The Bush administration’s thinking about the use of torture in the war on terror was on display on Wednesday after the White House released a file of documents on the treatment of detainees. The memos offer a glimpse of the decision-making process at the highest levels of the Pentagon, the department of justice and the White House.
The eight British sailors and marines detained in Iran are expected to be freed on Thursday, the British Foreign Office said after talks on their release were suspended late on Wednesday. British diplomats from the embassy in Tehran have also visited the men, who are being held in the town of Bandar Mahshahr.
An urgent inquiry was launched in Cyprus on Wednesday night after an undercover police operation exposed a group of up to 100 tourists, including Britons, taking part in what was described a mass orgy aboard a cruise ship off the island. The scenes, shown on local TV and described as ”debauched”, were broadcast after being caught on camera in the police sting.
Young South African women are being given false job offers to lure them into prostitution in Macau, a former Portuguese colony now under Chinese control, says the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). IOM official Jonathan Martens told a conference in Benoni that women were promised employment, luxury accommodation, and payment of between $10 000 and $20 000.
Michael Melvill, the pilot of the first manned private trip to the edge of space this week, has told how he feared he would not return from the landmark mission.
The South African-born Melvill told the New York Times, that SpaceShipOne lurched to the left and suffered a key control system failure that left him feeling ”deathly afraid”.
A nurse at a Polokwane hospital was dismissed and her two colleagues were suspended following an incident where two babies were swapped in April, the Limpopo health department said on Wednesday. The baby swapping discovery was made by one of the mothers when she went home and found two name tags on a baby.
A software engineer working for America Online was on Wednesday night charged with stealing the internet service provider’s entire subscriber list and selling it to spammers, the senders of unsolicited junk e-mails. Jason Smathers (24) was arrested on conspiracy charges at his home in West Virginia, close to AOL’s headquarters, where he had worked since 1999.
Up to 30 000 Iraqi police officers are to be sacked for being incompetent and unreliable and given a -million payoff before the United States hands over to an Iraqi government, senior British military sources said on Wednesday. Many officers either deserted to the insurgents or simply stayed at home during the recent uprisings in Falluja and across the south.
The United States senate was used for a bizarre ritual in which the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the head of the Unification church, was ”crowned” and declared himself the messiah in the presence of more than a dozen Republican and Democratic members of Congress, it was reported on Wednesday.
Journalists from three banned newspapers would not be able to find work under a government proposal to tighten a section of Zimbabwe’s sweeping media laws, warns the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition. The coalition says that such a move would be another blow to press freedom in the troubled southern African country.