LIFE for the last Taliban ambassador is becoming decidedly lonely. Before the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington blamed on Afghanistan’s ”guest” Osama bin Laden, US diplomats in Pakistan occasionally met Abdul Salam Zaeef, ambassador for Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban. Not now. When US ambassador Wendy Chamberlin arrived at a dinner on Wednesday night, […]

ADRIAN CROFT, Islamabad | Tuesday A EUROPEAN Union mission will tell leaders of five Muslim countries this week that the war on terrorism involves the whole world and is not a war on Islam, an EU official said on Tuesday. ”We want to make it absolutely clear that the campaign against terrorism…is a campaign for […]

New York | Wednesday NEW York Mayor Rudy Giuliani warned grieving families that thousands of bodies missing in the charred ruins of the World Trade Center would never be recovered. ”We are going to end up in a situation where we do not recover a significant number of human remains, so people have to focus […]

CHANTING anti-US and Israel slogans about 250 students at the University of Witwatersrand marched on campus to protest against a United States president George W Bush’s ”war talk”. Slogans such as ”The Zionist must go” and ”Phansi (down with) Israel” were chanted while the students who are members of the Muslim Students Association carried banners […]

NAWAAL DEANE, DAVID MACFARLANE AND MUNGO SOGGOT, Johannesburg | Friday THE South African government’s oil agency, the Central Energy Fund, has pumped at least R80-million into an unproven, coal-based HIV/Aids treatment that is being tested on Tanzanian soldiers. There are striking parallels between the drug trials, conducted under the auspices of the University of Pretoria, […]

DREW FORREST Johannesburg | Friday A UNIVERSITY research unit has calculated, at current budgetary levels, it will take 150 years to complete South Africa’s land restitution programme. The research, by the Programme for Land Agrarian Studies (Plaas) at the University of the Western Cape, strongly suggests that government plans to accelerate land reform – in […]

BARRY STREEK AND MUNGO SOGGOT, Johannesburg | Friday BILLY Masetlha, the controversy-shrouded Director General of the Department of Home Affairs, is being tipped to head the new Presidential Intelligence Unit (PIU). The PIU will be housed in the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), and will report directly to the Office of the President. Minister of Intelligence […]