DIPLOMACY
Guinea-Bissau has become a major hub of cocaine trafficking between Latin America and Europe. But any wealth the West African nation has derived from its middleman status has been offset by increased violence and instability.
Biague has his office in a colonial building slowly turning black from the moisture and humidity. It's located on a dirt street near an athletic field. The potholes are filled with plastic refuse and seashells. A woman is crouching under a ceiba tree and roasting a scrawny ear of corn over a smoldering fire.
Kenyan presidential candidate Raila Odinga will file a legal challenge if opponent Uhuru Kenyatta is declared president-elect, his adviser says.
Pohlmann: 'A nuclear attack would be suicide'
North Korea will follow up its threats with military action, says Christoph Pohlmann of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Seoul. What does that mean for the situation on the Korean peninsula?
DW: Mr. Pohlmann, North Korea has been making threats relentlessly for weeks: first, the announcement to conduct further nuclear tests this year; then the threat of nuclear war against the United States; and now scrapping the ceasefire agreement with South Korea. To what extent, in your view, has the conflict reached a new, even more dangerous, level of escalation with these recent developments?
Christoph Pohlmann: We could say that the conflict has reached a new level of escalation, which can also be seen in terms of military incidents. That's because North Korea cannot only keep threatening without following these threats with action. That is, we can actually assume that North Korea will act militarily in some form.
Africa's Cocaine Hub: Guinea-Bissau a 'Drug Trafficker's Dream'
Guinea-Bissau has become a major hub of cocaine trafficking between Latin America and Europe. But any wealth the West African nation has derived from its middleman status has been offset by increased violence and instability.
João Biague says he only has one way to lose his job: "success." As soon as he manages to seize a shipment of drugs, he admits, "I'll be fired." But "success" is not actually part of the job description of the director general of Guinea-Bissau's judicial police.
Black magic may still weave a spell over Indonesian law
March 9, 2013
Michael Bachelard
Indonesia correspondent for Fairfax Media
Australian travellers to Indonesia beware: smuggling drugs will still earn you a jail sentence but, if an official draft of the country's new criminal code becomes law, so could practising ''black magic'', adultery and living outside wedlock.
The new draft law is supposed to modernise Indonesia's 1918 Criminal Code, last updated in 1958, but some of its proposals constitute a step back to the Middle Ages.
In this country where many people believe they could be killed, injured or robbed by a sorcerer using black magic, news portal Detik.com's report on Thursday that people guilty of using black magic to cause ''someone's illness, death, mental or physical suffering'', face up to five years in jail or 300 million rupiah ($31,000) in fines would be welcome.
Odinga to challenge Kenyatta election victory in court
Kenyan presidential candidate Raila Odinga will file a legal challenge if opponent Uhuru Kenyatta is declared president-elect, his adviser says.
Kenyatta was elected Kenya's new president despite facing an international crimes against humanity trial, provisional election commission figures showed on Saturday.
Kenyatta took 50.03% of the vote, according to constituency tallies released in the early hours of Saturday, to become the African country's new leader 50 years after his independence hero father, Kenya's founding president.
The 51-year-old outgoing deputy prime minister – charismatic, able to appeal to all classes and one of Africa's richest men – is the first leader to take power while facing trial in The Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC).
Greater China
Did China execute the wrong pirate?
By Peter Lee
The Western media outrage on the execution in China of Naw Kham focused on the circus surrounding the televising - or non-televising - of the event, which followed the conviction of the Burmese pirate and several of his associates for the massacre of 13 Chinese crew members of two ships on the Mekong River in October 2011. But maybe they are focusing on the wrong problems.
By its own - and Western - standards, China's capture, trial, and execution of Naw Kham appears a model of legality. According to China's Global Times, the PRC was tempted to assassinate him via a drone strike in his foreign hideout, but declined.
Neither was he shot in the head by special forces and his corpse
secretly dumped in the ocean, as was done with Osama bin Laden.
By its own - and Western - standards, China's capture, trial, and execution of Naw Kham appears a model of legality. According to China's Global Times, the PRC was tempted to assassinate him via a drone strike in his foreign hideout, but declined.
Neither was he shot in the head by special forces and his corpse
secretly dumped in the ocean, as was done with Osama bin Laden.
9 March 2013 Last updated at 02:10 GMT
Canberra: Deathly dull at 100?
Australia's capital city turns 100 this weekend, but Canberra, like so many other purpose-built capitals around the world, is still struggling to convince outsiders that it has more to offer than political hot air, says Madeleine Morris.
"Canberra: Why wait for death?" was Bill Bryson's blistering judgement in his 2000 travelogue Down Under. "Pyongyang without the dystopia," wasthe verdict of the Economist in 2009.
If Sydney is brash and bold, and Melbourne is cool and classy, then Canberra, at least in the Australian public imagination, is dull and devoid of soul.
"Canberra: it's not that bad" is the caption on a well-known car licence plate in the capital city. Talk about damning with faint praise.
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