For more than 40 years, Uganda has been considered a safe haven for people fleeing violence in their homelands. It currently hosts about 230 000 nationals from neighbouring states such as Sudan, Rwanda, Somalia and Burundi — one of the largest refugee populations in Africa. But even as Uganda earns accolades for its generosity, both government and its critics agree there are problems with the refugee scheme.
If you’ve cast a weary eye round Jo’burg on more than one Saturday afternoon, lamenting the lack of a different form of outdoors entertainment for your kids, you’ve probably glanced over the many old mine dumps that pimple the city’s horizon. But, in doing so, you’ve also overlooked one of Joburg’s best-kept secrets and most unusual playgrounds …
Ninety percent blind in both eyes, Babe Simelane, who estimates he is 72-years old, could make out only the roughest outline of his son’s face when he died from an Aids-related illness last year, leaving two young sons. Without government assistance or a pension scheme to support him, Simelane relies on the kindness of neighbours. Although 69% of Swazis live on less than $1 a day, he envies those who can obtain even a fraction of that amount.
On the face of it, the new broadcasting regulations issued last month in Zimbabwe were groundbreaking. For the first time in the history of Zimbabwean elections, the opposition would be allocated time on state-owned radio and television in the run-up to the poll, scheduled for March 31. Some welcomed this as a step towards leveling the country’s uneven electoral playing field. Others say they’re simply cosmetic.
The once-feared Syrian intelligence agents vanished from Beirut and large parts of Lebanon on Wednesday, but not before repainting the jail in the basement of their headquarters. Almost all their intelligence offices in north Lebanon and the mountains east of Beirut were abandoned, and 150 to 200 agents moved to the eastern Beka’a valley.
Bolivia’s embattled President Carlos Mesa this week called for early elections to replace him, amid protests against his government’s economic policies. In a move aimed at ending a wave of street protests that have almost crippled the country, Mesa said he would ask Congress to approve a poll in August, two years before the official end of his term. Bolivia is a political time bomb that, analysts say, could explode at any moment.
Sixty years after the end of World War II, Germany is still nowhere near completing the job of destroying thousands of tonnes of unexploded bombs, shells, mines and grenades. In the eastern state of Brandenburg, encircling Berlin, a 4Â 000km chunk of land is contaminated with leftover bombs, shells and other potentially dangerous and ageing munitions.
Even as a crane hoisted away the heavy concrete slabs around the Israeli army’s checkpoint into Jericho this week, soldiers were still waving down drivers for inspection. By the end of the day, the paraphernalia of the roadblock was gone, but the troops remained. Israel transferred responsibility for security in Jericho to the Palestinians in a largely symbolic step toward reviving the peace process.
”You’re innocent until proven broke,” said celebrity lawyer Johnnie Cochrane who managed to secure football star OJ Simpson an acquittal in his celebrated double-murder case a decade ago. That case, followed breathlessly by television cameras from around the world, set off an obsession with celebrity trials, which seemed to reach its peak last Tuesday when three separate cases dominated the news in the United States.
”I tried to phone her the other day. I still have a number she gave me, which I could call infrequently and exchange a few words. It was fruitless to try this time; the hurried click at the other end was an echo of her Kafkaesque oppression. The isolation of Aung San Suu Kyi is now complete, in the 10th year of her detention,” writes John Pilger. Clearly with an eye to its vast Asian market, the European Union has shamelessly appeased the Burmese junta.