United States special forces troops have arrived in several north African countries over recent months amid Pentagon warnings that the region runs the risk of becoming an al-Qaeda recruiting ground and a possible back door into Europe.
Now you see the Great Wall of China. Now you don’t. Or perhaps the landscape is to blame. Or else someone is lying. Whatever the answer, the visibility — or lack thereof — of the thousands-of-kilometers-long monument from space is threatening to become an international incident after the last person to walk on the moon has reportedly insisted the structure is visible to the naked eye.
The United Nations-backed war crimes court in Sierra Leone has barred its president, Geoffrey Robertson QC, from judging cases involving rebels because of the appearance of bias against them. The ruling sidelined him from the court’s most important cases because of a book he wrote lambasting rebel atrocities.
”Sitting opposite Nina is like looking at one of her paintings. Filled with bright colours, the image seems to vibrate with energy and burst with life. ‘Everyone always asks me [to describe my paintings], but I never know what to say,’ she says, her eyes sparkling behind cat’s-eye spectacles”. The M&G meets celebrated artist and activist Nina Romm and finds out that she has more on her mind than cats.
”Affirmative action is creating a new discrimination, an angry new generation of young whites. Research indicates that if the employment equity quotas were enforced with 1,9% economic growth, 600 000 whites would have to be fired.” Drew Forrest hands out this week’s tien van die beste to Freedom
Front Plus leader Pieter Mulder.
”’Some of these guys know nothing different. They like their little huts,’ came their Afrikaner guide’s breezy explanation as to why the majority of black South Africans are living in slums almost 10 years after the end of apartheid”. An English journalist looks in on the new SA, in black and white.
"Bring back the death penalty," seems to be a popular slogan ahead of the April vote. So what is wrong with this, especially if there appears to be enough voters who would gladly place their crosses next to the candidate who promises to return the noose if he or she is elected? Nothing?
It all started at the White House. This is where African National Congress leaders in the Free State held an impromptu rally last week in preparation for Mbeki’s arrival to launch his drive to be elected for a second term as South Africa’s president. The president’s recent visit to the Goldfields area to canvass votes saw a poverty-stricken community open their doors and speak their minds.
Time: 11h30 to 12h30 Dr Alan Whitfield: Are we strangling our estuaries? South Africa’s estuaries have been damaged by large-scale water pollution and habitat alterations. Dr Whitfield has some interesting approaches that might turn the tide. Listen to his talk on the importance of freshwater supplies to estuaries and of tidal wave exchange in estuarine […]
The question remains: Why did Jean-Bertrand Aristide, ousted leader of Haiti, end up in the Central African Republic? No one goes there for kicks. The country has no particular political or economic record to write home about. The whole saga is packed tight with humbug.