Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged number three in al-Qaeda, confessed to planning the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 2001, in front of the secret military tribunals being held for the top detainees in Guantánamo, the Pentagon said on Wednesday night.
When United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon took office in January, he made a public commitment to revamp the UN secretariat, inculcate high ethical standards and make his new administration fully transparent and accountable. "My watchword will be meritocracy, with due regard for gender balance and geographical representation," he pledged, speaking of impending appointments of senior officials.
”He used to say, ‘Old men start the wars and send the young men off to fight them,”’ Ross Moody recalls of his brother Craig, who died 24 years ago while completing a mandatory two-year stint in the army. Craig was among tens of thousands of South African Defence Force conscripts whose only other choice would have been to serve a four-year prison term as a conscientious objector.
Under apparent pressure from South Africa, President Robert Mugabe will submit himself to a popular presidential election in 2008 rather than extend his term for another two years. According to this scenario, presidential and parliamentary elections will be harmonised in 2008 after Parliament is dissolved in January next year.
The papers are plump with stories on the continuing contest between the president and the popular figure he once chose as his number two. Some articles accuse the country’s boss of abusing state organs to stop this man from filling his shoes. Column inches debate whether the ”victim” has made irresponsible utterances and assess his chances against a protégé of the president.
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The International Cricket Council (ICC) has teamed up with UNAids, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) and the Caribbean Broadcast Media Partnership at the Cricket World Cup 2007 to highlight the situation of children and young people living with and affected by HIV/Aids.
We have a difficult past as South Africans. We’ve had conflict for 360 years, possibly more, and this was so because colonialism had to find its full sway and that took easily 200 years, followed by another 150 years of conflict, essentially over gold and diamonds. And in that process many people’s lives were trampled upon and we ended up with what I will call a "last fling", writes Dikgang Moseneke.
The government is looking at underground storage of carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations as a way of reducing the millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases the plants belch into the country’s atmosphere each year, Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk said on Wednesday.
A 30-member environmental management inspection team, the so-called ”Green Scorpions”, is set to descend on the Foskor Plant in Richards Bay on Thursday to effect a compliance inspection, according to the KwaZulu-Natal department of agriculture and environmental affairs.
European and Asian stocks dropped on Wednesday after Wall Street chalked its second-biggest point decline in four years and rattled already nervous markets worldwide. The tumble came just as international markets were recovering from sharp declines earlier this month.