Category: News

Mugabe, the only leader this country has known since its break from white rule nearly three decades ago, agreed to remain in the race and rely on the army to ensure his victory. During an April 8 military planning meeting, according to written notes and the accounts of participants, the plan was given a code…

The hostages, who had been divided in three groups, were taken to a rendezvous where two disguised MI-17 helicopters piloted by Colombian military agents were waiting. Betancourt said her hands and feet were bound, which she called “humiliating.” At first she thought the pilots were from a relief organization. Then she saw their Che Guevara…

“Once again we have shamed all our detractors, who, through gullible people, tried to use every opportunity to undermine our independence and desecrate our hard-earned and inalienable right to self-determination,” Mugabe said as he opened his sixth term in office. Check it out here.

A baby boy had both legs broken by supporters of President Robert Mugabe to punish his father for being an opposition councillor in Zimbabwe. Blessing Mabhena, aged 11 months, was seized from a bed and flung down with force as his mother, Agnes, hid from the thugs, convinced that they were about to murder her.…

If we don’t take action now, my daughters Kimmy and Jenna may not be able to blow-dry their hair for 45 minutes to an hour each morning, nor may my future sons-in-law cut their grass atop enormous, diesel-powered riding mowers. In fact, they may not even have lawns—at least not the lush, verdant kind that…

Zimbabweans soon faced a stark choice: attend midnight indoctrination sessions, where ruling party supporters chanted slogans and opposition activists were whipped and clubbed, or face similar treatment themselves. A poster captured the tenor of the runoff campaign. Beside a smiling Mugabe, sporting his trademark tailored suit and a strip of facial hair stretching from his…

The war against terrorism has evolved into a war of ideas and propaganda, a struggle for hearts and minds fought on television and the Internet. On those fronts, al-Qaeda’s voice has grown much more powerful in recent years. Taking advantage of new technology and mistakes by its adversaries, al-Qaeda’s core leadership has built an increasingly…

IN these last few weeks, the full nature of Robert Mugabe’s repressive regime in Zimbabwe has been cruelly exposed. With his increasingly brazen resort to torture and hit squads to terrorize his own people, Mr. Mugabe has crossed a moral line. Some United Nations lawyers now say there is enough evidence to charge him with…

Heavily armed police officers raided the headquarters of opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change party on Monday, dragging away about 60 people — including children — on a day when world leaders condemned violence by the Zimbabwean government in increasingly strong terms. Check it out here.

Extremist propaganda has long been produced in the lawless haven for the Taliban and al-Qaeda known as the “tribal belt.” Lately, however, there has been a regional boom in DVDs celebrating al-Qaeda operations, beheadings of purported U.S. spies and scenes of Taliban fighters attacking U.S. forces. “This is a media war on the part of…

No country is wholly free of anti-immigrant prejudice, whether it is the United States, where illegal immigration was a hot-button issue in the Republican primaries, or post-apartheid South Africa, where economic migrants were recently burned to death. But in many Western European countries today, something new and insidious seems to be happening. The familiar old…

Nader Abdul Kadoos, a 50-year-old returning student, was set upon by one such street committee last month in the southern port city of Aden, in a confrontation that received broad attention in Yemen’s news media. Kadoos’s apparent offense was to stroll out of the gates of Aden University after class in a group of male…

And again, Thomas Malthus, a British economist and demographer at the turn of the 19th century, is being recalled to duty. His basic theory was that populations, which grow geometrically, will inevitably outpace food production, which grows arithmetically. Famine would result. The thought has underlain doomsday scenarios both real and imagined, from the Great Irish…

Released late on Friday, it sharply criticised a campaign in February and March by Democratic Republic of Congo’s security forces against the ethnic-based political and religious movement Bundu dia Kongo (BDK) in western Bas-Congo province. From bases in the province the BDK has waged a campaign to re-establish the pre-colonial Kongo kingdom in parts of…

A bitter personal struggle between two powerful figures in the world of terrorism has broken out, forcing their followers to choose sides. This battle is not being fought in the rugged no man’s land on the Pakistan-Afghan border. It is a contest reverberating inside the Beltway between two of America’s leading theorists on terrorism and…

A local pastor, who did not want to be named, said the two girls were particularly affected and were exorcised after they spoke in a “demonic-sounding voice” and showed “superhuman” strength. He said one of the girls, who is petite, had even assaulted a strapping security guard by grabbing him by his neck and pinning…

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes in a new memoir that the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated “political propaganda campaign” led by President Bush and aimed at “manipulating sources of public opinion” and “downplaying the major reason for going to war.” McClellan includes the charges in a…

On trial for the 1989 murder of one African-American, a skinhead was accused yesterday of stalking another black person he allegedly wanted to kill in the Brandywine Creek area near Wilmington. The murder was averted when he realized his target was white, an ex-girlfriend testified yesterday. During cross-examination, the 39-year-old Newark, Del., woman revealed defendant…

Good Charlotte rocker Benji Madden is convinced he could run America more successfully than the “idiots” currently in charge under President George W. Bush’s leadership. The guitarist, who’s dating socialite Paris Hilton, is appalled at many of the decisions made by U.S. politicians, who he accuses of lacking the intelligence required for such a high-powered…