"Guns drive up S. Africa murder rate"

An Indecent Administration Rolls On
Once again, Bush scorns international humanitarian standards. This time he's fighting to save capital punishment.

Guns drive up S. Africa murder rate
South Africans are more likely to be shot than suffer any other kind of unnatural death as gun crime pushes the country's violent death rate to up to eight times the global average, a study showed on Tuesday.

In a Warped Reality
Two Years On, The Occupiers Justify the War by Embracing the Irrelevant and Ignoring the Inconvenient

Mbeki: SA must remain vigilant
Pretoria - South Africa has to remain vigilant against new manifestations of corruption, President Thabo Mbeki said in Pretoria on Tuesday.

Commonwealth head keen on Zimbabwe poll
Don McKinnon, the Commonwealth secretary-general, says he will watch with keen interest the upcoming Zimbabwean elections to see if they do deliver on the mandate of being free and fair. McKinnon is in South Africa on a short visit. He privately met with President Thabo Mbeki at the Union Buildings in Pretoria today.

Leading scientists discuss Africa's killer diseases
Some of the world's leading scientists are gathered in the Kenyan capital Nairobi for a landmark conference on Africa's killer diseases. The conference is organised by the Africa Genome Education Institute, whose focus is the development of vaccines to fight HIV/Aids, malaria and tuberculosis.

S Africa's Sharpeville Remembers Killings
Forty-five years after police shot dead 69 unarmed protesters in South Africa's Sharpeville township, residents say the end of apartheid did not bring the improvements they hoped for.

Zim: SA group 'disillusioned'
South African civil society groups came back from Zimbabwe disillusioned about the state of democracy in the country, they said on Tuesday.

Woman Imam Raises Mixed Emotions
Police kept protestors away, as a woman broke Islamic tradition by leading Friday prayer in New York City yesterday.

US Ambassador to Turkey Resigns
US Ambassador to Turkey, Eric Edelman, has resigned. One of the prominent names among the "hawkish" wing, Edelman, submitted a letter of resignation to US President George W. Bush and will officially depart from the post in July, reports say.

Lebanese crisis deepens as opposition spurns dialogue
Lebanon's crisis deepened Sunday with the opposition spurning a plea for dialogue from the pro-Syrian president and as a UN envoy said he feared another high-profile political killing in the country.

Mumbai report says Indo-Pak war on water inevitable
If we go by a report prepared by the Mumbai-based The Strategic Foresight Group, India and Pakistan are due to fight a war over water. The report has said that Islamabad's prime interest in Kashmir was to secure its water resources, a strategic think-tank has said a war over water between Pakistan and Kashmir is "inevitable in future".

Thousands flee Dera Bugti
Thousands of people started evacuating Dera Bugti on Saturday, fearing more battles between Bugti tribesmen and government forces, government officials said.

It's a slam dunk:
Venezuela was just as responsible for 9/11 as Iraq
The Union (California) contributor R. Owen Barnes writes: I'm confused. Why on earth did we go to all trouble to invade Iraq after 9/11 when we could've accomplished just as much by invading Venezuela?