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/ 18 February 2005
New evidence has emerged that United States forces in Afghanistan engaged in widespread Abu Ghraib-style abuse, taking ”trophy photographs” of detainees and carrying out rape and sexual humiliation. The abuses took place in the main detention centre at Bagram, near the capital Kabul, as well as at a smaller US installation near Kandahar.
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/ 18 February 2005
John Negroponte, the United States Ambassador in Baghdad, was on Thursday nominated as the first director of national intelligence, making him potentially the most powerful spy chief in US history. Announcing Negroponte’s nomination President George Bush described intelligence as ”our first line of defence” in the struggle with terrorists.
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/ 18 February 2005
Those who attack American interests around the globe, who incite peaceful native populations to fanaticism and violence, and who undermine democracy must expect swift and decisive action by the United States and its military. This was the word from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday as she outlined her country’s plans to invade Manchester.
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/ 18 February 2005
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) on Thursday hit out at the government over its alleged "persistent kowtowing to employers’ blackmail". Cosatu’s statement came a week after President Thabo Mbeki, in his State of the Nation address, mooted the relaxation of South Africa’s labour market to boost small business in the country.
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/ 18 February 2005
Those hoping for daybreak after 14 years of chaos in Somalia realised this week they were experiencing a false dawn. The slow move homewards of the new government of Abdullahi Yusuf was to have started next week. Now it appears to be facing further delays. Somali warlords have made their point: the country is still too dangerous for the government to work in.
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/ 18 February 2005
The International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) has urged the Congolese government to prosecute former militia leaders instead of reappointing them to high-ranking positions in the newly integrated national army. "If the Democratic Republic of the Congo is to achieve a lasting peace, it must not appoint individuals to the army when there is evidence that they may be responsible for serious abuses," said the president of the ICTJ.
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/ 18 February 2005
The Herculean nature of the task facing Somalia’s new government has been brought to the fore again in recent days, as efforts proceed to have the administration installed in the capital, Mogadishu. Reports on Thursday said three people had died while seven were injured in what appeared to have been a bomb blast outside the building that used to house the foreign affairs ministry.
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/ 18 February 2005
Peter Mandelson, the European Union trade commissioner, this week launched a fresh onslaught on protectionist forces in Europe and the rest of the world and demanded the dismantling of virtually all barriers to trade in goods and services.
Mandelson argued in Stockholm that opening up European and global markets as a whole is the key to promoting growth and jobs at home — and fighting poverty in the Third World.
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/ 18 February 2005
Stunned astronomers on Friday described the greatest cosmic explosion monitored to date — a star burst from the other side of the galaxy that was briefly brighter than the full moon and swamped satellites and telescopes. The high-radiation flash caused no harm to Earth but would have literally fried the planet had it occurred within a few light years of home.
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/ 18 February 2005
The presidents of Colombia and Venezuela met in Caracas this week to patch up frazzled relations after the worst diplomatic row between the South American neighbours for decades. Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe was greeted with a 21-gun salute on his arrival in Caracas to meet Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, who barely a month ago had threatened to break off commercial and diplomatic relations.