Sixty years after the end of World War II, Germany is still nowhere near completing the job of destroying thousands of tonnes of unexploded bombs, shells, mines and grenades. In the eastern state of Brandenburg, encircling Berlin, a 4Â 000km chunk of land is contaminated with leftover bombs, shells and other potentially dangerous and ageing munitions.
Even as a crane hoisted away the heavy concrete slabs around the Israeli army’s checkpoint into Jericho this week, soldiers were still waving down drivers for inspection. By the end of the day, the paraphernalia of the roadblock was gone, but the troops remained. Israel transferred responsibility for security in Jericho to the Palestinians in a largely symbolic step toward reviving the peace process.
”You’re innocent until proven broke,” said celebrity lawyer Johnnie Cochrane who managed to secure football star OJ Simpson an acquittal in his celebrated double-murder case a decade ago. That case, followed breathlessly by television cameras from around the world, set off an obsession with celebrity trials, which seemed to reach its peak last Tuesday when three separate cases dominated the news in the United States.
”I tried to phone her the other day. I still have a number she gave me, which I could call infrequently and exchange a few words. It was fruitless to try this time; the hurried click at the other end was an echo of her Kafkaesque oppression. The isolation of Aung San Suu Kyi is now complete, in the 10th year of her detention,” writes John Pilger. Clearly with an eye to its vast Asian market, the European Union has shamelessly appeased the Burmese junta.
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A North West father charged with sexually abusing and neglecting his sons was found guilty in the Brits Regional Court on Thursday. Magistrate Louis Matthee found the 45-year-old man from Mooinooi near Pretoria guilty on 18 charges, including indecent assault, contraventions of the Child Care Act and assault with the intent to do grievous bodily harm.
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Observers from neighbouring Southern African countries met with several Zimbabwean political groups on Thursday to assess the running of elections in the country. Only the South African and Mauritian observers of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) mission have thus far arrived in Zimbabwe.
Twenty years after a group of publishers gathered to discuss how to get African ideas on the West’s agenda, a gathering at the British Parliament offered a measure of how much the publishers have accomplished. This week in London, journalists, lawmakers and African hands came together for the launch of the latest offering of the African Books Collective.
North Korea accused the United States administration on Thursday of having suggested the Asian country’s ”elimination” and blamed the US for a breakdown in multilateral talks on North Korea’s nuclear disarmament. Vice-President Yang Hyong Sop was speaking in Pretoria after talks with Deputy President Jacob Zuma.
A 30-year-old woman who fell down a narrow mineshaft near the Marathon informal settlement in Primrose, Germiston, on Thursday was rescued just before 1pm, emergency services spokesperson Johann van den Heever said. Patricia Nzimande was found at a depth of 45m to 50m, deeper than emergency staff had originally thought.