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.
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A North West father charged with sexually abusing and neglecting his sons was found guilty in the Brits Regional Court on Thursday. Magistrate Louis Matthee found the 45-year-old man from Mooinooi near Pretoria guilty on 18 charges, including indecent assault, contraventions of the Child Care Act and assault with the intent to do grievous bodily harm.
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Observers from neighbouring Southern African countries met with several Zimbabwean political groups on Thursday to assess the running of elections in the country. Only the South African and Mauritian observers of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) mission have thus far arrived in Zimbabwe.
Twenty years after a group of publishers gathered to discuss how to get African ideas on the West’s agenda, a gathering at the British Parliament offered a measure of how much the publishers have accomplished. This week in London, journalists, lawmakers and African hands came together for the launch of the latest offering of the African Books Collective.