AFTER 11 demonstrators were killed outside the Ministry of Defence in Cairo early this month, Mohammad al-Assaf, a member of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf), expressed his astonishment that anybody might suspect the military of wanting to rig the forthcoming presidential elections in Egypt.
NAIROBI — Sub-Saharan African nations will not be able to sustain their accelerated economic growth unless they eliminate hunger, the UN said in a report on Tuesday.
DRUG thugs dumped 49 bloodied and dismembered corpses on a northern Mexican highway last Sunday. We journalists are finding little new to say, few fresh insights to offer, about these all too frequent narco-massacres in Mexico and the 50 000 people murdered so far in the country’s endless drug war.
JERUSALEM — The deal that ended the Palestinian prisoners’ mass hunger strike not only headed off a confrontation with Israel, but also proved the growing success of the Palestinian strategy of non-violent protest.
I WANTED you to be the first to know. It has just been revealed by the Combating Terrorism Centre (CTC) at West Point Military Academy in the United States that I am on a very short list of journalists (eight in Western countries and seven in India, Pakistan, and Arab countries) to whom Osama bin Laden wanted to send “special media material” on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the US. To what do I owe this honour?
FOLLOWING the election of Francois Hollande as France’s new president, analyst Paul Melly asks whether a new man in the Elysée Palace will mean a new policy in Africa where France retains strong economic, political and military ties with many of its former colonies?
HONDURAS has the world’s highest murder rate. Many victims are poor. And one politician campaigning for election made an unusual vote-winning promise — free funeral for anyone unable to give a loved-one a dignified burial.
“My true adversary does not have a name, a face or a party,” said Francois Hollande, France’s next president. “He never puts forth his candidacy, but nevertheless he governs. My true adversary is the world of finance.”
WHEN Britain’s biggest tabloid claimed credit for a Conservative general election victory with the front-page headline “It’s the Sun wot won it”, its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, was not pleased. Giving evidence on April 25 to a public inquiry on press ethics, Murdoch explained that he had administered “a terrible bollocking” to the Sun’s then editor, Kelvin MacKenzie. A “tasteless” claim, he said. “We don’t have that sort of power.”
LET’S suppose that you are an artist who knows you have to shock people if you really want to get on in the trade. And not being Damien Hirst yet, you should probably justify your shock tactics by claiming that they serve some good cause or other. So which cause will it be?
HRITY spent three months chained to half a dozen people on a basement floor, beaten with sticks and chains that gave off electric shocks, on a ration of just a spoonful of rice a day.
TO mark the day Egypt regained control of the Sinai peninsula from Israel, a group of protesters pledged they would this week cover a memorial to Israelis killed in the war with an Egyptian flag bearing the words: “Sinai — the invaders’ graveyard.”
US President Barack Obama, circa 2008, may have just clinched the Republican nomination for President in 2012. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney doesn’t look like Obama. They don’t come from the same background. And they don’t share a governing philosophy or a policy platform.
THE verdict on Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia, will be announced on April 26 by the Special Court for Sierra Leone. It has sat for over three years in The Hague to hear accusations that in order to gain a share of Sierra Leone’s diamonds, he conspired with Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front to wage Africa’s most brutal war against a democratically elected government.
IN the midst of the Taliban attacks in central Kabul on April 15, a journalist called the British embassy for a comment. “I really don’t know why they are doing this,” said the exasperated diplomat who answered the phone. “We’ll be out of here in two years’ time. All they have to do is wait.”
“WE, the undersigned terrorist groups, hereby promise to stop all violence in Syria and surrender all our weapons to the Syrian regime. We will no longer carry out the orders of Israel, the United States, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who have been financing our campaign of armed terrorism against the Syrian people. Love, the terrorists of the Free Syrian Army.”
JOYCE Banda, who has made history becoming Malawi’s first female president and only the second woman to lead a country in Africa, has a track record of fighting for women’s rights.
