The CIA is to declassify records detailing operations including illegal domestic surveillance, assassination plots and kidnapping, undertaken from the 1950s to the early 1970s. The records were compiled in 1973 at the behest of the then CIA director, James Schlesinger, and collected in a dossier known as the ”family jewels”.
Growing embarrassment at senior levels within the Bush administration over the Guantánamo Bay detention centre in Cuba is driving an intensifying internal debate on how and when the camp can be closed. The Guantánamo camp has been used to hold hundreds of foreign terrorist suspects without charge or trial since the September 11 2001 attacks.
Meanwhile, elsewhere at the Cape Town Book Fair … Relative obscurity brought solitude, and solitude brought time; and with them came a chance to look around at the other stalls, and to wonder about the nature of book fairs and book signings, and to watch my autographing pen rust.
Three women have been released after being held hostage at a hair salon in Vanderbijlpark, Vaal Rand police said on Friday night. Captain William Mcera said three women had been released from Merle’s Hair Boutique on Attie Fourie road at about 5.45pm, but ”according to the negotiators there are still a few of them inside”.
European Union leaders reached broad agreement on Friday on a single post to run EU foreign affairs, the first success at a summit on the bloc’s future, but Poland help up progress towards a treaty to reform the union. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, hosting the summit, struggled to break Poland’s resistance.
A scrap-metal dealer and two workers at the City of Cape Town have been arrested for theft of copper cables, the municipality said on Friday. Pieter van Dalen, chairperson of the City’s cable-theft task team, said the workers were arrested this week after confessing to stealing the cables and selling them to a scrap-metal dealer.
The Proudly South African campaign has dismissed media reports it has been ”disowned” by the government and the Department of Trade and Industry. The seed funding provided for the campaign’s founding period was suspended in 2004, it said in a statement on Friday.
At least four women were being held hostage in a hair salon in Vanderbijlpark late on Friday afternoon. Initial reports were that the four were being held by a middle-aged man. However, it was later claimed that there were 11 women in Merle’s Hair Boutique, in Attie Fourie Street, and that they were hostage to a six or seven-man gang.
Zimbabwe’s galloping inflation will force President Robert Mugabe from office before the end of the year, the United States ambassador to Harare said on Friday, predicting the rate could hurdle one million percent within months. In an interview, Christopher Dell said Mugabe’s government was effectively ”committing regime change on itself”.
Lasting peace in Sudan will not be possible unless the fractious country takes serious steps to address alarming environmental woes, said a United Nations report published on Friday. Decades of war have devastated Africa’s largest country and fresh competition for its resources continue to fuel conflict, said the report.