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/ 23 September 2004

Season of the beasts

Meteorologists oft-times speak about the greater cycles of global weather, recurring patterns sometimes aeons apart, sometimes separated by only a few years. Why do lemmings save up the years and then, obeying some mystical signal, rush to throw themselves off the nearest precipice? Which brings me to the subject of this week’s sermon: Wherever you look these days, you will find monsters in charge.

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/ 23 September 2004

SA fails the right to know

Promising transparency is one thing, but the South African government delivering it is quite another. If you want to know what is going on and have the temerity to ask, the chances are that you will simply be ignored. Rather than abide by their constitutional and statutory duty to respond to requests for public information, government agencies prefer to stick their head in the sand and hope the pesky interlocutor will go away.

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/ 23 September 2004

‘Not all Arab tribes are Janjaweed’

A top official from Sudan’s ruling party said on Thursday the government will not disarm ”Arab tribes” in the troubled Darfur region, saying they are not all members of the feared Janjaweed militia. ”The government and international community are not in agreement over the definition of the Janjaweed,” a National Congress spokesperson said.

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/ 23 September 2004

We didn’t show beheading, says e.tv

Free-to-air television station e.tv did not broadcast footage of the beheading of an American hostage in Iraq as reported on Thursday, the station said. The station’s editor-in-chief, Joe Thloloe, said on Thursday reports that stated his station had aired footage of the beheading in the manner that SABC1 did were not entirely correct.

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/ 23 September 2004

Iraq on path to success, Allawi tells US Congress

Iraq’s interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, thanked the United States on Thursday for liberating his country and said Iraq is on the path to success. ”We are succeeding in Iraq,” he told a joint session of Congress. The US has made ”enormous sacrifices” in Iraq, Allawi said, vowing that those ”sacrifices are not in vein”.