Articles

Old habits, it is said, die hard. This applies especially to the regime of president Husni of Egypt who seems to be continuing in the ways of the pharaohs of bygone days.

Dr Mahathir Mohamed’s much-trumpeted Vision-2020 has been forced to have corrective lenses installed in the last few weeks.

Africa has caught the attention of Uncle Sam which can mean only one thing: more trouble for the beleaguered continent. As if French and British ‘benevolence’ were not enough, the cigar-chewing Americans, notorious for leaving death and destruction in their wake, can only add to Africa’s woes.

'I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you sometimes see in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.

The cult of St. Diana incorporates many myths but none so corrosive as the idea that there is a good Establishment media (“the press”) and its wicked alter ego, (the “tabloid press”).

The appointment last month of Dr Masoomeh Ebtekar as vice president in the cabinet of president Mohammad Khatami caused surprise among those unfamiliar with Iran.

There died in the first half of this month two ladies, one known for her exemplary charitable works, the other famous because she is well-known.

The Beni Mousses killings, however, pale into insignificance in comparison with the August 29 slaughter near Rais, 40 kms south of Algiers, when an estimated 300 people were hacked to death.

The Saudi rulers are about to undergo, for the first time, the humiliating experience of a public drubbing by a fully paid-up member of the desert kingdom’s inner elite.