Isa Mohammed distrusts doctors, especially white foreign ones. His suspicions, he says, stem from a 1996 drug study by American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer in which his daughter, now partially disabled, took part. It is that study that is driving a polio-vaccine boycott, now six months old, among northern Nigerian Muslims.
America’s media, already reeling from the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal, has been rocked by the revelation that yet another top reporter has been making up news stories. Jack Kelley, senior foreign correspondent for USA Today and a Pulitzer Prize nominee, has been faking major foreign news stories for several years, the paper confessed last week.
There were shadows in the rocks. As the 12 United States Special Forces soldiers arrived at a remote mountain region in eastern Afghanistan last week, the shadows took form and started moving, turning into people. The Americans, accompanied by troops from Pakistan and Predator drones scouring the hills ahead, finally got a glimpse of the prey they had been hunting for months.
Dramatic corroboration of the massacre of Afghan prisoners by the United States-backed Northern Alliance at the start of the war in 2001 was on Saturday night provided by American pathologists commissioned to investigate the claims by the United Nations.
The United Nations is to be given a lead role in post-occupation Iraq under British and American plans to shore up crumbling international support for the continuing military presence in the country. UK officials said there will be a sustained push for a fresh UN resolution ‘mandating’ the continued military presence in Iraq.
South African Jacques Kallis stayed in pursuit of Don Bradman’s record of six centuries in consecutive Tests when Kallis reached 51 at tea on the fourth day of the second cricket Test against New Zealand on Sunday.
The time for quiet diplomacy in Zimbabwe is over and must be brought to an end, a senior official in the country’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said on Friday. Speaking during a visit to Berlin, the MDC’s legal secretary David Coltart said the policy, practiced notably by South Africa, had failed.
”For many black South Africans very little has changed: the same people still own the big houses, they still hold down the best jobs, they still drive the fancy cars that speed — unseeing — past the black informal settlements that line our first-world highways,” says FW de Klerk, the country’s last apartheid-era president.
Noam Chomsky, the political theorist and leftwing guru, on Friday gave his reluctant endorsement to the Democratic party’s presidential contender, John Kerry, calling him ”Bush-lite”, but a ”fraction” better than his rival.
The United States, under pressure from its giant pharmaceutical companies, is trying to undermine the use in poor countries of cheap, copycat Aids drugs, made by ”pirate”, generic companies but validated by the World Health Organisation, campaigners claim.