neighbourhood.
Gunmen wearing commando uniforms of the Shi’ite-dominated interior ministry have stormed an Iraqi security company that relies heavily on Sunni ex-military men from the Saddam regime, spiriting away 50 hostages. The ministry has denied involvement and called the operation a ”terrorist act”.
Innat Edson didn’t think it would end this way. Last year, she was making wedding plans. Now, at just 15, she is back at her mother’s cramped, dingy house, nursing a fussing baby her former fiancé refuses to acknowledge is his. Many of Malawi’s teen mothers marry much older men who they hope can give them a better life.
No image available
/ 2 February 2006
The United Nations food agency needs -million to feed up to 10-million people in Southern Africa, hit by successive years of drought and some of the world’s highest HIV/Aids infection rates, a UN envoy said on Thursday. ”This is the place in the world where the issues are the most intense and the most people are at risk,” said James Morris.
No image available
/ 17 January 2006
More than 50 African human rights and civil society groups have written to the continent’s leaders expressing alarm at Sudan’s bid to chair the African Union despite continued violence in its western Darfur region. The groups warned such a move could destroy efforts to resolve a conflict that has killed an estimated 180 000 people.
When Botswana first offered free HIV/Aids treatment, health authorities in one of the world’s most infected countries braced for a rush. It didn’t come. Most people were still too afraid to get tested for the deadly scourge. The startling reluctance to seek help in one of the few African nations able to provide it prompted a radical rethink of how testing is done.
No image available
/ 30 November 2005
![]()
The United Nations food agency is setting up ”pit stops” providing lifesaving information about Aids to food-aid truck drivers and the communities they pass through in some of the world’s most infected countries. The first centre opened its doors at Malawi’s Mwanza border crossing in October.
No image available
/ 19 September 2005
Private Andries Nhlengethwa jumps from planes and lifts 45kg weights. He also happens to have HIV. The 31-year-old parachutist and bodybuilder is one of the few South African soldiers living openly with the deadly virus, presenting a new face of the pandemic on a continent where Aids drugs are rare and infection is often a death sentence.
Squinting into his binoculars, William Fowlds scans a vast, grassy plane where a busy dairy once stood. The cattle and sheep have given way to herds of grazing antelope. Out of a knot of thorny bushes, a family of elephants emerges. For more than two centuries, farmers like Fowlds have forged a living from the rugged and arid land of South Africa’s Eastern Cape.
A smuggled video showing hundreds of thousands of poor Zimbabweans on the move after the government tore down their homes as part of an urban renewal project underlined a call from human rights groups for the campaign to stop. The Zimbabwean government, meanwhile, pledged to build new houses for those it has made homeless.