A Scorpions probe and a lawsuit brought by rugby boss Brian van Rooyen have opened a Limpopo province can of worms in which tender-rigging and financial favours to the African National Congress and former premier Ngoako Ramatlhodi are alleged.
The killers struck just before midnight. With speed and method, they went from house to house smashing open doors and windows and shooting families in their beds. Weeks later, blood remained visible on the walls as the village of Broudoume mourned its 12 dead and tended its wounded.
Sonia Gandhi’s rise from small-town, postwar Italy to the whitewashed British Raj bungalows of Delhi is a story of love and death in India’s political cauldron, culminating in the most sensational victory since India became independent in 1947.
Senior figures across the Labour party are intensifying pressure on Tony Blair to publicly detach himself from the Bush administration, calling on him to spell out an independent British position on the Middle East, peacekeeping in Iraq and the United States presidential election.
The parents of Nick Berg, the freelance contractor brutally murdered on video, on Thursday stepped up their campaign to expose the Pentagon’s role in their son’s final days, releasing an e-mail from a United States official saying he was being detained by US troops.
They called it ”bitch in a box”. On a baking hot day last August, a black Mercedes sedan pulled up at the United States army base in Ramadi and two US interrogators dragged an Iraqi man out of the boot. He was gasping for air. ”They kind of had to prop him up to carry him in. He looked like he had been there for a while,” said a US soldier who witnessed the Iraqi’s arrival.
‘US held man who was beheaded’
Greenpeace will appear in court in Miami on Monday in what is believed to be the first criminal prosecution in the United States of a campaign group for the activities of its members. The case has been attacked by the former vice-president Al Gore and many civil rights groups, who claim it is being used by the attorney general, John Ashcroft, to stifle dissent.
A media conspiracy unfolded this week. The facts — which we know to be true because they were printed in newspapers — include that
South African men are the laziest in the world, outslothing Muscovite pimps and Zimbabwean election monitors, and that Danny Jordaan is "the hardest-working man in South African football".
United States President George W Bush promised $15-billion for the fight against HIV/Aids in developing countries over five years. But former Eli Lilly CEO Randall Tobias, who runs the president’s Aids emergency plan, said the money would be spent only on high-quality patented drugs from the giant pharmaceutical companies.
African National Congress MP Vincent Smith’s coronation as leader of Parliament’s public accounts committee, Scopa, brings to a sad end one the most inglorious chapters in South Africa’s new democracy. Smith has been rewarded for shielding the executive during Parliament’s ill-starred efforts to hold it to account over the multibillion-rand arms deal.