The 15-year-old boy who accuses Michael Jackson of child molestation on Wednesday confronted the pop star across the courtroom as he took to the witness box. In emotionally charged scenes the teenager and the entertainer sat barely 15 feet apart but studiously avoided eye contact in the hushed court.

More than three years after the September 11 attacks, and -million later, the FBI has abandoned an attempt to upgrade its computer database, hampering the United States’s ability to track suspected terrorists. FBI director Robert Mueller told Congress he took full responsibility for the failure of the project, known as the virtual case file.

United States forces have agreed to hand over control of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison to the newly elected Iraqi authorities in an attempt to draw a line under one of the most shameful episodes of the Iraq war. The prison was at the centre of a political storm after revelations of mistreatment and torture of Iraqi inmates by their US guards.

More than half a billion people — nearly double previous estimates — were infected by the deadliest form of malaria in 2002, scientists reveal in a report out on Thursday. They calculate that one in three in the world — a total of 2,2-billion people — is at risk from the mosquito-borne parasite Plasmodium falciparum.

Tens of thousands of Syrians jammed the centre of Damascus on Wednesday in a rally organised by the government in support of President Bashar al-Assad, who is under strong international pressure to withdraw troops from Lebanon. Demonstrators in Damascus denounced Washington’s pressure, burning United States flags as riot police took up position around the embassy.

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In his weekly online column for Israeli protest movement Gush Shalom, Middle East commentator Uri Avnery puts the United States’s push for regime change in Syria — through the stalking-horse of Lebanon — in the context of Graham Green’s novel <i>The Quiet American</i>. In his vanity and ideological crudeness, US President George W Bush is very much in the mould of Greene’s CIA agent, Alden Pyle.

Lemmer was under the impression that the Democratic Alliance’s Craig Morkel, son of the Cape Flats’s answer to Charles Bronson, had withdrawn from all political activity in late January after being linked to the travel voucher skandaal. He was therefore not a little surprised to find Bronsontjie on the party’s website this week, listed as DA parliamentary spokesperson on youth.