United States forces have agreed to hand over control of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison to the newly elected Iraqi authorities in an attempt to draw a line under one of the most shameful episodes of the Iraq war. The prison was at the centre of a political storm after revelations of mistreatment and torture of Iraqi inmates by their US guards.
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In his weekly online column for Israeli protest movement Gush Shalom, Middle East commentator Uri Avnery puts the United States’s push for regime change in Syria — through the stalking-horse of Lebanon — in the context of Graham Green’s novel <i>The Quiet American</i>. In his vanity and ideological crudeness, US President George W Bush is very much in the mould of Greene’s CIA agent, Alden Pyle.
Lemmer was under the impression that the Democratic Alliance’s Craig Morkel, son of the Cape Flats’s answer to Charles Bronson, had withdrawn from all political activity in late January after being linked to the travel voucher skandaal. He was therefore not a little surprised to find Bronsontjie on the party’s website this week, listed as DA parliamentary spokesperson on youth.
Almost a third of the British government’s arms sales machine is dedicated to selling to a single regime — Saudi Arabia. A United Kingdom Ministry of Defence publication circulated to defence firms and obtained by The Guardian shows the extent of Saudi dependence on Britain to run its air force. No fewer than 161 of the department’s 600 officials work for the ”Saudi Armed Forces Project”.
A decade after a landmark United Nations conference resolved to tackle violence against women head on, not enough has been done to put an end to this scourge, say female legislators from East Africa. They said that leaders in their countries had largely relegated violence against women — and other issues related to gender equality — to the back seat of policy-making and resource allocation over the past ten years.
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At least 42 miners were stuck 2,4km underground at Hartbeesfontein gold mine late on Wednesday after an earthquake shook the Klerksdorp mining area in the North West province. ”Rescue teams are working to open entry tunnels that were closed by rock falls,” said Ilja Graulich, spokesperson for DRDGold, which operates the mine.
The plight of the San indigenous community in South Africa was placed in the spotlight last week with the launch of a report by the South African Human Rights Commission. According to the Working Group for Indigenous Minorities of Southern Africa, there are currently about 100 000 San — the majority of whom live in Botswana.
As the citizens of the Central African Republic go to the polls to choose a new president and parliament this weekend, experts differ on whether it is a step toward true democracy. The landlocked nation has had a violent and troubled past. Since independence from colonial master France in 1960, it has been continuously rocked by political instability.