Karima Mohammed’s men were taken on September 5. Her husband Saleh Ahmed Mahmoud (50) and 17-year-old son, Ghazan Saleh Ahmed, were seized by men wearing the uniform of the Iraqi police near the filling station in Zafaraniya in southern Baghdad. The day after they disappeared, her husband’s brother received a threatening phone call.

It was the week he came out fighting. Bill Clinton’s extraordinary assault on the makers of a dramatised 9/11 documentary which portrayed his administration as failing to prevent the terror attacks, was the most public example of a three-pronged effort — to protect his own presidential legacy, to relaunch himself as a world statesman and to make himself a viable First Gentleman.

Rumours are flying that the Western Cape’s Local Government Minister, Richard Dyantyi, is planning to use municipal laws to remove Cape Town’s DA mayor Helen Zille from office and undermine her ruling coalition. The office of Western Cape Premier Ebrahim Rasool would not be drawn on the issue this week.

Four years after the nevirapine-based prevention of mother-to-child transmission programme was introduced, following the Treatment Action Campaign’s watershed court victory over the government, one in 13 children in highly HIV-affected KwaZulu-Natal communities is still thought to be dying of Aids before turning five.

"Whites vote to maintain the status quo. In the coloured community one can also see it: they feel threatened, that they have to defend the crumbs that they were given by apartheid against the encroachment of Africans." The ANC’s Western Cape chairperson, James Ngculu, is often described as an Africanist. Pearlie Joubert spoke to him about racial tensions in the province.

”There was something unfettered about the police rubber bullets fired at the Kennedy Road informal settlement in Durban on Tuesday night … Apparently without warning shooting erupted. As an overhead light near us shattered, people scrambled into the shacks.” Conflict between authorities and Durban shack-dweller organisation Abahlali baseMjondolo escalated this week, reports Niren Tolsi.