Pakistani forces were on Thursday night poised for a dawn assault on a mountain stronghold that officials in the capital, Islamabad, said could be the hideout of Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s deputy leader. ”[Because of] the resistance being offered by the people there, we feel that there may be a high-value target,” President Pervez Musharraf told CNN television.
The World Bank has formally reopened a corruption inquiry into a leading Canadian engineering company which could lead to the first blacklisting of a major international firm. The move follows the conviction of Acres International in the high court of Lesotho, an unprecedented example of a Western firm being prosecuted for bribery by a developing country.
As the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide approaches, David Beresford examines the case of the general who struggles to live with what he saw. Few accounts of the Rwandan genocide have been as graphic as General Romeo Dallaire’s.
Long-running labour disputes in the civil aviation and road freight industries have held up a crystal ball in which the clouded future of labour organisations in South Africa can be seen. The battles highlight the two largest threats to trade unions in the new millennium — the growing use of casual labour and privatisation.
Rows of bright-green, leafy tobacco plants grow in a humid greenhouse. They look identical, but one row is special. These are genetically altered tobacco plants, carrying the shell of the human papilloma virus, which causes cervical cancer in women. These Tobacco leaves could provide an affordable vaccine for cervical cancer in Southern Africa.
There is a Sanzar (the alliance between the Rugby Unions of South Africa, New Zealand and Australia) meeting currently under way where the delegates have been given a licence to dream.
The worst ethnic violence in Kosovo since the end of the 1999 conflict erupted in the partitioned town of Kosovska Mitrovica this week, leaving hundreds wounded and at least six people dead as United Nations peacekeepers and Nato troops scrambled to defuse a raging gun battle between Serbs and ethnic Albanians.
A myth equal to the fable of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction is gaining strength on both sides of the Atlantic. It is that John Kerry offers a world-view different from that of George W Bush. Watch this big lie grow as Kerry is crowned the Democratic candidate and the ”anyone but Bush” movement becomes a liberal cause celebre.
This week’s burning question: Who said ”Manchester United will never die. People who are saying United are finished are wrong. United is a massive club and always will be”? Hmmm. Sir Alex Ferguson? Sir Bobby Charlton? The never-to-be-knighted Roy Keane? Answer: none of the above.
The right to vote and the opportunity it provides for an individual to contribute to social change is a very simple, powerful tool in the democratic process, and we in South Africa have waited long and suffered much to secure this right. For this reason alone we should all discharge our responsibility as voting citizens with due care and informed thought.