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/ 5 February 2007
This week’s African Union summit failed to make substantive progress on resolving two of the continent’s most urgent crises — in Darfur and Somalia. In November, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s tentative agreement on the deployment of a hybrid AU-United Nations operation in the area in November sparked hope that he was softening his stance on the deployment of UN troops to the region.
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/ 5 February 2007
Fadhel is a slim 26-year-old Mahdi Army commander with a thin goatee beard and smoothed-down hair that looks like a flat cap. One day last month he described how he and his men seized a group of three Sunnis suspected of killing his fellow Shia. ”I followed the group for weeks and then one of them crossed the bridge to Karrada [a Shia district]. We first informed a nearby Iraqi army checkpoint that we were arresting terrorists”
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/ 5 February 2007
The editor of one of Zimbabwe’s only remaining independent newspapers, The Standard, which belongs to the stable of media outlets belonging to Mail & Guardian owner Trevor Ncube, this week received an envelope containing a bullet.
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/ 5 February 2007
If there is one glaring false assumption made by the fitness industry in its attempts to lure us to the nearest gym, it is that we sign up as members purely to get fit and healthy. What really drives those who pay a monthly subscription to these temples of bodily worship is vanity.
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/ 5 February 2007
The former president of the European Court of Human Rights this week claimed he was poisoned during a visit to Russia in late October — three days before the former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned in London. Luzius Wildhaber, who retired last month as Europe’s most senior judge, told a Swiss newspaper that he had fallen violently ill after a three-day trip to Moscow.
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/ 5 February 2007
Venezuela’s congress extended the authority of the President, Hugo Chávez, on Wednesday when it passed a measure allowing him to rule by decree. The legislation gives Chávez powers to transform 11 “strategic areas” by decree over the coming 18 months to pave the way for “21st-century socialism”.
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/ 5 February 2007
Commentators have interpreted the number of staff leaving as a “purge” of those who disagree with Snuki Zikalala, news and current affairs director. The Mail & Guardian‘sTumi Makgetla speaks to SABC spokesperson Kaizer Kganyago about this and the resignation of John Perlman.
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/ 5 February 2007
When President Thabo Mbeki attacked environmental processes for being too slow last year, many environmentalists were outraged. After a Cabinet lekgotla, Mbeki said environmental legislation was causing development delays and had contributed to “a quite considerable slowing down of economic activity”.
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/ 5 February 2007
The Australian writer Donald Horne meant the title of his celebrated book, The Lucky Country, as irony. “Australia is a lucky country run by second-rate people who share its luck,” he lamented in 1964, describing much of the Australian elite as unfailingly unoriginal, race-obsessed and in thrall to imperial power and its wars.
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/ 5 February 2007
Representatives of Côte d’Ivoire President Laurent Gbagbo and New Forces rebel leader Guillaume Soro started holding face-to-face talks on Monday in a bid to promote a stalled peace process. The talks are taking place in Ouagadougou under the mediation of Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaore, an Agence France-Presse journalist in the Burkina Faso capital said.