Recently, Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula told persistent ‘whingers’ about crime to emigrate. Do they include Hazel Makuzeni, who begged him earlier this year in the M&G to do something about runaway crime in Khayelitsha? This is Makuzeni’s latest bulletin from ‘the war zone’

Malika Labazanova crouched on the floor of her house at number 20, Third Tsimlyansky Lane, Grozny. A young man in camouflage fatigues held the muzzle of an automatic rifle against her head. Both were citizens of the same country, Russia, but he represented the government, and she did not.

Daniel Ortega led a rogue state before rogue states were invented. As chief engineer of Nicaragua’s 1980s left-wing Sandinista revolution, he became Ronald Reagan’s favourite Central American whipping boy. The United States government conspired with so-called Contra rebels to overthrow him. He was eventually voted out of office in 1990, beaten by a US-backed candidate.

The death of al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, on Wednesday in Baquba, during a joint United States-Jordanian operation, was hailed as ”great news” on Thursday, but there were differing views on whether it would lead to a break in the violent insurgency that has wracked the Middle East nation.

The Bush administration stared down a new wave of international condemnation of Guantánamo on Sunday, dismissing the suicides by three inmates of the prison camp as a ”good PR move” on their part and an ”act of asymmetrical warfare”. The hard line from an administration official comes at a time of increasing international criticism at the handling of terror suspects at Guantánamo.

Twenty-five years after the first Aids cases were reported, there is no sign of a halt to the pandemic which is likely to spread to every corner of the globe, the head of the United Nations’s Aids agency has said.