What would evil minds not do to realize money? For a long time now, four women have been running a syndicate that specializes in renting babies for public display, with whom they solicit alms from the sympathetic public.
But today the game is up for the quartet, as the long arm of the law has finally caught up with them.
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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 name: CIBD. The acronym, which proved apt in the fevered campaign that unfolded over the following weeks, stood for: Coercion. Intimidation. Beating. Displacement.
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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 shirts and assumed they were rebels.
Only when they were airborne did she notice that Cesar, who had treated her so cruelly for so many years, was naked and blindfolded on the floor.
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“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.
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An estimated 450,000 unsold copies of Time’s special April 22 Earth Day issue were trucked Monday from the magazine’s New Jersey distribution center to the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island.
The discarded copies of the issue–which features articles about conservation, biodiversity, and recycling, as well as guest editorials by President Clinton and Leonardo DiCaprio–are expected to decompose slowly over the next 175 years.
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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.
She heard one of them say, “Let’s kill the baby”, before Blessing was hurled on to a bare concrete floor.
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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 requires constant watering and pesticide treatment. It’s conceivable that one day my five children’s spacious yards may be entirely composed of synthetic Astroturf, or—God forbid—those tacky wood chips my sister in Arizona uses.
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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 nose to upper lip, a block of boldface letters carried the slogan: “The Final Battle for Total Control.”
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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 prolific propaganda operation, enabling it to communicate constantly, securely and in numerous languages with loyalists and potential recruits worldwide.
Every three or four days, on average, a new video or audio from one of al-Qaeda’s commanders is released online by as-Sahab, the terrorist network’s in-house propaganda studio. Even as its masters dodge a global manhunt, as-Sahab produces documentary-quality films, iPod files and cellphone videos. Last year it released 97 original videos, a sixfold increase from 2005. (As-Sahab means “the clouds” in Arabic, a reference to the skyscraping mountain peaks of Afghanistan.)
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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 crimes against humanity.
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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.
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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 the Taliban and al-Qaeda, aimed at exaggerating their victories as well as getting maximum sympathies of the masses through horrific footage and emotional sermons,” said Silab Mehsud, a tribal journalist working in South Waziristan, part of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
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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 arguments against immigrants — that they are criminals, that their culture makes them a bad fit, that they take jobs from natives — are mutating into an anti-Islamic bias that is becoming institutionalized in the continent’s otherwise ordinary politics.
Examples abound. The Swiss People’s Party sponsors ads in which three white sheep push one black sheep off the Swiss flag — and wins 29 percent of the vote. In Belgium, the Vlaams Belang deploys a clever variation, publicly praising Jews and seeking their support against Muslims, whom it tellingly describes as “the main enemy of the moment.” Meanwhile, the Dutch politician Geert Wilders calls Islam “the ideology of a retarded culture.”
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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 female students.
About five bearded men pounced on the students, grabbing one woman by the hand to hold her while two other female students escaped in taxis, Kadoos recounted. The men slapped some of the male students. “Is this a lover’s lane?” the leader of the gang shouted, according to Kadoos.
More bearded men appeared from nowhere to upbraid the group, while some outraged passersby stopped to defend the mostly young men and women.
“Do you want us to wait until they start having sex in the street?” Kadoos recalled one of the bearded men shouting back at the crowd.
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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 Famine of 1845 to the Population Bomb of 1968.
But over the last 200 years, with the Industrial Revolution, the Transportation Revolution, the Green Revolution and the Biotech Revolution, Malthus has been largely discredited. The wrenching dislocations of the last few months do not change that, most experts say. But they do show the kinds of problems that can emerge.
The whole world has never come close to outpacing its ability to produce food. Right now, there is enough grain grown on earth to feed 10 billion vegetarians, said Joel E. Cohen, professor of populations at Rockefeller University and the author of “How Many People Can the Earth Support?” But much of it is being fed to cattle, the S.U.V.’s of the protein world, which are in turn guzzled by the world’s wealthy.
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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 Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Angola and Gabon. Authorities accuse its members of violent protests and killings carried out in the name of popular justice.
The U.N. human rights investigators’ report said police used heavy machineguns, grenades and small arms against BDK members armed mainly with wooden weapons and “magical” talismans. It put the number of people killed at least 100, much higher than the death toll of 27 given by the Congolese government.
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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 how to fight it, two men who hold opposing views on the very nature of the threat.
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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 him against the wall.
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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 341-page book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” that delivers a harsh look at the White House and the man he served for close to a decade. He describes Bush as demonstrating a “lack of inquisitiveness,” says the White House operated in “permanent campaign” mode, and admits to having been deceived by some in the president’s inner circle about the leak of a CIA operative’s name.
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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 Thomas Gibison’s alleged attempt to murder again so that he could earn from fellow skinheads a blood-red teardrop in his spider tattoo, which was a trophy from the first murder.
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