"The Object of Torture is Torture"

Africa's forgotten war
WHILE THE world dithers on the killing in Darfur, it ignores another deadly conflict -- in the Democratic Republic of Congo. An estimated 30,000 innocent men, women and children are dying every month in Congo, mostly due to hunger and disease. Since 1997, Congolese civilians have suffered two wars, and an estimated 4 million have died. It is time for the international community to press all sides to commit to peace.

UN says Congo troops harassing civilians

S Africa's Sharpeville Remembers Killings

Time Warner Pays $300 Million to Settle Fraud

The Object of Torture is Torture
Instead of beginning today’s column with a discussion of world events, we begin with a vocabulary lesson. The lesson is inspired by the confluence of two words that seem to have nothing in common. They are “transferal” and “rendition.” The first word means, among other things, to move from one situation or place to another. Transferals are innocuous events that say nothing about the society in which they take place.

A rendition is, among other things, a version of a familiar tune performed in a manner that is slightly different from the version to which the listener is accustomed. Renditions are innocuous events that say nothing about the society in which they take place although if the rendition is a bad one, it may say something about the performer.

MDC to meet SA observers
Zimbabwe's opposition leader will meet poll monitors from the South African government this week after his party accused them of "prejudging" the March 31 parliamentary vote as free and fair, a minister said on Sunday.

Into Africa's new heart of darkness
In the war-torn Sudanese province of Darfur, more than two million have been forced from their homes and 70,000 - perhaps many more - have been killed. The UN has called it "the world's worst humanitarian crisis".

Africa-Caribbean Commission makes sense
We cannot but endorse the proposal from last week's Diaspora conference in Kingston, promoted primarily by Jamaica and South Africa, for the establishment of an Africa-Caribbean Commission to be a sort of central mechanism to promote the interaction between the two regions.

Conference recommends formation of Africa-Caribbean Commission
THE inaugural South Africa-African Union-Caribbean Diaspora conference ended in Kingston yesterday with a proposal to establish an Africa-Caribbean Commission to be the centralised mechanism for interaction between the two regions.

Rastas upset about exclusion from South Africa conference
RASTAFARIANS from the Nyabinghi Order said they were disappointed that they were not allowed to make formal presentations during Wednesday's opening of the South Africa/African Union/Caribbean Diaspora Conference at the Jamaica Conference in Kingston.

After fighting ends, Africa's innocents bear the wounds
BUNIA, Congo: There were two ailing boys, both appropriately named Innocent, at a makeshift hospital here. They didn't know it, but they represented the two different ways of dying in Africa's wars

The continent's problems are too big for us to ignore
The West, seeing little economic profit or strategic advantage in it, pays scant attention to its crippling problems. Long after the end of the Cold War and the start of economic globalization, long after once-poor countries in Asia and Latin America began to attract foreign investments to pull themselves out of destitution, Africa continues its downward slide into a collective miasma of extreme poverty, pervasive disease, civil strife, tribal warfare and obscenely corrupt governments.

Google sued over news aggregation
REUTERS SAID Agence France Presse (AFP) is taking legal action over the aggregation of news and pictures on the Google News site.
In 2002, a federal appeals court ruled that Web sites may reproduce and post "thumbnail" or down-sized versions of copyrighted photographs. But the court said displaying full-sized copies of photographs is a copyright violation.

Putin to pay first visit to Kiev after new Ukr pres takes office
Russian President Vladimir Putin arrives in Ukraine on Saturday for a brief working visit, the first top-level visit to Kiev after the power change in the country.

Brazil Wants to Shed Fugitive Haven Image

South Korea, U.S. begin military drills
Thousands of American and South Korean troops conducted joint maneuvers Saturday, rankling North Korea, which denounced the exercises as a rehearsal for war.

End farm export subsidies in 5 years, G-20 says
A powerful block of 20 developing countries demanded on Saturday that rich nations scrap all trade-distorting subsidies for farm goods within five years.

S Korea not calmed by Japan's statement in territorial dispute

Zapatero, Uribe, Lula, Chavez meeting will take place in Venezuela
Presidents of Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and Spain, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Alvaro Uribe, Hugo Chavez and Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero respectively, will meet at the end of March in Venezuela ... not in Brazil as originally established.

Cuba Tops Latin American Efforts to Wipe Out Tuberculosis
Though tuberculosis remains a curse that kills 1.8 million people annually worldwide - 98 percent of whom in Third World countries - Cuba is likely to eliminate that disease in the near future.