Is The Hague making a mockery of justice so the CIA and MI6 can save face?
Robert Fisk investigates an alleged double standard over two prominent Libyans accused of crimes against humanity
There’s a spot of skulduggery going on in the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague. Not to put too fine a point upon it, a lot of questions are being asked about why the worshipful judges have, at least publicly, demanded a trial in Europe for Saif el-Islam al-Gaddafi – son of the late Muammar – but have blithely accepted that the dictator’s ruthless security boss, Abdullah al-Senussi, should be tried in the militia-haunted chaos of Libya.
Was this because the court didn’t want to upset Libya’s anarchic authorities by insisting that it try both men at The Hague? Or is there an ulterior, far more sinister purpose: to prevent Senussi blurting out details in The Hague of his cosy relationship with Western security services when he was handling relations between Gaddafi, the CIA and MI6?
Ben Emmerson, who is Senussi’s UK counsel – and, by chance, the UN’s special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights – has described this month’s pre-trial decision by the International Court to refuse to try Senussi in The Hague as “shocking and inexplicable” because there is “overwhelming evidence… that the Libyan justice system is in a state of total collapse and that it is incapable of conducting fair trials”.
Yemeni street artist uses Sana'a walls to remember the disappeared
Murad Sobay, who downplays comparisons with Banksy, stencils faces of vanished political prisoners to keep their memory alive
Peering out from one of the perimeter walls of Sana'a University is a young man's face, stencilled in black and white paint. Daubed next to him is his name and the year he disappeared. A metre on is another face, and then another, and then another, stretching along the whole perimeter of the wall.
The faces belong to Yemeni political prisoners who simply vanished, leaving behind families who have little or no knowledge of their fate. Some go as far back as the 1970s and some date to the Yemeni revolution against former president Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2011.
They are part of a campaign called The Walls Remember Their Faces, the brainchild of a 26-year-old street artist, Murad Sobay.
Anger in France as men defend right to use sex workers
Magazine petition from group of French intellectuals comes under fire from feminists
Angelique Chrisafis
A group of French intellectuals have come under fire from feminists over a magazine petition in which several high-profile male journalists, commentators and actors demanded the right to visit sex-workers.
The petition – deliberately styled along the lines of a famous 1971 feminist appeal to legalise abortion lead by Simone de Beauvoir – was aimed at countering the government’s proposals to criminalise anyone who pays for sex in France.
The French parliament will soon debate Socialist proposals to make it illegal to pay for sex, meaning anyone who buys sex from any kind of sex-worker would face heavy fines.
Chinese officials loom large in doctored photo
October 31, 2013 - 12:53PMAustin Ramzy
Efforts to promote a visit by local government officials to an elderly pensioner in the eastern province of Anhui took an awkward turn after a poorly doctored photo spread rapidly on Chinese websites. By Wednesday, hours after it had begun to go viral, the photo had landed on the front page of The Beijing News.
The image shows four men, including Wang Jun, deputy mayor of the city of Ningguo, and Yu Anlin, head of Ningguo's civil affairs bureau, visiting an elderly woman who is holding a red envelope typically used to present a gift of money.
The woman is identified as 103-year-old Cheng Yanchun. In life, Cheng is a small woman, but in the photo manipulation she appears improbably tiny beneath the giant, beaming men.
Kenya crackdown on militants troubles Muslims
A Kenyan police crackdown on Islamists is fuelling Muslim resentment and moderate preachers say it undermines their efforts to counter recruiting by al Qaeda militants with links across the border in Somalia.
Smashing Islamist recruitment networks among its Muslim minority has become a priority for Kenya, however, as it tries to end attacks by Somali militants bent on punishing it for sending troops over the frontier to fight al Shabaab rebels.
The cost of failure was laid bare in September when al Shabaab gunmen, one of whom police say is a Kenyan from the port of Mombasa, raided the Westgate shopping mall in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. At least 67 people were killed.
Police say their tough approach, taken before Westgate but stepped up since, has limited the flow of would-be jihadists in and out of Somalia, citing a drop in the number of suspected militants they have tracked and arrested in the past year.
Volunteers give a 'potential paradise' in Puerto Rico a 'mega cleanup'
A volunteer effort collects thousands of pounds of garbage – refrigerators, tires, shopping carts, toys, and countless plastic bottles – from San Juan, Puerto Rico, estuaries.
A flotilla of fishing skiffs and kayaks plied through the channels and lagoons that comprise the San Juan estuary system Oct. 26 as volunteers dove beneath bridges and trudged through the thick mangrove forest lining its coasts.
With egrets, herons, and terns circling overhead, and large tarpon breaking through the lagoon's surface, the estuary system evokes a tropical paradise. A closer look shows its green waters are ripe with an algae bloom, the result of sewer and storm water runoff that hide tons of trash submerged in the estuary and buried along its coastlines.
Some 300 volunteers collected thousands of pounds of garbage – refrigerators, tires, shopping carts, toys, and countless plastic bottles – in the second "mega cleanup" of the San Juan estuary system, an inland waterway that snakes around the international airport and connects several bodies of water that cut acrossPuerto Rico's capital.
