Six In The Morning

Obama administration may designate the Haqqani network as a terrorist organization

　Designation could further complicate relations between US and Pakistan

By ERIC SCHMITT
Risking a new breach in relations with Pakistan, the Obama administration is leaning toward designating the Haqqani network, the insurgent group responsible for some of the most spectacular assaults on American bases in Afghanistan in recent years, as a terrorist organization. With a Congressional reporting deadline looming, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and top military officials are said to favor placing sanctions on the network, which operates in Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to half a dozen current and former administration officials. A designation as a terrorist organization would help dry up the group’s fund-raising activities in countries like Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, press Pakistan to carry out long-promised military action against the insurgents, and sharpen the administration’s focus on devising policies and operations to weaken the group, advocates say.

Butchered and beheaded for singing and dancing (or were they?)
When the bodies of 17 young Afghans were found last weekend, there could be only one conclusion: they were victims of the Taliban's strictly enforced moral code. But is the truth more complex – and testament to our limited understanding of the country?

JULIUS CAVENDISH SATURDAY 01 SEPTEMBER 2012
As crimes go, it appeared to be black and white: 17 villagers who had known little but hardship and brutality in their short lives were butchered in cold blood for indulging in a rare moment of music and dance. As the news of last Sunday's slaughter – carried out by Taliban insurgents enraged by the "moral" crime of mixed-sex dancing – flashed around the world, the first, pitiful details emerged. There was the shattered electric keyboard in the corner of a room daubed in blood; the letters of warning posted on a mosque door by night; the decapitated corpses dumped beside an irrigation canal.

The Thin Line Between Guilt and Innocence
The search for justice in the new Libya is raising difficult questions about who is to blame for the atrocities of the Gadhafi era, such as the Abu Salim prison massacre. A unique experiment is taking place at one prison, where former inmates confront their torturers.

By Juliane von Mittelstaedt in Tripoli
Mohammed Gwaidar could chain the man to the wall, hang him up, send electroshocks through his body and beat the soles of his feet until they swell up like balloons. In some ways, it would be fair, because these are precisely the things that the man in cell 6 at the Hadba prison in the Libyan capital Tripoli did to him. Gwaidar, 48, was himself locked up for 11 years because of his religious convictions and for attempting to overthrow the government. The prison now holds a former prime minister, 14 colonels in the intelligence service, dozens of prison guards and thugs -- and Hamsa, his former tormentor.

Mutambara fights for survival in court
Arthur Mutambara's fall has been traced to the MDC's congress in January last year at which Welshman Ncube was elected president of the party.


Arthur Mutambara, now fighting for leadership of the Movement for Democratic Change's breakaway party, stepped on to Zimbabwe's political stage on September 15 2008 as the third signatory to the political agreement between President Robert Mugabe and arch-rival Morgan Tsvangirai. A former student union leader at the University of Zimbabwe in the late 1980s, Mutambara initially appeared destined for a career in academia and studied robotics and mechatronics at Oxford University. His critics have described him as a political opportunist, given his rise to the leadership of the smaller MDC party after the split in 2005.

Bohemia revisited: The holiday that changed my life
Holidays can expose the traveller to cultures, languages and experiences they would not get at home, but trying to recreate them many years on might not always be successful.

By Rob Cameron BBC News, Prague
There are times you should pay attention in school, and the lesson where they teach you how to recognise various farm animals is definitely one of them. It was one o'clock in the morning, on a steep hillside in South Bohemia. There we stood, four middle-aged men on a fool's errand of recreating a 20-year-old holiday, about to be gored to death in a meadow. "It's got horns. Doesn't that mean it's a bull?" one of us said. "Not necessarily," said another, nervously. "It could be a cow."

Mexico's Pena Nieto confirmed president-elect, rival defiant


By Lizbeth Diaz | Reuters
Mexico's electoral tribunal confirmed Enrique Pena Nieto as president-elect on Friday, but his rival refused to accept defeat and held out the possibility of further protests that could hamper reform efforts. The tribunal threw out an attempt to overturn the election result by leftist leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who had accused Pena Nieto of laundering money and buying votes in the July election. Centrist Pena Nieto, 46, will be sworn in on December 1 and has pledged a raft of fiscal, labor and energy reforms, which Lopez Obrador is likely to resist.