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Authorities seize radioactive material

Slovak and Hungarian police, after a months-long operation, have arrested three people for trying to sell half a kilogram of enriched uranium — enough to make a "dirty bomb."

Police in Slovakia and Hungary have busted a black-market ring allegedly aiming to sell nuclear contraband on the eastern frontier of Europe, Slovak authorities said late Wednesday. Three people have been arrested for trying to sell 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of enriched uranium for for €680,000 ($1 million).

On Wednesday the Slovak police had also said the contraband was a full kilogram (2.2 pounds) of a "highly dangerous radioactive material," but on Thursday they amended the information to say it was just under half a kilogram of enriched uranium in powder form.

"It was possible to use it in various ways for terrorist attacks," said First Slovak Police Vice President Michal Kopcik.

The uranium originated from an ex-Soviet republic, he said, without going into detail, and police weren’t sure yet who was trying to buy it.

Kopcik said the 481.4 grams of powder had been stashed in unspecified containers, and that investigators determined it had a 98.6 percent uranium-235 content. "Weapons-grade" uranium contains at least 85 percent uranium-235.

Experts say about 25 kilograms of highly enriched uranium or plutonium is needed to fashion a crude nuclear device. But a fraction of that would be enough, they say, for a "dirty bomb," which could use conventional explosives to scatter radioactive debris and spread panic.

A spokesman for the Slovak police, Martin Korch, said on Wednesday, "Three people have been taken into custody, two in Slovakia one in Hungary," and added that Slovak and Hungarian police had worked on the case for months.

Kopcik said the suspects ranged in age from 40 to 51. Three other suspects, including a Slovak national identified as Eugen K., had been arrested in mid-October in the Czech Republic for allegedly peddling fake radioactive material. But Kopcik said he wasn’t sure if they were related to this uranium case.

All three of the current suspects were detained near the Ukrainian border. Slovakia’s border with Ukraine is the EU’s frontier in the east, and authorities have worried since the collapse of the Soviet Union about a dangerous black market for radioactive material in this region.

But Kate Hudson, chairwoman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the UK, told the Associated Press that a wide underground market hadn’t really materialized.

"The kind of massive problem that had been envisioned hasn’t come to fruition," she said.

Still, there has been a massive increase in incidents of lost or stolen radioactive material. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear energy watchdog, such incidents have spiked by 200 percent since 2002. Melissa Flemming of the IAEA said Wednesday’s event will be monitored for the database the group keeps on such incidents.

It is not the first such seizure for Slovakia. In 2003, police arrested two Slovaks for attempting to sell low-enriched uranium to undercover cops. In 2006, officials in the country of Georgia helped the CIA arrest a Russian man trying to sell a small amount of weapons-grade uranium.

China is running on empty

China is running out of fuel. Police are guarding petrol stations in several inland provinces to prevent fights, as shortages of petrol and diesel are causing huge queues of trucks, buses and cars.

In Kunming, capital of the southwestern province of Yunnan, 1000 trucks are stranded.

A truck driver named Li told the Chuncheng Evening News he had been stranded at the Stone Tiger Gate petrol station for three days after searching for fuel in other places, but failing. He said his delivery date was way overdue.

Another driver, at Geiju city, said a job that would have taken one day in the past, now took three: one on the road, two queuing for fuel.

Nine days ago, a truck driver was reported to have been stabbed to death in central Anhui province after a row about queuing.

A few days earlier, at Ezhou in Hubei province, 100,000 people were stranded, unable to get to work, because city buses had run out of fuel.

Beijing has been insulated from the headache, and the wealthy coastal provinces are mostly better stocked, because the refineries are nearby.

The problem would intensify as winter approached, and was starting to affect exports, warned the Commerce Ministry, since diesel was crucial for shifting products to ports.

The system is suffering from pressure of demand to sustain its economic growth at the current 11.5per cent – with China now the second-biggest consumer of oil after the US.

Diesel imports rose 46.5per cent in the first nine months of the year, compared with the same period last year.

The other cause of the supply-demand mismatch, is the stuttering transition from government-controlled prices to market pricing.

The Government wishes to graduate towards a system that allows prices to move with international markets.

But inflation is at a 10-year high of 6.5per cent and the Government is reluctant to let oil, a key input for distribution of all products, float free as yet.

The two companies that dominate petrol and diesel sales, Sinopec and PetroChina, are state-controlled but also listed on stock markets, highly competitive, and anxious to become even more market-driven. Both pledged this week to boost their imports, especially diesel.

As inflation began to accelerate this year, the Government announced it was capping the prices of key commodities it still controlled, including oil, until the end of the year.

But it relented under strong pressure from Sinopec, PetroChina and other oil refiners and distributors, and conceded a 10per cent rise from this month.

Even after the 10 per cent rise, the price remains well beyond international levels, and China has to import about half its oil, for which it must pay world prices.

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Anglican Leader Blasts U.S.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, leader of the world’s Anglicans, has launched an attack on the United States, saying it has lost the high moral ground since the September 11 attacks in 2001.

Williams, a longtime critic of the war in Iraq, said in uncharacteristically blunt language: "We have only one hegemonic power at the moment. It is not accumulating territory, it is trying to accumulate influence and control. That’s not working."

Asked in an interview with the Muslim lifestyle magazine Emel, if he thought the United States had lost the high moral ground since the 9/11 attacks, he replied "Yes."

Drawing comparisons between British imperialism and the 21st Century United States, Williams said: "It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering and normalizing it.

"Rightly or wrongly, that is what the British Empire did — in India for example."

"It is another thing to go in on the assumption that a quick burst of violent action will somehow clear the decks and that you can move on and other people will put things back together again — Iraq for example."

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Playboy goes anti-Semitic

Israel Shouldn’t Get a Free Pass

Why can’t American Jews, particularly liberal Jews, think straight about Israel? American Jews can easily condemn the war in and occupation of Iraq, as well as the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the violations of civil rights there. Yet the same passion for peace, justice and human rights is muted when it comes to talking about unpleasant activities in the Israeli government. American Jews and many politicians who pander for Jewish votes are hurting Israel and the cause of peace by refusing to have an honest debate about our country’s historically one-sided position vis-a-vis Israel and the Middle East conflict. An honest debate is underway within Israel itself, but in the US it’s impossible to be critical of Israel without being labeled anti-Semitic or worse.

Before I dive further into this, I should establish my bona fides for making this argument, which itself says alot about the terrain. I am a Jew. My father was born in what was then Palestine and fought in Israel’s war of independence. My father’s cousin was killed in that war. I lived in Israel for seven years, including the period of the 1973 Yom Kippur war. A cousin of mine was killed in that war, leaving behind a widow and two children. My step-grandfather, an ikd nab wgi was no threat to anyone was killed by a Palestinian who took an axe to his head while he was sitting quietly on a park bench. His murder was revenge for the massacre of dozens of peaceful Muslims the day before, slaughtered by an ultra-nationalist Israeli soldier as they knelt in prayer.

I care about Israel as I care about our country, but I wish to speak the truth about it. In 2006, when I ran in the New York Democratic primary for Senator because of incumbent Hillary Clinton’s support for the Iraq war, my campaign coincided with Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, a move triggered by the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. While campaigning I said that Israel had committed acts that violated the Geneva Conventions and international standards. Within an hour reporters from all four New York daily papers called me, alerted to my comments by my opponent’s operatives. Betraying their bias, the reporters had no idea my position would not be considered novel or radical in Israel where the country’s conduct in the war was a topic of hot debate. Indeed, the reporters need only have consulted Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.

Referring to last summer’s Lebanon bombing, B Tselem’s website states, “International humanitarian law…requires that the combating sides direct their attacks only against specific military objectives, take cautionary measures to prevent injury to civilians and refrain from disproportionate attacks, ie., attacks directed against legitimate targets but that are likely to cause excessive harm to civilians. Over the past week Israel has killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians in its attacks against targets in Lebanon. There is a concern that at least some of them were disproportionate attacks, which constitute war crimes”.

Here are some other inconvenient truths. Israel is holding 10,000 Palestinians in administrative detention where, according to B’Tselem, they are exposed to “moderate pressure”, a euphuism for torture. And while six Israeli soldiers and 17 civilians died last year, the Israeli military killed 660 Palestinians, roughly half of them innocent bystanders. So why is there such a lack of debate in the US?

Jews and non-Jews who can easily tell foreigners that being American is not the same as supporting the American government are incapable of making the same argument in Israel’s case. Elected officials won’t say anything because of the political cost or at least the perceived threat from Jewish voters. And there is residue from the Cold War, when Israel was seen as the region’s bulwark against the Soviet Union. Among Jews there is a reflexive “Israel right or wrong” attitude that is deeply rooted in the memory of the Holocaust. My own family lost people in the Holocaust. But the Holocaust should not be used as a moral shield to suppress honest criticism of Israel.

It’s also important to acknowledge that some critics of Israel undercut their own positions by painting a caricature of the country. Israel is a democracy, and like all democracies it has its flaws Nut the open debate heard in Israel is rarely heard in the regions’s other countries, most of which are ruled by dictators or generals. Israel has a very free rambunctious press” can the same be said about Egypt or Syria? Israel’s attorney general recently went after the country’s president for sexual harassment. We can’t even get Congress, not to mention the attorney general, to investigate the president for lying about a war.

These facts make Israel’s conduct even more troubling. The country’s democratic principles and societal fabric are being undermined by its role as an occupier. People who refuse to criticize Israel because of friendship are no friends to Israel. A true friend would not have stood by and remained silent as Israel dropped thousands of cluster bombs in Lebanon, leaving a million unexploded bomblets-small devices the size of a light socket that are still killing and injuring civilians-littered throughout the southern part of the country. A true friend would have taken Israel’s leaders to the woodshed and said, “Responding to Hezbollah is one thing, but turning Lebanon into rubble and embittering a new generation toward the existence of your country is madness”. Instead, politicians like Joe Lieberman and Clinton actually encouraged the bombing by uttering vigorous endorsements of Israel’s right to defend itself. A friend of Israel would not try to fan fears y tarring as anti-Semitic people who are critical of U.S. Middle East policy. Criticism of Israel may be painful to American Jews, but it is high time anyone, Jew or non-Jew, were able to raise questions about our one-sided policy without fear of a McCarthy like smear. A friend would argue strenuously that Israel’s moral fiber and security are weakened every moment it allows the so-called separation barrier in the West Bank to stand, in violation of international law. Whether Jews like the comparison or not, Jimmy Carter is correct in his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid when he describes the control over Palestinian’s movements as similar to South Africa’s apartheid system.

As a Jew, I have always been proud of the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, which means roughly,”repairing the world.” I like to think it is hat brought so many Jews into the civil rights and labor movements in the 60’s and 70’s and in to the current antiwar movement. I feel great sorrow that Israel is an occupier of another people, and I believe Israel can never be whole or at peace until that occupation is ended in a just way. I also believe tikkun olam means we must never be silent.

Лобановский

Ally of Bush defeated

Australia’s prime minister, John Howard, one of President Bush’s staunchest allies in Asia, suffered a comprehensive defeat at the hands of the electorate on Saturday, as his Liberal Party-led coalition lost its majority in Parliament.

He will be replaced by Kevin Rudd, the Labor Party leader and a former diplomat. “Today Australia looks to the future,” Mr. Rudd told a cheering crowd in his home state, Queensland. “Today the Australian people have decided that we as a nation will move forward.”

Mr. Howard’s defeat, after 11 years in power, follows that of José María Aznar of Spain, who also backed the United States-led invasion of Iraq, and political setbacks for Tony Blair, who stepped down as Britain’s prime minister in June.

Mr. Howard conceded nearly two hours after the last polling booths closed in the west of the country.

“A few moments ago I telephoned Mr. Kevin Rudd and I congratulated him and the Australian Labor Party on a very emphatic victory,” Mr. Howard told a room of emotional supporters.

“I leave the office of prime minister with our country prouder, stronger and more prosperous than ever,” he said.

Returns for a small number of seats are yet to be compiled, but analysts estimate that over all the Labor Party gained 28 seats to win a comfortable 22-seat majority in the 150-seat lower house of Parliament, where governments are formed. Official results are expected within the next day or two.

Mr. Howard may suffer the indignity of losing his own seat, representing a district on Sydney’s north shore, which he has held for 33 years, to a former television anchor and rookie politician. He would be the first sitting prime minister to lose his seat since 1929.

It was a bruising campaign, and the Liberal Party has said it will challenge some results on the grounds that the Labor candidates had broken electoral law by failing to resign from government jobs before running for office. The Labor Party said it had broken no laws.

Mr. Rudd, 50, campaigned on a platform of new leadership to address broad concerns about the environment, health and education. He has said his first acts as prime minister would include pushing for the ratification of the Kyoto agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and negotiating the withdrawal of Australia’s 500 troops from Iraq.

Analysts said the leadership change was unlikely to bring a radically new foreign policy, although they expected a shift in emphasis in the relationship with the United States, Australia’s closest ally. “Australia will remain a close ally of the United States, and Rudd remains committed to the alliance,” said Michael Fullilove, of the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney. But he noted that “if there is a Democratic administration elected next year, to some extent they would become closer.”

Mr. Howard has a strong personal relationship with Mr. Bush that is based on a similar socially conservative philosophy and a shared outlook on terrorism.

Australian opinion polls have shown that although Australians remain strong supporters of the so-called Anzus alliance — the security pact among Australia, New Zealand and the United States — they do not approve of Mr. Bush or the Iraq war.

The attempts by Mr. Howard’s coalition to stress its economic record apparently failed to impress voters. The Australian economy has had 17 years of continuous growth, lately driven by Chinese demand for Australian iron ore and coal. Mr. Howard had warned voters that a Labor victory would endanger the country’s prosperity.

Despite the coalition campaign, there was little distance between the parties on economic policy, and the defining characteristics came down to the personalities of the leaders. Mr. Howard was running for a fifth term, and many voters said they were ready for a change.

“Howard is out of touch,” said George Varvaressos, 52, who voted in eastern Sydney on Saturday morning. “It’s the arrogance of being in power for too long — he hasn’t been listening.”

If Australia’s strongest military and political alliance is with Washington, the fuel for its economy is coming from China. Mr. Fullilove says Mr. Rudd’s ability to manage the relationship among Canberra, Washington and Beijing will be crucial.

Mr. Rudd, 18 years younger than Mr. Howard, has a reputation as a cerebral student of policy, as opposed to the Liberal leader’s image of a hardened and aggressive political animal.

“He seems more personable, approachable. He doesn’t seem arrogant — yet — and I have respect for him,” said Marcelle Freiman, who voted for Mr. Rudd in eastern Sydney on Saturday.

Mr. Rudd’s dry image was altered by the news that he had visited a strip club during a trip to New York in 2003.

He was a diplomat in Beijing and speaks Mandarin. He impressed many with a fluent address to President Hu Jintao of China when Mr. Hu visited Australia in September.

Mr. Fullilove said Mr. Rudd’s experience regarding China was unlikely to make a significant difference to Australia’s relationship with the United States. “I would counsel against people assuming that because Kevin Rudd speaks Mandarin there would be a big rebalancing of the relationship in favor of Beijing,” he said.

прокурор Фильчаков

South Africa won’t condemn rape

South Africa’s refusal to condemn the use of rape as a means of achieving political or military objectives and its calls for the broadening of the definition to include “all forms of sexual violence in all its forms and manifestations” may sully its international image, analysts say.

Last week the United Nations General Assembly attempted to adopt a resolution to eliminate the use of rape as a weapon of war and intimidation but was thwarted by South Africa. It was reminiscent of South Africa’s refusal to discuss Zimbabwe at the UN Security Council and its vote that blocked a resolution demanding an end to human rights abuses in Burma.

Hannah Botsis, a political researcher at the South African Institute of Race Relations, questioned South Africa’s record on human rights since assuming its position at the Security Council. “It seems that South Africa wants to throw its weight around, that they want to be taken seriously. What is a pity is that they seem to be objecting to all the wrong issues.”

Botsis argues that there would be no harm in South Africa endorsing the resolution on rape as a weapon of war, and questions the motives behind the move. “If South Africa thinks that the United States is raising this resolution for political reasons, then South Africa could take that political issue up with the US elsewhere. Again South Africa has failed to come out strongly on the side of human rights … Is this about human rights or is it about being vocal against the Western world?” asks Botsis, pointing out that South Africa’s oppositional stance “does more harm than good”.

The Western media’s coverage of the issue has not helped Africa’s reputation, particularly in light of South Africa’s high levels of sexual violence, says Abdul Lamin, senior lecturer in international relations at Wits University.

“The reports coming out seem to suggest that South Africa condones sexual violence when in fact they are putting forward a principled argument,” Lamin said. “We should condemn rape wherever it is being perpetrated, including by the occupying forces of Iraq,” he added.

Rape under any circumstances is “a cause for concern” and should be condemned, says Lisa Vetten, researcher at the Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre, adding that the international community should not lose sight of the bigger picture by targeting only specific states.

Adam Habib, deputy vicechancellor at the University of Johannesburg, points out that US-led resolutions have manipulated genuine human rights issues in order for it to push country-specific agendas “against people whom they dislike”.

Habib points to the fact that US President George W Bush specifically mentioned Burma and Sudan in endorsing the rape resolution but he has never acknowledged atrocities committed by American soldiers in Iraq.

Habib said while there was a definite human rights issue to be addressed, those who condemned South Africa’s actions at the UN were “not seeing the politics at play”.

Habib does concede, however, that “in opposing the [US’s] hidden agenda South Africa has opposed the resolution and that is a problem”.

“It presents an interesting dilemma. The answer is not to oppose the resolution but to revise it so that the language applies evenly across all countries,” he says, adding that this might be why South Africa has insisted on a redraft to address a broader definition of rape.

Democratic Alliance MP Sheila Camerer was part of a South African delegation to the Fourth World Conference on Women where the Beijing Declaration was signed and rape was recognised as a war crime. “I remember we worked long and hard on that declaration and the wording thereof … It had the UN’s ‘blessing’ and serves as an advisory which one hopes would be influential in the international court [setting],” she says.

Camerer says she finds it “strange” that South Africa had been a part of that declaration but was now calling for a broader consideration of rape. “Perhaps he [South African ambassador to the UN Dumisani Kumalo] doesn’t know about the declaration.”

South Africa’s position on Zimbabwe and Burma is simply about South Africa following the lead of India and China, says Francis Kornegay, a senior researcher at the Centre for Policy Studies. He explains that if South Africa failed to toe the line it would certainly jeopardise the bargaining power it has with the two emergent superpowers.

“Zimbabwe is on the doorstep of South Africa in the same way that Burma is close to China and India.”

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Commonwealth summit protesters beaten

UGANDAN police yesterday beat protesters during the Commonwealth summit as they tried to demonstrate against human rights abuses.

Some demonstrators were carried away with head wounds, splashed with blood, after more than 100 police blocked a march on Kampala city centre and charged with batons.

Witnesses said one police officer suffered a head injury when the demonstrators threw stones after the march was halted.

"This is nothing new. This is what we have been living through all this time. This is a police force that does not respect the rights of citizens at all," opposition leader Kizza Besigye said.

Police said the protesters knew they were not allowed to march out of a suburb where the demonstration was authorised.

Protesters said the Commonwealth, which began a three-day summit yesterday, had ignored human rights abuses by the government of President Yoweri Museveni, which diplomats say ruthlessly suppresses opposition in Uganda.

Elizabeth Evenson, of US-based Human Rights Watch, condemned the police action.

"Using force to keep opposition supporters out of sight of the Commonwealth summit reflects continuing limitations on political freedoms. Commonwealth leaders should take President Museveni to task," she said.

The demonstrators earlier waved banners criticising Queen Elizabeth, who opened the summit. "Queen, you are the head of our problems," one of them read.

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Erasing the Afrikaner Nation

CNN’s Kyra Phillips has led her viewers to believe that dangling a noose—an impolite and impolitic form of expression—is a hate crime; a black man beating a white man to a pulp—not so much. Being maimed or murdered, evidently, doesn’t compare to being insulted. Phillips and the feminized establishment media have difficulties differentiating a felony from an affront to feelings. No wonder these wonder men and women are mum about who’s killing whom in the democratic South Africa, the pride of the liberal press.

While black South African criminals are not neglecting other blacks, they are, overwhelmingly, targeting Indians and whites. According to the South African Institute of Security Studies, “Only 32 percent of all blacks questioned knew someone who was a victim of crime,” compared to 66 percent of Indian adults and 56 percent of white adults. The color of crime and its casualties both in America and South Africa is the proverbial elephant in the room—to be touched upon only if the victims can be vilified as racists.

The BBC as well as New Zealand and Australian television news-networks have covered the racially motivated killing campaign Africans are conducting against the Afrikaner farmers of South Africa. Not Kyra and her colleagues at Fox, MSNBC, ABC, and CBS. No wonder, then, that the orchestrated ethnocide against the entire Afrikaner people has not been brought out into the open, as they like to say on CNN.

Ethnocide, as defined by Michael Mann, a leading historical sociologist, is “state-induced cultural assimilation, through hegemony and suppression.” The warmed-over Marxists governing South Africa with the West’s blessing are leading the charge against the country’s Afrikaner past, patriotism, and institutions.

Afrikaans, in particular, has come under the ANC’s attack, as the government attempts to compel Afrikaans schools to adopt English. Afrikaans-speaking universities, for example, have been labeled racist in the New South Africa and have been forced to merge with “third-rate black institutions so that campuses may be swamped by blacks demanding instruction in English,” to quote the Afrikaner intellectual, Dan Roodt.

The ANC’s attempts to tame and claim South-African history have been extended to landmarks in the annals of the founding people—these are being slowly erased, as demonstrated by the ANC’s decision to give an African name to Potchefstroom, a town founded in 1838 by the “Voortrekkers” (Dutch pioneers). The leader of those pioneers, Marthinus Pretorius, founded the capital, Pretoria. It is now Tshwane! Durban’s Moore Road (after Sir John Moore, the hero of the Battle of Corunna) is Che Guevara Road; Kensington Drive, Fidel Castro Drive. The cherry on the cake is Yasser Arafat highway, down which the motorist can speed on the way to the Durban airport.

As a subject in the school curriculum, history was initially neglected during the transition to majority rule. The establishment of the “South African History Project” changed that. The Project’s aim, according to Sasha Polakow-Suransky of the Chronicle of Higher Education, has been “a resurrection of the subject as a prominent field of study in the national school curriculum.” Unfortunately, following the American academy’s example, the trend has been away from “the pursuit of objective historical truth,” toward a postmodern, politically correct reconstruction of historical events, with the aim of fostering “certain values,” in the words of Kader Asmal, the minister of education in 2000.

“You have books appearing that interpret the history of South Africa only according to the perspective of the liberation struggle,” avers Pieter Kapp, a retired professor of history at Stellenbosch University. Indeed, “Since 1994, tales of European conquest are slowly beginning to disappear from the nation’s classrooms, giving way to epic accounts of black anti-apartheid heroes,” writes Polakow-Suransky.

Like it or not, the modern marvel that was South Africa—with its space program and skyscrapers—was not the handiwork of the black nationalist movement now dismantling it; but the creation of those persecuted, pale, patriarchal Protestants.

Ilana Mercer is a columnist for WorldNetDaily.com, and a Fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Her website is at www.ilanamercer.com , her blog at http://blog.ilanamercer.com

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Racial tensions rise at UKZN

A student representative council at the University of KwaZulu Natal (UKZN) lashed out at the institution’s management Thursday, saying that remnants of apartheid still existed on the campus.

Central Student Representative Council (CSRC) secretary-general Mshengu Kwazi was reacting to meetings held at the campus to discuss the recent rape of an American exchange student at on the Howard College campus.

Kwazi said meetings had ended in chaos and the deputy dean of students was man-handled on Monday by "some white academics".

"This because he was not giving pre-determined answers on the rape case… We regard it as nothing but a shameful expression of political frustration by a brood of fangless vipers."

Kwazi added that the meeting on Wednesday was similar. "If the deputy dean was white he wouldn’t have been man-handled…. those who came on behalf of the university were not attacked and we
believe this was because they were of another race."

Kwazi said the CSRC was upset by the behaviour of varsity management and the fact that its views were being sidelined.

"The dramatisation and distortion of our views at the meeting yesterday (Wednesday) proved to us that there are still remnants of apartheid in our institution – that will do anything to pursue their
politically-naked agenda of silencing and threatening those who are not shy to speak about their demonic tendencies," Kwazi said in a statement.

"These are the very same remnants that continue to ensure bad publicity of our institution – that is why every time they call a meeting, they also mobilise the media and attack the university.

"We are convinced that these barbaric styles of expressing anger are due to the fact that they are not comfortable with serving under the leadership of a black vice-chancellor," he said.

Kwazi said following the rape on November 13, a few meetings were held which resulted in "racist tendencies manifesting from the incident".

Police Inspector Michael Read said the rape took place at the university’s Howard College campus residence.

The girl was taken to King Edward VIII Hospital where she was treated, and anti-retrovirals administered.

"A number of our students have been victims of rape attacks and robberies but there has never been any commotion as we are witnessing now. In fact, two weeks prior to the incident in question, another student was raped and she unfortunately committed suicide thereafter," Kwazi said.

He said the institution was not speaking out on black students who were being raped.

"This latest incident has been blown out of proportion," Kwazi said.

He said "racial statements" made during meetings had also convinced the CRSC that the university was still living with remnants of apartheid.

Ian Smith ‘was overthrown’

The former prime minister of Rhodesia, Ian Smith, has died aged 88.

The cause of his death is unknown but he had been ill for some time at a residential home in South Africa.

He illegally declared independence from Britain in 1965 and his white minority government led the country for 14 years amid international scorn and sanctions.

Following a bitter bush war with black nationalists, his government was overthrown by Robert Mugabe in 1979, leading to the creation of Zimbabwe.

Ian Smith’s supporters continued to laud him as a political visionary and a man who understood the uncomfortable truths of Africa.

To his detractors, however, he was an unrepentant racist.

Mr Mugabe’s deputy information minister, Bright Matonga, described Ian Smith as a man who brought untold suffering to millions of Zimbabweans.

"We offered him the hand of reconciliation which he never accepted. Good riddance," Mr Matonga was quoted by AFP news agency as saying.

The BBC’s James Robbins says that to the end of his days Ian Smith was convinced that Rhodesians, black and white, would have fared better under his leadership than that of Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party.

He died believing he had been vindicated by Zimbabwe’s current crisis, with its massive inflation and unemployment.

Steeped in the colonial values of his Scottish immigrant father, our correspondent says Mr Smith was a born leader with a distinguished war record as an RAF fighter pilot.

He helped to found the right-wing Rhodesian Front, which came to power in 1962, and when the-then prime minister, Winston Field, baulked at the prospect of seizing independence, the party turned to Mr Smith, who gave them what they wanted.

He became prime minister of the then self-governing British colony of Rhodesia in 1964. The following year he made his Unilateral Declaration of Independence and years of civil war ensued.

Ian Smith denied this was caused by the actions of his regime and insisted there was nothing wrong with five million blacks being ruled by 200,000 whites.

In the end, Mr Smith maintained, it was not his enemies who beat him, but apartheid South Africa’s threat to cut Rhodesia’s lifeline.

Margaret Thatcher’s UK government brokered a peace deal in the Lancaster House talks in 1979 and a black-majority government took over Zimbabwe.

Ian Smith remained a key player in Zimbabwean politics until seats reserved for whites were abolished in 1987.

When in retirement he failed to create a united opposition to Robert Mugabe, Mr Smith was finally relegated to the sidelines.

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‘Pentagon preparing for nuclear Iran’

Officials in both the US and Israel reportedly told the Telegraph that Iran has hidden and scattered its nuclear facilities more effectively than previous intelligence has indicated.

Pentagon adviser Dan Goure told the paper that while "military strikes [against Iran’s nuclear facilities] might set the program back a couple of years… current thinking is that it is just not worth the risks."

Meanwhile, the paper continued, some believe that Israel is preparing to counter nuclear aggression by Iran by fitting out a fleet of submarines with atomic weapons.

The Telegraph report comes three days after another report was released, according to which, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has instructed his cabinet ministers to draft proposals on how to cope with a nuclear Iran.

The report was later denied by a senior Prime Minister’s Office official, Israel Radio reported.

The agency quoted a source close to Olmert as saying there were "long-term ramifications to be addressed, like how to maintain our deterrent and military response capabilities, or how to offset the attrition on Israeli society that would be generated by fear of Iranian nukes."

Why China beats competitors

Low costs give Chinese investors in Africa a competitive advantage over their counterparts from other countries, a Chinese analyst told the U.S.-Africa Business Summit in Cape Town.

Professor Yang Guang, director-general of the Institute of West-Asian and African Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, was addressing an audience of mostly American and African business leaders.

"They [China] possess low-cost technology for resource development," he said. "They enjoy a low cost of labour – not only unskilled labour but also… engineers and managers; they employ cheap ‘Made in China’ electrical machinery, and they earn the support of the government."

Yang was speaking at a plenary session of the summit focussing on Chinese and American perspectives on investing in Africa.

Ambassador Princeton Lyman of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations told the same session that the U.S. could not compete with China’s offerings:

"China is able to package their government programmes, their state-owned enterprises, their aid programmes in ways that the United States can’t," Lyman said.

"We can’t assist an oil company in making a deal by saying if they win [a contract with an African country] we’ll build a road [for that country], and it’s a challenge for those of us who do things differently."

China’s rapidly growing economic presence on the continent has been taking up more and more space on the agendas of a range of entities interested in African business, including governments, local industries, and foreign companies operating on African soil.

The Council on Foreign Relations, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation of the U.S. and the Brenthurst Foundation of South Africa have been running a trilateral dialogue on how China-United States relations can benefit African economies.

Giving feedback on the dialogue to the summit, Lyman described China’s recent activities in Africa as "almost breathtaking. They’ve come with such vigour and such energy and resources."

Yang backed Lyman’s observations with evidence. China now has more than 800 companies operating in Africa in a wide variety of sectors, he said. About 100 are state-owned and the rest are private but still supported by the Chinese government.

In monetary terms, Yang added, the cumulative value of Chinese investment in Africa totalled 11.7 billion U.S. dollars by the end of 2006.

"We began by investing heavily in the resource development industries," he said, "but nowadays Chinese investment is widespread in industries such as textiles, agro-industries, electricity, road construction, tourism, and telecommunications…"

Africa has had a mixed response to China’s increased presence on the continent.

Sindiso Ngwenya, assistant secretary-general of the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), told the summit Africa should focus on its own interests at the same time as trying to meet China’s needs.

"There’s nothing wrong with them [China] being after resources – everybody is after resources," he said, "but the issue is… what is it that they bring to the table?"

He cautioned that China was "awash with cash, and they are looking for investment opportunities," adding that "we need to engage them with open eyes [and] ensure that it is a win-win situation."

South African trade minister Mandisi Mpahlwa agreed: "Africa, your problem is not the self-interest of the Chinese. Your problem is… how do you leverage this growth, this demand, for maximum benefit?"

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China leads weather race

Not content to push the edge in cloning, architecture and geological engineering, China’s also leaving the rest of the world behind when it comes to controlling the weather.

A few years ago, Australian journalist John Taylor reported,

It’s uncanny living in Beijing how it rains on the eve of major events. Be it a big domestic event, or a visiting foreign politician, the rain has usually fallen the day before, making for temporary blue skies free of the normal haze.

Chinese officials say cloud seeding has helped to relieve severe droughts and water shortages in cities. In Shanghai officials are considering the measure to cool the daytime temperature, easing demand for electricity.

When next summer’s Olympics roll around, the Beijing Weather Modification Office will be poised to intercept incoming clouds, draining them before they get to the festivities. No fewer than 32,000 people nationwide are employed by the Weather Modification Office — "some of them farmers, who are paid $100 a month to handle anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers" loaded with cloud-seeding compounds. Some estimate that up to 50 billion tons of artificial rain will be produced by 2010. But Taylor noted that this has resulted in competition between cities to seed clouds first, and bitter acrimony when when region receives water claimed by another.

During my cloud seeding reportage, a few weather modification scientists praised China’s initiative. My gut instinct was to focus on China’s less-than-stellar human rights record and just say, "Well, it’s easy to mess with the weather when there’s no paperwork to fill out or reparations to pay if you flood a village or turn a county into desert." But that’s reductionist. At some level, it’s about vision and will — and China’s got it.

Said Bill Woodley, a weather modification researcher who spent several decades running cloud seeding experiments for NOAA,

"There’s much we don’t know, as compared to China, where investment is 100 million a year. They’re training young scientists and pilots; they’ve just gone crazy there. It’s the epicenter of all weather modification activity. They’re pushing hard. Whereas in the United States, the amount of money invested by any government is probably in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if that. For a country our size, not much is being invested.

Interestingly, when I opined that this was a shame, because with all the billions of federal dollars spent uselessly elsewhere, the government ought to shake a few million weather modification dollars out of the White House sofa, Woodley seemed a bit chagrined. You can’t just throw money at it, he said — there needs to be strong oversight, someone to make sure the research is first-rate, and so on.

He mentioned a couple of weather modification research bills now creeping through Congress — one introduced by Mark Udall (D-Colorado), the other pushed by Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas). If you think weather modification research is a good idea, go get your democratic participation on.

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‘Rape happens’

"This thing of rape," said Colonel Edmond Ngarambe, shifting uneasily on his wooden bench high in the mountains of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, "I can’t deny that happens. We are human beings. But it’s not just us. The Mai Mai, the government soldiers who are not paid, the Rastas do the same thing. And some people sent by our enemies do it to cause anger against us."

The colonel’s words lay bare a brutal reality about the wretched use of rape as an instrument of war in the eastern DRC.

The growing numbers of women who arrive daily at hospitals as a fresh bout of fighting engulfs the region often have no idea whether their attackers were from the Mai Mai traditional militia, renegade Tutsi soldiers or a group of deserters from an array of armed groups who wear dreadlocks, call themselves the Rastas and specialise in particularly brutal treatment of their victims.

Ngarambe’s own men in the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), which evolved out of the army and militia that fled into the DRC after leading the 1994 genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis, have been named by human rights groups as among the worst offenders in the onslaught against women, hundreds of thousands of whom have been raped over the past decade of conflict.

Rape has been used to terrorise and punish civilians in the DRC who support the "wrong side", and it is perhaps no coincidence that it was also a tool of genocide in the mass murder of the Tutsis. Sexual violence is now so widespread that the medical aid charity Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) says that 75% of all the rape cases it deals with worldwide are in the eastern DRC. Darfur is a distant second.

"The two places don’t compare," said Augustin Augier, the MSF administrator at Rutshuru hospital, who was previously posted to Darfur. "There you have a lot of people in camps but here the insecurity is so much worse."

‘Barbaric’
The numbers of women seeking treatment for rape at the hospital has risen as a conflict that has already left four million dead over the past decade has reignited.

Human rights groups describe gang rapes as commonplace and often accompanied by "barbaric" acts of torture, with victims beaten with clubs, cut with knives or sexually assaulted with guns. Many young women have been abducted into sexual slavery.

The largest United Nations peacekeeping force in the world of more than 17 000 troops has done little to stop it. Instead, the primary attempt to discourage sexual violence appears on hand-painted murals on walls across the region telling men that it is not manly to rape.

Some of the victims make their way to Rutshuru hospital where they are met by Esparance Kiakimwa (29), a nurse in its sexual violence unit.

"We treat women and children from many places, sometimes very far. Many others can’t get the courage to walk, so far so those who arrive often tell us that all the women in the village were raped but they are the only ones to make it to the hospital. The numbers that make it are only a small part of the total," she said.

"They arrive on the back of motorbikes and in cars but sometimes on foot, walking for days because they don’t have any money for transport. They have all kinds of injuries like knife cuts and damage to the vagina. It’s worse for the young girls. We have to take them immediately to surgery."

Many of the women do not make it to hospital within the 72 hours after the rape in which antiretroviral drugs to reduce the possibility of contracting HIV are most effective. Four percent of those who seek treatment are men.

Hiding
One woman who sought treatment at the hospital tells how she hasn’t dared sleep in her own home for months. "Every woman in the village leaves at night to sleep in the bush because of the raping. They still loot, but if they can’t find us they can’t rape us," she said.

Augier said that women in many villages dare not sleep in their own homes. Others are too afraid even to go to the outskirts of their communities to tend to crops because so many women have been seized in the fields, contributing to the rise in malnutrition and disease that has claimed so many lives.

"People live in fear, so they live in the bush. They expose themselves to diseases: malaria, gastro-enteritis. It’s cold at night. All of this claims lives," he said.

Human Rights Watch said in a recent report that some armed groups appear to regard rape as a battle tactic aimed at breaking civilian support for rivals or as a means of punishing other ethnic groups.

"In some cases soldiers or combatants raped women and girls as young as five years old as part of a more general attack in which they killed and injured civilians and looted and destroyed property. Their intent was to terrorise communities into accepting their control or to punish them for real or supposed links to opposing forces," it said.

The FDLR is among the primary culprits. But the forces of Laurent Nkunda, a renegade Tutsi general who broke away from the Congolese army to fight the FDLR, have also been accused of systematic rape of Hutu women. So too have the Mai Mai.

Immaculee Birhaheka, head of a women’s rights group in Goma, Paif, said those women who make it to hospital are just a fraction of those attacked. She gave as an example what happened in villages along the road south from Goma toward Bukavu.

"The women who come from there tell us that every woman in every village has been raped over the years. There is not one who was not attacked they told us," she said. "Some of them were captured and taken into the forest for months, even two years. When they are released some are in such bad condition that they die."

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