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/ 30 January 2005
The court house in Santa Maria looks like a fortress. Three lines of steel fencing, reinforced by sandbags, now guard its entrance. Twitchy security guards watch for suspicious characters as they supervise the erection of the metal walls. This is not some new anti-terrorist measure, nor preparations for the prosecution of a violent criminal gang. It is all for the King of Pop.
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/ 30 January 2005
Thousands of Chinese mourners paid their last respects to purged Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang on Saturday in a tightly controlled memorial ceremony that underlined the government’s unease about the most prominent political victim of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
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/ 30 January 2005
After the threats and the promises; after the bombs, assassinations and security clampdown; after the Sunni boycott and the Shi’ite religious call to vote, the day of Iraq’s first free elections in half a century dawned on Sunday over a country divided between fear and cautious optimism.
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/ 29 January 2005
Serena Williams had lost the first four games and was in pain, wincing on almost every swing. Her shots lacked their usual zing. Her hopes for a seventh Grand Slam appeared to be doomed. Then, with a little help from the trainer, the woman who calls herself the toughest fighter in tennis started getting her power back.
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/ 29 January 2005
Zimbabwe on Friday warned the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) to stop meddling in its internal affairs. Envoy Simon Khaya Moyo said reports that the African National Congress had changed its mind about Cosatu’s planned fact-finding mission to Zimbabwe and was supportive of it, were contrary to what they had learned from the party itself.
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/ 29 January 2005
Former anti-apartheid activist Allan Boesak was welcomed back into the fold in Bishopscourt on Friday evening by the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Njongokulu Ndungane. Earlier in the month Boesak received a presidential pardon from Thabo Mbeki, expunging his criminal record of a fraud conviction.
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/ 29 January 2005
European art lovers and investors are taking advantage of the cheap dollar to buy back some of the hundreds of thousands of works that have crossed the Atlantic over decades. Nicholas Hall, international director of Christie’s New York, said that European activity was ”exceptionally strong” at this week’s auction.
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/ 29 January 2005
The Bush administration was confronted with fresh evidence of a far-reaching clandestine campaign to influence public opinion on Friday after a third conservative commentator admitted receiving payments for championing its policies.
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/ 29 January 2005
The United States is increasing the pressure on Iran by sending military planes into its airspace to test the country’s defences and spot potential targets, according to an intelligence source in Washington. ”The idea is to get the Iranians to turn on their radar, to get an assessment of their air defences,” said the source.
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/ 29 January 2005
As darkness fell across Baghdad on Friday night — the silence punctuated by explosions and helicopters — residents, prisoners in their homes, awaited the unknown. A weekend of bloodshed seemed certain, but how much blood, and whose, nobody knew.