LIFE for the last Taliban ambassador is becoming decidedly lonely. Before the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington blamed on Afghanistan’s ”guest” Osama bin Laden, US diplomats in Pakistan occasionally met Abdul Salam Zaeef, ambassador for Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban. Not now. When US ambassador Wendy Chamberlin arrived at a dinner on Wednesday night, […]

PRESIDENT George W Bush was ”very disturbed” by remarks last week from a US lawmaker who described turbans as diapers, the White House said on Wednesday. Republican Representative John Cooksey of Louisiana reportedly told a radio network in his home state that: ”If I see someone come in that’s got a diaper on his head […]

ADRIAN CROFT, Islamabad | Tuesday A EUROPEAN Union mission will tell leaders of five Muslim countries this week that the war on terrorism involves the whole world and is not a war on Islam, an EU official said on Tuesday. ”We want to make it absolutely clear that the campaign against terrorism…is a campaign for […]

Moscow | Thursday THE pro-independence leader of Russia’s mainly Muslim republic of Chechnya reacted coolly on Wednesday to a US statement calling on him to break off all contact with the Saudi-born extremist Osama bin Laden, clearly implying that there were no contacts to break off. A representative for Aslan Maskhadov, the main rebel leader […]

New York | Wednesday NEW York Mayor Rudy Giuliani warned grieving families that thousands of bodies missing in the charred ruins of the World Trade Center would never be recovered. ”We are going to end up in a situation where we do not recover a significant number of human remains, so people have to focus […]

THE hearing of former national cricket captain Hansie Cronje’s application to the Pretoria High Court to overturn his life-long ban from activities of the United Cricket Board and its affiliates, will continue on Thursday. Counsel for the UCB, Wim Trengove, SC, is expected to continue his argument in opposition to the application. The UCB imposed […]

CHANTING anti-US and Israel slogans about 250 students at the University of Witwatersrand marched on campus to protest against a United States president George W Bush’s ”war talk”. Slogans such as ”The Zionist must go” and ”Phansi (down with) Israel” were chanted while the students who are members of the Muslim Students Association carried banners […]

New York | Sunday THE US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) started sending teams to Afghanistan three years ago in a bid to convince opposition forces to capture and maybe kill terror suspect Osama bin Laden, the New York Times reported on Sunday. It said the CIA officers tried to work with Ahmad Shah Massoud, the […]

THE Commonwealth of Britain and its former colonies on Friday postponed its summit in Australia after the leaders of Britain, Canada and India pulled out because of the suicide hijacking attacks on the United States. Australian Prime Minister John Howard said the Commonwealth had decided there was little point in holding its October 6-9 meeting […]

NAWAAL DEANE, DAVID MACFARLANE AND MUNGO SOGGOT, Johannesburg | Friday THE South African government’s oil agency, the Central Energy Fund, has pumped at least R80-million into an unproven, coal-based HIV/Aids treatment that is being tested on Tanzanian soldiers. There are striking parallels between the drug trials, conducted under the auspices of the University of Pretoria, […]