From the Cape Argus:

Shoppers ran for their lives when bloody warfare between two rival Cape Flats gangs spilled over into a crowded Wynberg shopping mall.

The confrontation, between members of rival Hanover Park gangs the Ghetto Kids and the Americans, began outside the magistrate’s court where a gang leader was appearing yesterday.

It then spilled into the streets and the busy Maynard Mall.

Three men were stabbed.

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From the New York Times:

A practiced escape artist, Charles Taylor knows he is better off in Europe than in Sierra Leone, where thousands of people would happily administer vigilante justice. Any escape from the protection of the United Nations detention center in Freetown would be a death sentence.
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From the New York Times:

Why do bureaucrats insist on spending the taxpayers’ money to keep aging government paperwork from the taxpayers?

The question has arisen anew because of the discovery that military and intelligence agencies have pulled some 55,000 pages of decades-old documents from public access at the National Archives. Some documents were photocopied long ago by researchers. In the case of the redacted 1946 memorandum, the State Department had already published it in the multivolume history “Foreign Relations of the United States.”

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Machael DeLong, from the New York Times:

This is why the much-repeated claims that Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t “give us enough troops” in Iraq ring hollow. First, such criticisms ignore that the agreed-upon plan was for a lightning operation into Baghdad. In addition, logistically it would have been well nigh impossible to bring many more soldiers through the bottleneck in Kuwait. And doing so would have carried its own risk: you cannot sustain a fighting force of 300,000 or 500,000 men for long, and it would have left us with few reserves, putting our troops at risk in other parts of the world. Given our plan, we thought we had the right number of troops to accomplish our mission.

The outcome and ramifications of a war, however, are impossible to predict. Saddam Hussein had twice opened his jails, flooding the streets with criminals. The Iraqi police walked out of their uniforms in the face of the invasion, compounding domestic chaos. We did not expect these developments.

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From the New York Times:

Yet Mr. Kohn said he found the chorus of attacks disquieting. He was disturbed, he said, by an assertion made by Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, who retired from the Marines, in an essay for Time magazine, that he was writing “with the encouragement of some still in positions of military leadership.”

“That’s a fairly chilling thought,” Mr. Kohn said. “Chilling because they’re not supposed to be undermining their civilian leadership.”

“It’s not the military that holds the civilian leadership accountable,” he said. “It’s Congress, the voters, investigative journalists. Things have been turned upside down here.”

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From the Guardian:

Global temperatures will rise by an average of 3C due to climate change and cause catastrophic damage around the world unless governments take urgent action, according to the UK government’s chief scientist.

In a stark warning issued yesterday Sir David King said that a rise of this magnitude would cause famine and drought and threaten millions of lives.

It would also cause a worldwide drop in cereal crops of between 20 and 400m tonnes, put 400 million more people at risk of hunger, and put up to 3 billion people at risk of flooding and without access to fresh water supplies.

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