Rasha Zayoun thought the worst of last year’s war between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas was over when a ceasefire halted 34 days of fierce Israeli bombardment of south Lebanon. She was wrong. A few months ago, Zayoun (16) was sitting at home in the southern village of Maarake picking out thyme leaves from a bag her father had brought, when her finger caught on a ribbon attached to a cluster bomblet.
Rebels responsible for waging a brutal 20-year battle in northern Uganda might be spared punishment by the International Criminal Court, according to a new agreement signed last Friday. In terms of the deal the Ugandan government has agreed to handle the war crimes of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) under an ”alternative justice mechanism”.
Recently Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Putin’s most implacable enemy, goes on trial in Russia for corruption, accused of stealing millions of dollars from Russia’s state airline, Aeroflot. If convicted, the former mathematics professor faces 10 years in jail. But he was not in court to face his accusers, and will not be there to hear the verdict weeks from now.
It was going to be a trip down memory lane. At least that’s what I thought as I prepared to try out the vaunted Soweto Business Express. Soon after arriving at Ikhwezi station in Mofolo, I discovered that the world had changed a bit since igado/ibomba was the transport of choice, writes Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya .
In most supermarkets in the sprawling township of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, empty shelves and butcheries with no meat in the cold rooms tell of a desperate reality. Even chickens are hard to come by. The government’s crack price monitoring teams will soon have no jobs, because “there will be nothing to monitor as all commodities have disappeared from shelves”, says Mercy Tiripo (32) of Mabvuku township, about 20km east of Harare.
President Nestor Kirchner of Argentina will not seek a second consecutive term in office in order to let his wife, Cristina, run as the ruling party’s candidate in an election later this year, it was announced this week. Cristina Kirchner (54), a senator and veteran politician, is favoured to win the October poll and become one of the most powerful women in Latin America.
Hamas has good reason to celebrate the release of the BBC’s Gaza corrrespondent Alan Johnston, for its success demonstrates to the Palestinians and to the wider international community that it can run the show in the Gaza Strip, less than three weeks since taking it over. Jubilant spokesmen wasted no time in making the connection between the BBC man’s freedom and their own wider political ambitions.
The ANC Women League’s proposal of a special women’s ministry has run into flak from the ANC and from women’s activists who feel it could “ghettoise” women’s issues. The league insists the ANC policy conference last week had agreed to set up a special ministry for women’s affairs.
Even amid Zimbabwe’s increasing instability, life in suburban Harare has remained more or less predictable. Which is why Sunday morning shoppers at a suburban shopping mall, popular with young professionals and the well-heeled, stood stunned as they watched the store manager of a branch of one of the country’s largest retail chains being dragged out of his store by the back of his collar.
A corruption-busting deputy mayor, who was assassinated outside her home in Mpumalanga, is believed to have been killed while investigating suspected housing irregularities. The execution of Thandi Mtsweni is just the latest in a string of violent incidents linked to corruption in the Govan Mbeki municipality in Secunda in the past five years.