A United States Senate report due to be published on Friday will blame the CIA for the Bush administration’s unfounded claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and will not address White House responsibility for the debacle. The report will admonish the outgoing director, George Tenet, and CIA analysts who, one Republican senator claimed, had made ”wholesale mistakes” in their collection and processing of intelligence.
When Afghan police burst into the large suburban house in Kabul, they were not expecting to see three men strapped to the ceiling and hanging by their feet. This was supposedly an import business, after all. But as they released the men, and five other captives who were also in the house, officers realised they had stumbled upon a private jail where Afghan prisoners were being locked up and tortured.
"To acknowledge the impersonal is by no means to devalue life or to slide into a hopelessly depressive state. Quite the opposite." Poet Colleen Higgs explores life in her collection <i>Halfborn Woman</i>. Paul Wessels tries to make sense of it all.
CDS OF THE WEEK: What’s new on the shelves at your local music store: Alanis Morissette on Prozac, the Hanson brothers all grown-up, Dead Prez resurrected, and more …
"The city boasts new shopping centres, new restaurants and new university buildings, but poverty is still one of the overriding impressions of this settler town, where everyone and their grandmother is a car guard." Mike van Graan reflects on the context of the National Arts Festival.
Professional hunters are capitalising on the Kruger National Park’s growing elephant population by selling "canned" elephant hunts to wealthy American clients. Police and conservation officials are investigating the "hunting" of a Kruger bull within hours of its delivery to a safari outfit in North West province.
February 26 2004. Johannesburg. The date and place where the seeds of the ongoing match-fixing scandal in South African football were sown. The event was a meeting of the Premier Soccer League (PSL) executive committee — made up of club chairmen and other club officials — at the PSL headquarters in Doornfontein. The meeting was called to discuss a spate of bad refereeing decisions.
Second-hand book dealers, old-age homes and a whole assortment of so-called ”secondary merchants” are all eagerly awaiting the forthcoming Government Publications Warehouse Sales. As each fulfilling decade of the South African rainbow democracy comes to an end, government storage houses will be kicking off the next 10 years with a major clean-out. I managed to get a look at some.
"A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday " — Alexander Pope (1688 to 1744). By happy synchronicity, the above quotation popped up on the Wordsmith website the very morning I was starting on this column. It couldn’t have been better suited to my subject.
South Africa’s best prospects for growing employment lies in sectors that export primary products to rapidly industrialising countries such as China and India, suggests a new labour market analysis by the Reserve Bank. These include food and coal, according to Labour Market Frontiers, published last week.