The Israeli government is guilty of systematic fraud, ”institutional lawbreaking” and the theft of private Palestinian land to covertly establish illegal Jewish outposts in the West Bank, according an official report. ”No one seriously intended to enforce the law,” said the report.
Chechen separatists quickly appointed a successor to the killed leader Aslan Maskhadov on Wednesday, withholding his name but making it clear that it is not Russia’s most wanted man, the mastermind of hostage taking, Shamil Basayev. Their spokesperson, Akhmed Zakayev, said the name is being withheld for now, but the new leader is in his early 30s and part of a new generation of separatists.
More than half a billion people — nearly double previous estimates — were infected by the deadliest form of malaria in 2002, scientists reveal in a report out on Thursday. They calculate that one in three in the world — a total of 2,2-billion people — is at risk from the mosquito-borne parasite Plasmodium falciparum.
Tens of thousands of Syrians jammed the centre of Damascus on Wednesday in a rally organised by the government in support of President Bashar al-Assad, who is under strong international pressure to withdraw troops from Lebanon. Demonstrators in Damascus denounced Washington’s pressure, burning United States flags as riot police took up position around the embassy.
United States forces have agreed to hand over control of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison to the newly elected Iraqi authorities in an attempt to draw a line under one of the most shameful episodes of the Iraq war. The prison was at the centre of a political storm after revelations of mistreatment and torture of Iraqi inmates by their US guards.
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blahBlah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
In his weekly online column for Israeli protest movement Gush Shalom, Middle East commentator Uri Avnery puts the United States’s push for regime change in Syria — through the stalking-horse of Lebanon — in the context of Graham Green’s novel <i>The Quiet American</i>. In his vanity and ideological crudeness, US President George W Bush is very much in the mould of Greene’s CIA agent, Alden Pyle.
Lemmer was under the impression that the Democratic Alliance’s Craig Morkel, son of the Cape Flats’s answer to Charles Bronson, had withdrawn from all political activity in late January after being linked to the travel voucher skandaal. He was therefore not a little surprised to find Bronsontjie on the party’s website this week, listed as DA parliamentary spokesperson on youth.
A decade after a landmark United Nations conference resolved to tackle violence against women head on, not enough has been done to put an end to this scourge, say female legislators from East Africa. They said that leaders in their countries had largely relegated violence against women — and other issues related to gender equality — to the back seat of policy-making and resource allocation over the past ten years.
Almost a third of the British government’s arms sales machine is dedicated to selling to a single regime — Saudi Arabia. A United Kingdom Ministry of Defence publication circulated to defence firms and obtained by The Guardian shows the extent of Saudi dependence on Britain to run its air force. No fewer than 161 of the department’s 600 officials work for the ”Saudi Armed Forces Project”.